SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



had it already worked out in almost the same 

 terms. Engels eagerly assented to this new and 

 startling theory of history, which he had himself 

 approached in his " Condition of the Working 

 Class in England in 1844." Henceforth these 

 two thinkers worked side by side in a fraternal 

 co-operation never equaled before or after them. 

 And as the first emphatic declaration of the fact 

 that from now on philosophy, science and the 

 proletariat were united for the conquest of so- 

 ciety, and that no science could be monistic with- 

 out this combination, they flung the gage of battle 

 into the teeth of the bourgeois world in their 

 " Communist Manifesto," published in 1848. 

 Never before had the theory of social evolution 

 been stated in such consistently monist materialist 

 terms as in that immortal document. 



Its fundamental proposition, as summed up 

 later on by Engels, is that " in every historical 

 epoch, the prevailing mode of economic produc- 

 tion and exchange, and the social organization 

 necessarily following from it, form the basis upon 

 which is built up, and from which alone can be 

 explained, the political and intellectual history of 

 that epoch; that consequently the whole history 

 of mankind, since the dissolution of primitive 

 tribal society, holding land in common owner- 



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