On the other hand, he destroyed the legend of the intrinsic immorality of Marxism, which was due to Marx's repeated assertions that the social question is not a moral question, and to his sharp criticisms of class ideals and hypocrisies. He pointed to the moral interest which had guided Marx's political activity, and which could even be said to have prompted the choice of the fundamental hypotheses of his economics. What Marx had called the impotence of morality was the futile attempt at apportioning praise or blame for the natural conditions of the social order. It is only when such conditions are no longer conceived as necessary for the social order in general, but only for a stage in its history, and when new conditions appear that make it possible to destroy them, that moral condemnation is justified and effective: to use another of Marx's phrases, morality condemns what history has already condemned. This is as much as saying that the only real moral problems, as all other problems of human life, are those that present themselves under given historical circumstances, at a given time; concrete, not abstract; and that moral judgments apply not to facts or conditions, but to actions. The passage from such a concrete, or historical, view of morality, to a doctrine of moral relativity is a very easy one, but Marx's own views on this point, which he never deliberately expounded, are irrelevant to the substance of his doctrine. For his own part, Croce reasserted the value of Kantian ethics, and the absoluteness of the moral ideal, as an ideal which is not above and outside the spirit of man, but rather one of its intrinsic forms or categories. And Marx's conclusions in regard to the function of morality in the social movement, and to the method for the education of the proletariat, though clashing with current prejudices, contain no contradiction of general ethical principles. But Marx's interest was not essentially an ethical one: the moralistic criticisms of Marx were similar to the puritanic criticisms of Machiavelli, and resolved themselves into a charge that neither the one nor the other had treated problems totally different from those which they had actually attempted to clarify. While vindicating the importance of Machiavelli in the history of the study of the economic activity of man, Croce called Marx himself the Machiavelli of the labour movement, implicitly suggesting a similarity of both object and method between _Il Principe_ and _Das Kapital,_ which is singularly illuminating.