I have thus spoken in order to show you how I stand concerning Marx's theory of the social movement. I make most earnest effort to separate it from all extraneous matter, to comprehend it in its essential points, and so to present these essentials in such way that they shall be consistent with reality. At the same time I emphasise the spirit of Marx's theories, and only hope that it is truly the soul of Marx, and not of myself, "in which the times reflect themselves." I shall attempt to speak later concerning what I look upon as confusing "non-essentials" of the theory; I speak now of what I think to be the historically important essence--the κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί--of Marx's theory of the social movement. First and before all, it is a scientific accomplishment of the first order to give prominence to the historic conception of the social movement and the inner relationship of the "economic," "social," and "political" manifestations and precedents. Marx applies the evolution idea to the social movement. Other conspicuous men have tried to consider socialism and the social movement as in the flow of historic life--I think, for example, of Lorenz von Stein, that writer who, perhaps, has most influenced Marx. But no one has so clearly, illuminatively, effectively shown these historical relations. That political revolutions and agitations are fundamentally great displacements of social classes is a truth enunciated before the time of Marx; but no one has ever presented it in so impressive a way. He takes economic revolutions as his starting-point, in order to explain the creation and the conflict of social classes; and in _Misère_ (175), before the "Communistic Manifesto," he had already said: "il n'y a jamais de mouvement politique qui ne soit social en même temps." But therewith--and it is this that is of importance to us--is the proletariat brought to full self-consciousness and taught to know itself in its historic relations. Out of this historic conception arises, for Marx and for the proletariat, with certainty the main points of the programme and the tactics of the social movement. They are only "a general expression of actual relations in an existing struggle of classes," as the "Communistic Manifesto" has expressed it somewhat vaguely. To state it more exactly, the theory of Marx affirms the identification of that which unconsciously and instinctively had arisen as a proletarian idea with that which is actually observable as the result of economic development. As to tactical management, however, the idea was decisive that revolutions could not be forced, but were the outgrowth of specific economic antecedents; while class strife in both its forms--the political, of which the "Communistic Manifesto" speaks chiefly, and the economic, for which in _Misère_ Marx breaks a lance--is recognised as the instrument which the proletariat must use in order to protect its interests during the process of economic transformation. Thus he formulates that which