realize its utopia by means of the law, the
Parisian proletarians had already been beaten in those days of June by
that bourgeoisie which through this victory was preparing a master for
itself: it was a military adventurer whose power lasted twenty years.

It is not in the name of a school, but as the promise, the threat, and
the desire of a party that the new doctrine of critical communism
presented itself. Its authors and its adherents did not feed upon the
utopian manufacture of the future but their minds were full of the
experience and the necessity of the present. They united with the
proletarians whom instinct, not as yet fortified by experience, impelled
to overthrow, at Paris and in England, the rule of the bourgeois class
with a rapidity of movement not guided by well-considered tactics. These
communists disseminated their revolutionary ideas in Germany: they were
the defenders of the June martyrs, and they had in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung a political organ, extracts from which, reproduced occasionally
after so many years, still carry authority.[7] After the disappearance
of the historic situations which in 1848 had pushed the proletarians to
the front of the political stage, the doctrines of the Manifesto no
longer found either a foundation or a field for diffusion. Many years
were required before it circulated again and that because many years
were required before the proletariat could re-appear by other roads and
under other methods as a political force upon the scene, making of this
doctrine its intellectual organ and directing its course by it.

But from the day when the doctrine appeared it made its anticipated
criticism of that _socialismus vulgaris_ which was flourishing in Europe
and especially in France from the coup d'Etat to the International; the
latter moreover in its short period of life had not time to vanquish and
eliminate it. This vulgar socialism found its intellectual food (when
nothing even more incoherent and chaotic was at hand) in the doctrine
and especially in the paradoxes of Proudhon who had already been
vanquished theoretically by Marx[8] but who was not vanquished
practically until the time of the Commune when his disciples, and it was
a salutary lesson in affairs, were forced to act in opposition to their
own doctrines and those of their master.

From the time of its appearance this new communist doctrine carried an
implied criticism of all forms of State socialism from Loui