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Updated: May 9, 2025
The proletarians must, therefore, overthrow the political power where it is already in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They must themselves attain to power, to revolutionary power. Mr Heinzen again says unconsciously what Engels says, again in the sincere conviction of having said the opposite. What he says he does not mean, and what he means he does not say.
We need to know whether the "magic of property" extends from a man's garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists say, and, conversely, we need to know what is happening to that mass of proletarians who own no property and cannot satisfy their instincts even with personal chattels. For if ownership is a human need, we certainly cannot taboo it as the extreme communists so dogmatically urge.
The constituent assembly was considered as aristocratical: the law it had established was regarded as a violation of the rights of the people, because it imposed conditions for the exercise of political rights; because it did not recognise the most absolute equality; because it had deputies and magistrates appointed by electors, and these electors by the people; because, in some cases, it put limits to the national sovereignty, by excluding a portion of active citizens from high public functions, and the proletarians from the functions of acting citizens; finally, because, instead of fixing on population as the only basis of political rights, it combined it, in all its operations, with property.
And as the rule of the bourgeois from the beginning brought into being an appendage of propertyless plebeians, with day laborers and servants of all sorts, without any recognized position in their cities, the forerunners of the later proletarians, so the heresy was very early subdivided into a moderate one, on the part of the citizens, and a plebeian revolutionary one, which was an abomination to the bourgeois heretics.
"The modern State, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine.... The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, ... the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over.
If we conceive of England with its lords, its squires, and above all its City, but with its freeholders and lessees converted into proletarians, and its labourers and sailors converted into slaves, we shall gain an approximate image of the population of the Italian peninsula in those days. The economic relations of this epoch are clearly mirrored to us even now in the Roman monetary system.
But his guide, with whom familiarity with the proletarians had, in a great measure, bred indifference, hurried him away to Little Bourke Street, where the narrowness of the thoroughfare, with the high buildings on each side, the dim light of the sparsely scattered gas-lamps, and the few ragged-looking figures slouching along, formed a strong contrast to the brilliant and crowded scene they had just left.
That the free proletarians in Sicily were little better than the slaves, had been shown by their attitude in the first insurrection; after it was subdued, the Roman speculators took their revenge and reduced numbers of the free provincials into slavery.
They take us back three-quarters of a century, to the era before Marx, to that past so remote in intellectual and moral character, though recent in point of time, when the working class of no country in Europe possessed the right to vote when the workers were indeed proletarians and not citizens; not only propertyless, but also "without a fatherland."
There are as many counts against our society of plutocrats, politicians and proletarians, mingled in complete and ineffective confusion, as there were against the aristocracies, so called, of the eighteenth century. Perhaps there are more, at least many of them are different, but the indictment is no less sweeping.
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