Page:Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov - The Bourgeois Revolution- Its Attainments and Its Limitations - tr. Henry Kuhn (1926).pdf/35

 ests by means of political measures; but neither must the oppressed neglect the safeguarding of their interests and should appear as a unified party in the newly opened political arena. To this very day this lesson has not suffered in either sense or importance. Conditions have changed only in so far as the bourgeoisie today occupies a privileged position. And what else is now left for the workers but to close their ranks in a separate party of the oppressed, standing in opposition to the privileged bourgeoisie?

At the end of the 18th century, at the time of "the great rebellion" of the French "mob," the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat was present only in embryo. For that reason the classconsciousness of the proletarians had to be rather unclear. When, in the course of this treatise, we tried to explain the argumentation of Paul Janet relative to the Jacobin conceptions of "the people," we ascribed to them an attitude antagonistic to all classes living on the labor of others. That was really the only possible meaning of the argument of the author. How-