"It might be said of past [emancipatory] historical enterprises that the time was not yet ripe for them. Present talk of inadequate conditions is a cover for the tolerance of oppression. For the revolutionary, conditions have always been ripe. What in retrospect appears as a preliminary state or a premature situation was once for a revolutionary a last chance for change. A revolutionary is with the desperate people for whom everything is on the line, not with those who have time. The invocation of a scheme of social states which demonstrates post festum the impotence of a past era was at the time an inversion of theory and politically bankrupt. Part of the meaning of theory is the time at which it is developed. The theory of the growth of the means of production, of the sequence of the various modes of production, and of the task of the proletariat is neither a historical painting to be gazed upon nor a scientific formula for calculating future events…If truth is perceived as property, it becomes its opposite and hence subject to relativism which draws its critical elements from the same ideal of certainty as absolute philosophy. Critical theory is of a different kind. It rejects the kind of knowledge that one can bank on. It confronts history with that possibility which is always concretely visible within it."