(3) In this struggle of the working classes the Communists are therefore the pioneers of the movement. They are at once the philosophers and the self-sacrificing champions of the proletariat awakened into class consciousness. "The Communists are not a special party in contradistinction to the other Labour parties. They have no interests apart from the interests of the whole proletariat. They set up no special principles according to which they wish to mould the proletarian movement." The Communists lay stress on the common interests of the whole proletariat and of the collective movement. Their aim is the organisation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of middle-class domination, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat. They support everywhere "any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions. In all these movements they emphasise the question of property, in whatever state of evolution it may appear, as the foundation of the movement. And finally the Communists work everywhere for the union and agreement of democratic parties[6] of all nationalities. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and intentions. They declare openly that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of every obtaining order of society. Let the ruling classes tremble before a Communist revolution; the workers have nothing to lose by it but their chains. They have the world to win. Workers of every land, unite!" From the standpoint of social philosophy, the Manifesto, a document reflecting its time, is almost perfect. Strong emotion and extraordinary intellectual power are united in it. Years of study of one of the boldest and most fertile minds are here welded together in the glowing heat of one of the most active of intellectual workshops. But the work is not free from logical flaws. In the passages we have quoted the part played in history by the middle class is extolled by Marx; yet in the last few lines of the very same section he declares that "the middle class is the unwitting and inert instrument of industrial progress," and still more scathing is his criticism in the second section, where the middle class is accused of indolence. "It has been objected that, if private property were done away with, all activity would cease and a general laziness set in. According to that, middle-class society would have been ruined by idleness long ago; for those of its members who work gain nothing, and those who gain do not work." That is as much as to say that the middle class is lazy and does not work, and yet the Manifesto says that the middle class has achieved more marvellous works than Egypt, Rome, and the Middle Ages, and that, in its reign of power of scarcely a hundred years, it has created more powerful and more gigantic forces of production than all past generations put together. How can a class which does not work produce more marvellous works than the whole ancient and mediaeval world?