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Updated: May 28, 2025
In the past, governments had always been prepared for revolutionary agitation among the proletarian wage-earners of the cities, and had always counted on the stolid conservatism of the agricultural class for the force to keep the inflammable artisans down. But in this revolution it was the agriculturists who were in the van.
"Revolution" was his title; he pictured modern civilization as it presented itself to the proletarian man a gigantic Moloch, to which human lives were fed, a monster from whose dominion there was no deliverance, even in the uttermost parts of the earth.
Here we see one of the most revolutionary agitators becoming more and more "radical" until he has completed the circle and come back, not only to "labor right or wrong," but even to "labor working in harmony with capital." "The skilled workingman," he says, "is not a proletarian.
Like Henry IV., he was raised roughly, leading the life of a real peasant, running the day long, in sabots, through the snow and ice and mud. "My nurse, who was retained as maid," he says, "was a good peasant, and thoroughly proletarian.
Surely their presence is a guarantee that Socialists have not been ruled by the working class or proletarian "fetish," against which Marx warned them more than half a century ago. Winston Churchill, op. cit., p. 389. Die Neue Zeit, Oct. 27, 1911. Speech just before Congressional Elections of 1910. Speech delivered by Mr. Roosevelt, Dec. 13, 1910. John Spargo, "Karl Marx."
They were good, as mortals go; they were loyal and upright, they wanted no scandal, no rumpus in the family, no trouble or pain for anybody else; but they wanted to belong to each other much more than they wanted to belong to any class, artistic, proletarian, or capitalist. And they were desperate because of the pertinacity of the Obstacle, whom they both respected fully as much as he deserved.
These men were the first fruits in America of Bakunin's ideals and work in Europe. They, too, were put down, by an act of legislature. "These proletarian protagonists whipped me into a fury. My father, too, had his rifle, and when drunk he invoked it, as it hung on the wall, thus: 'Come down, my sweet rifle, how brightly you shine!
Against them was directed the hate of the dark forces of the "occult government" and at the same time the fierce opposition and scorn of men who called themselves Socialists and champions of proletarian freedom! There was treachery in the General Staff and throughout the War Department, at the very head of which was a corrupt traitor, Sukhomlinov.
He once described the Soviet as "a true, unadulterated democracy," but, unless we are to dismiss the description as idle and vain rhetoric, we must assume that the word "democracy" was used in an entirely new sense, utterly incompatible with its etymological and historical meaning. Democracy has always meant absence of class rule; proletarian dictatorship is class rule.
The more the factory system has taken possession of a branch of industry, the more the working-men employed in it participate in the labour movement; the sharper the opposition between working-men and capitalists, the clearer the proletarian consciousness in the working- men.
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