Proletarianism

“ Thus the existence of capitalism is the necessary preliminary condition of the proletariat, and so of the modern social movement.
But how stands it with the proletariat? What are the conditions under which the working-class lives? And how has it come to pass that out of these conditions those particular tendencies and demands have arisen which, as we shall find, have come out of this proletariat? Usually, when one is asked concerning the characteristics of the modern proletariat, the first answer is—the great misery in which the masses are sunk. ”

“ It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself."
"In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. ”

“ We have already seen that the first step in the Workers' Revolution is the transformation (literally "the promotion") of the proletariat into the ruling class, the conquest of democracy. ... The proletariat will use its political supremacy in order gradually to wrest the whole of capital from the capitalist class, to centralize all the instruments of production in the hands of the State, that is, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase as quickly as possible the total of productive forces." ”

“ The proletariat fulfils the judgment which private property by the creation of the proletariat suspends over itself, just as it fulfils the judgment which wage-labour suspends over itself in creating alien riches and its own condemnation. If the proletariat triumphs, it does not thereby become the absolute side of society, for it triumphs only by abolishing itself and its opposite. ”

“ The Manifesto tells next the manner of growth of the class struggle. "The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves." ”

“ I said that the social movement has, as its supporters, the modern proletariat, a class of free, lifelong wage-workers. The first condition of its existence is the rise of this class itself. Every social class is the result, the expression, of some specific form of production; the proletariat, of that form of production which we are accustomed to call capitalistic. The history of the rise of the proletariat is also the history of capitalism. ”

“ Here the Writer challenges all philosophers, both bourgeois and pseudo-socialist, by claiming that—now and hereafter—Wherever it is possible for the bourgeosie to rule the proletariat, it is possible for that proletariat to accomplish its industrial freedom by revolution. ”

“ The machine proletariat, recognized its subject position in modern class society, stands squarely on the class struggle, organizes to carry on the class struggle, and prepares itself to direct industry and administer society when that struggle shall have been won. ”

“ This bourgeois class now strikes the attitude of a pure soul, misunderstood and abandoned, at a critical moment, by the proletariat, that has been misled by the Socialists. And its cry finds a general echo in the bourgeois world. ”

“ They are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement. And when one examines a year’s file of the Northern Star, the only sheet which reports all the movements of the proletariat, one finds that all the proletarians of the towns and of country manufacture have united in associations, and have protested from time to time, by means of a general strike, against the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. ”

“ On the other hand, the proletariat is revolutionary relative to the bourgeoisie because, having itself grown up on the basis of large-scale industry, it strives to strip off from production the capitalist character that the bourgeoisie seeks to perpetuate. ”

“ So the proletarian is a figure put into flat opposition to something called capital. I find in large type outside the current number of the Plebs, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” ”

“ The bourgeois revolution brought into existence two other classes: the industrial proletariat as an ally and/or an acceptable leader of the peasant masses of Europe. At the same time it enlarged the middle class to a point at which it was able to play a decisive role in the formulation and direction of social policy in industrialized communities. 5. Fragments of the industrial proletariat and the greatly enlarged middle class came together in an avowedly revolutionary movement: socialism-communism, which reached the power summit between 1910 and 1917. ”

“ The proletariat has reached the point where it knows exactly what road it should follow in the immense social transformation that is coming. It recognises now distinctly enough the chief aspects of the new régime that it wishes and ought to institute. ”

“ If the proletariat has been unable to seize the control of a single one of the bourgeois revolutions, it has nevertheless in a hundred and twenty years forced its way into all the agitations of the revolutionary bourgeoisie ”

“ The historic mission of the class at present exploited, the proletariat, which is being organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of capitalist production, is to complete the work of destruction begun by the development of social antagonisms. ”

“ From a troublesome beggar, employed out of pity, the proletarian became the working class from which society lives. The personality of the capitalist, on the contrary, became more and more superfluous in the progress of production, something which the corporation and the trust made plainly evident. Because of economic necessity the wage relation became more and more a relation of power, maintained by the power of the state. But the proletariat grew to become the most numerous class in the state, and also in the army, upon which the power of the state rests. ”

