Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation

the relations of property within which they have hitherto moved. From forms of development of the forces of production, these relations change into fetters. Then enters an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the whole gigantic superstructure (the legal and political organisations to which certain social forms of consciousness correspond) is more slowly or more quickly overthrown. One form of society never perishes before all the productive forces are evolved for which it is sufficiently comprehensive, and new or higher conditions of production never step on to the scene before the material conditions of existence of the same have come to light out of the womb of the old society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production . . . but the productive forces developing in the heart of the bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. The previous history of human society, therefore, terminates with this form of society.* It must first be observed by anticipation that the concluding sentence and the word " last M in the preceding sentence are not capable of proof but are hypotheses more or less well founded. But they are not essential to the theory and even belong much more to the * A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy. Preface. applications of it, and they may therefore be passed over here. If we look at the other sentences we are struck, above all, by their dogmatic wording, except the phrase the " more slowly or more quickly M (which indeed hides a good deal).…