shows that a strike is sometimes sufficient to ruin all the work of education which these manufacturers of social peace have patiently built by years of labour.
In order to understand thoroughly the consequences of the very singular régime in the midst of which we are living, we must hark back to Marx's conceptions of the passage from capitalism to Socialism. These conceptions are well known, yet we must continually return to them, because they are often forgotten, or at least undervalued by official Socialist writers; it is necessary to insist on them strongly each time that we have to argue about the anti-Marxist transformation which contemporary Socialism is undergoing.
According to Marx, capitalism, by reason of the innate laws of its own nature, is hurrying along a path which will lead the world of to-day, with the inevitability of the evolution of organic life, to the doors of the world of tomorrow. This movement comprises a long period of capitalistic construction, and it ends by a rapid destruction, which is the work of the proletariat. Capitalism creates the heritage which Socialism will receive, the men who will suppress the present regime, and the means of bringing about this destruction, at the same time that it preserves the results obtained in production.[1] Capitalism begets new ways of working; it throws the working class into revolutionary organisations by the pressure it exercises on wages; it restricts its own political basis by competition, which is constantly eliminating industrial leaders. Thus, after having solved the great problem of the organisation of labour, to effect which Utopians have brought forward so many naive or stupid hypotheses, capitalism provokes the birth of the cause which will
- ↑ This notion of revolutionary preservation is very important; I have pointed out something analogous in the passage from Judaism to Christianity (Le Système historique de Renan, pp. 72–73, 171–172, 467).
