to the past seems to them a crime against science, law, and human dignity.
Socialism looks upon this evolution as being a history of middle-class force, and it only sees differences of degree where the economists imagine that they are discovering difference of kind. Whether force manifests itself under the aspect of historical acts of coercion, or of fiscal oppression, or of conquest, or labour legislation, or whether it is wholly bound up with the economic system, it is always a middle-class force labouring with more or less skill to bring about the capitalist order of society.
Marx endeavoured to describe the details of this evolution very carefully; he gave very little detail, however, about the organisation of the proletariat. This gap in his work has often been explained. He found in England an enormous mass of materials concerning the history of capitalism, which was fairly well arranged, and which had already been discussed by economists; he was therefore able to investigate thoroughly the different peculiarities of middle-class evolution, but he was not very well furnished with matter on which he could argue about the organisation of the proletariat; he was obliged, therefore, to remain content with an explanation, in very abstract formulas, of his ideas on the subject of the path which the proletariat must take, in order to arrive at the final revolutionary struggle. The consequence of this inadequacy of Marx's work was that Marxism has deviated from the path assigned to it by its real nature.
The people who pride themselves on being orthodox Marxians have made no attempt to add anything essential to what their master has written, and they have always imagined that, in order to argue about the proletariat, they must make use of what they had learned from the history of middle-class development. They have never suspected, th efore, that a distinction should be drawn between the force that aims at authority, endeavouring
