By Rosa Luxemburg

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dream, the invention of a few bold minds. If we listen to the first vanguard fighter of the revolutionary upheavals set into motion by the proletariat, Gracchus Babeuf, who attempted a coup de main during the Great French Revolution for the purpose of introducing social equality forcibly, then we shall find that the sole argument on which he is able to base his communist aspirations is the crying injustice of the existing social order. In his impassioned articles, pamphlets, and also in his defence plea before the tribunal which sentenced him to death, he never tired of picking contemporary social order to pieces. His gospel of socialism consists of an indictment of society, the denunciation of the sufferings and the torments, the irade union demonstraton A/somp/i /874 wretchedness and the debasement of the working masses, on whose backs a handful of idlers grow wealthy and rule society. For Babeuf, it was enough that the existing social order well deserved to perish, i.e. it could have been overthrown a hundred years previous to his time, if only a group of determined men had been found who would seize the state power and who would introduce the regime of equality - just as the Jacobins seized political power in 1793 and introduced the republic.