“ The proletariat has created a new institution which embraces the entire working class without distinction of vocation or political maturity, an elastic form of organization capable of continually renewing itself, expanding, and of drawing into itself ever new elements, ready to open its doors to the working groups of city and village which are near to the proletariat. ”

“ By grouping the workers in considerable masses and multiplying their numbers it created the proletariat. By making the workers an immense State within the State it paved the way for their emancipation, and furnished them with the means of conquering power. ”

“ You will become proletarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity.
“You see, labor has nothing concrete of which to be despoiled. Its share of the wealth of the country consists of clothes and household furniture, with here and there, in very rare cases, an unencumbered home. But you have the concrete wealth, twenty-four billions of it, and the Plutocracy will take it away from you. Of course, there is the large likelihood that the proletariat will take it away first. ”

“ For the success of the victory over capitalism a correct correlation between the leading Communist Party—the revolutionary class, the proletariat—and the masses, i. e. the whole mass of workers and exploited, is essential. ”

“ By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live. ”

“ Ten years later, when the revolutionary risings of the proletariat demonstrated in the streets the darker side of this optimism about capitalist development, none of this Pleïad of Marxist optimists, with but a single exception, was to be found in the camp of the proletariat. ”

“ The forces of social evolution have thus already created, as far at least as this country is concerned, that other indispensable factor for the success of the impending Social Revolution. They have created that class, the proletariat, whose mission it is and which is strong enough to free itself and the whole of mankind from exploitation and oppression by the capitalists, the master class of our time. ”

“ The proletariat, functioning at the machinery of modern production and gaining its living by group effort—team work—about that machinery, cannot conceive of a society producing its living properly in any other way. ”

“ This affirmation, that the proletariat is a necessary result of modern society, has for its mission to succeed the bourgeoisie, and to succeed it as the producing force of a new social order in which class antagonisms shall disappear, makes of the Manifesto a characteristic epoch in the general course of history. It is a revolution—but not in the sense of an apocalypse or a promised millennium. ”

“ Society is thus divided into two opposite classes: one, the capitalists and their sleeping partners, the landlords and loanmongers, holding in their hands the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and being, therefore, able to command the labor of others; the other, the working-class, the wage-earners, the proletariat, possessing nothing but their labor-power, and being consequently forced by necessity to work for the former. ”

“ In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. ”

“ From this time forward Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. ”

“ The only two classes that really correspond to Marx’s theory, the two pure classes that the entire analysis of Capital brings to the fore, are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These are also the only two revolutionary classes in history, but operating under very different conditions. The bourgeois revolution is done. ”

“ The Marxian classification broadly and very satisfactorily divides modern industrial communities into three broad sections—the greater and dominant capitalism, which is practically in control; the smaller capitalism which has lost control but which stubbornly and incessantly maintains the fight against the greater capitalism, and the proletariat which is practically, so far, a negligible quantity. ”

“ The slavery in which the bourgeoisie has bound the proletariat, comes nowhere more plainly into daylight than in the factory system. In it all freedom comes to an end both at law and in fact. The workman must be in the factory at half past five. ”

“ Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. ”

“ Indeed, even among those who have become thoroughly conscious of the necessity of the proletarian class struggle, there are still plenty who cannot escape from the influence of present society, and who doubt or despair of the victory of the proletariat. ”

“ The growth of the consciousness of the proletariat transforms this class struggle, gives it a deeper and more purposeful character, which in its turn calls out a corresponding reaction on the part of the dominant class. The struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie will reach its denouement long before large-scale enterprises begin to dominate in all branches of industry. ”

“ The very nature of capitalist production forces him to think and, thereby, his wits are exercised and sharpened. The "Machine proletariat" as this class is now beginning to call itself, is not to be measured by the old slave or serf standards, but by standards of its own. ”