Post reply

Name:
Email:
Subject:
Message icon:

Verification:

shortcuts: hit alt+s to submit/post or alt+p to preview


Topic Summary

Posted by: 8$8
« on: January 13, 2013, 04:21:44 pm »


The proletarian is a proletarian by his own desire.
It is not the machine, it is not the mechanization of industry, it is not the dependence of wages on capitalist production that makes a man a proletarian; it is the proletarian consciousness.
There was an assembly during the revolutionary year of 1919. In justification of the Revolution and its prospects a proletarian contended that there are far more proletarians in Germany than is commonly supposed. "Ninety out of every hundred of us," he cried, "are proletarians!" Another interrupted: "But they don’t want to be!" This contradiction sounds the knell of the proletarian movement. There is a point after which it can gain no more recruits: there are people who will not be proletarians. The man who will not, supplies an answer to the question: Who is, and who is not, a proletarian?
The proletarian’s philosophy of life is simple. Therein lies his strength. But his philosophy is also narrow, hidebound, elementary; it is inadequate, inexperienced, untried; it is without the idea of growth, without feeling for organization, without knowledge of the interrelationships of things. Therein lies its weakness, its impotence and its hopelessness. The spell which binds the proletarian is the spell of birth. As men, as prehistoric men, if you like, we were all originally proletarians, who sat about naked on the bare ground. But a differentiation soon set in; inborn superiority asserted itself, and was inherited as outward privilege. The man who was not sufficiently developed to fit into this social structure as it developed remained at the bottom, he did not rise, he sank.
He was the proletarian. Proletarians multiplied and sough to assert themselves and to claim a share in the general progress. But only those succeeded in obtaining a share who ceased being proletarians. The proletariat is what remains at the bottom. The proletarian of today will succeed in obtaining such a share provided he does not shut himself out from the social organization, from the national organization; but he will succeed only in his children. The masses lift themselves by generations. This uplift is selection. The inertia of the masses remains. There always remains a proletariat. Socialism makes an effort to hasten the raising process. Behind the fourth estate the fifth is seen advancing, dour and determined, and behind that the sixth, which is perhaps no longer a single enslaved class, but a whole nation which has been enslaved—with flags whose colours no man knows. There is always a proletariat.
Meanwhile the man who will not be proletarian is differentiated from the other, by his inherited and acquired values which give him greater intellectual mobility and a wider outlook. The proletariat has not yet taken its share in the values which our forefathers bequeathed us and which distinguish more educated, more conscious men. These values existed before the proletariat came into a world it did not understand. The proletariat has no ancestors and no experience. It took over theories which uprooted idealists of other classes formulated to suit it. What is the past? It is not anything to eat! The proletariat sees the present only.


Arthur Moeller van den Bruck