Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
Pannekoek introduces a variety of arguments to sustain his position. For instance, that "the higher strata among the new middle class have a definitely capitalistic character. The lower ones are more proletarian, but there is no sharp dividing line." This is true but the high strata in every class are capitalistic.
Pannekoek is right, for instance, when he says that most of the brain workers in the Socialist movement come from the circles of the small capitalists and bring an anti-Socialist prejudice with them, but he forgets that, on the other side, the overwhelming majority of the world's working people are the children of farmers, peasants, or of absolutely unskilled and illiterate workers, whose views of life were even more prejudiced and whose minds were perhaps even more filled up with the ideas that the ruling classes have placed there.
A few quotations from the well-known revolutionary Socialist, Anton Pannekoek, will show the contrast between the narrower kind of Socialism, which still survives in many quarters, and that of the majority of the movement. He discriminates even against "the new middle class," leaving nobody but the manual laborers as a fruitful soil for real Socialism.
The statement applies equally well to railway conductors, to foremen, and to many classes of manual workers. "And then, too," Pannekoek continues, "they, the new middle class, have more to fear from the displeasure of their masters, and dismissal for them is a much more serious matter. The worker stands always on the verge of starvation, and so unemployment has few terrors for him.
Pannekoek accuses the brain workers of having something to lose, again forgetting that there are innumerable groups of more or less privileged manual laborers who are in the same position. And finally, he contends that their superior schooling and education is a disadvantage when compared to the lack of education of the manual laborers:
"For the cause of Socialism we can count on this new middle class," says Pannekoek, "even less than on the labor unions. For one thing, they have been set over the workers, as superintendents, overseers, bosses, etc. In these capacities they are supposed to speed up the workers to get the utmost out of them."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking