Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/16

 and it will be found that the author had to change but very little.

What gives to our review a decidedly special significance is the circumstance that, for the first time, it expressed the formula which today, with general unanimity of the labor parties of all the countries of the world, briefly summarizes their demand for economic reconstruction: the expropriation of the means of production by society. In the second chapter, anent the "Right to Work," which is designated as the "first awkward formula wherein the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are condensed," it is said: "But behind the Right to Work stands the power over capital, behind the power over capital stands the expropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, therefore, the abolition of wage labor and of capital and of their mutual relations." Hence, here is formulated—for the first time—the thesis whereby modern working class Socialism is sharply differentiated, not only from all the different shades of feudal, bourgeois, petty bourgeois, etc., Socialism, but also from the confused notions of a community of goods of the utopian as well as the original labor communism.

If, later, Marx extended the formula to the expropriation of the means of exchange, this extension, which became a matter of course after the Communist Manifesto, simply expressed a corollary of the main thesis. Some wise people in England have recently