The immense progress of production and wealth, largely usurped by parasitic classes, has not led to an equivalent progress in well-being and security for the workers, the proletarians. Whole categories of wage-earners are abruptly thrown into extreme misery by the constant introduction of new mechanisms and by the abrupt movements and transformations of industry. Capitalism itself admits the disorder of the present régime of production, since it tries to regulate it for its gain by capitalistic syndicates, by trusts. Even if it succeeded in actually disciplining all the forces of production, it would only do so while consummating the domination and the monopoly of capital. There is only one way of assuring the continued order and progress of production, the freedom of every individual, and the growing well-being of the workers; it is to transfer to the collectivity, to the social community, the ownership of the capitalistic means of production. The proletariat, daily more numerous, ever better prepared for combined action by the great industry itself, understands that in collectiveness or communism lie the necessary means of salvation for it. As an oppressed and exploited class, it opposes all the forces of oppression and exploitation, the whole system of ownership, which debases it to be a mere instrument. It does not expect its emancipation from the good will of rulers or the spontaneous generosity of the propertied classes, but from the continual and methodical pressure which it exerts upon the privileged class and the government. It sets before itself as its final aim, not a partial amelioration, but the total transformation of society. And since it acknowledges no right as belonging to capitalistic ownership, it feels bound to it by no contract. It is determined to fight it, thoroughly, and to the end; and it is in this sense that the proletariat, even while using the legal means which democracy puts into its hands, is and must remain a revolutionary class. Already by winning universal suffrage, by winning and exercising the right of combining to strike and of forming trade-unions, by the first laws regulating labor and causing society to insure its members, the proletariat has begun to react against the fatal effects of capitalism; it will continue this great and unceasing effort, but it will only end the struggle when all capitalist property has been reabsorbed by the community, and when the antagonism of classes has been ended by the disappearance of the classes themselves, reconciled, or rather made one, in common production and common ownership. How will be accomplished the supreme transformation of the capitalist régime into the collectivist or communist? The human mind cannot determine beforehand the mode in which history will be accomplished.