Workmen's advocate., 1890-06-21
with,sfresh elementsHof enlightenment

WitnssITesn elementSNOf enllSntenment and progress. P'A -~, t,a
 Finally, in times when the class. strug- gle hears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such violent glaring character, tha. small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in it's hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, sec ton of the nobility went over to the b0urgeoisle, so now portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat and in particular, a portion of the bour- geois ideologists, who have raised them. selves to the level of experiencing theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
 Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day, the proletariat alone is really revolution ary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product
 The lower middle-class, the small manufacture the shopkeeper, the ar tisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their flu ture interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
 The dangerous class" the social scum, that passively rotting class thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of brihed tool of reactionary intrigue.
 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 any, thing in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial la bor, 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. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which turk in ambush just as many bourgeois inter- ests
 All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
 All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self conscious, indepen- dent movement of the immense major ity, in the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our resent society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
 Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoi,ie is at first a national struggle The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with It's own bourgeoisie.
 (1o be continued neat aceek.)