The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
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.
The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman.
At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie.
"
Proletarian science" and "
proletarian philosophy" were his phrases for it, and therein he shows the provincialism of his mind--a defect, however, that was due to the times and that none in that day could escape.
He had lived in Silesia, a member of a despised and persecuted race, and had taken part in the proletarian movement in the early seventies, when Bismarck, having conquered France, had turned his policy of blood and iron upon the "International." Ostrinski himself had twice been in jail, but he had been young then, and had not cared.
You might say that there was really but one Socialist principle--that of "no compromise," which was the essence of the proletarian movement all over the world.
He was a
proletarian, according to his own aggressive classification, and he had wanted to write for a living.
I am one of the dispossessed, a sansculotte, a
proletarian, or, in simpler phraseology addressed to your understanding, a tramp.'
Madame de S was pleased to discover that this young man was different from the other types of revolutionist members of committees, secret emissaries, vulgar and unmannerly fugitive professors, rough students, ex-cobblers with apostolic faces, consumptive and ragged enthusiasts, Hebrew youths, common fellows of all sorts that used to come and go around Peter Ivanovitch--fanatics, pedants,
proletarians all.