Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/34

 from their professional interests, they always become the champions of the interests of another class, which appear to them to be synonymous with general social progress. Some attach themselves to the landowners, others to the capitalists, and again others to the Proletariat. And it is the same with the peasants and lower middle-class. The attempt to, create special parties of the peasants or the small middle-class have always ended by such parties becoming subservient to alien class interests.

Now in Georgia we find the peculiar phenomenon that of the three great leading classes only one exists. After the Agrarian Reform of 1918 there were; no large landowners in the country. There is also no capitalist class of any importance. The nucleus of an energetic and independent capitalist class has always been bound up with industrial capital. This condition has almost completely been wanting in Georgia. Money and trading capital is found to be represented there more strongly, but this is mostly in the hands of foreigners, and cannot therefore enter directly into the struggle of parties.

Thus the proletariat remains as the only class which is capable of conducting an independent and leading policy. But this capability is not possessed by the entire proletariat of Georgia. We find in Georgia two sharply separated kinds of the Proletariat, an oriental and a modern. In the Georgian proletariat we perceive distinctly that here we stand on the boundaries of two very different worlds.

The oriental proletariat deserves in reality the name of a vagabond proletariat. It lives from hand to mouth in the greatest poverty, but by no means only from begging and stealing. The number of beggars is great. Yet among the oriental type of the proletariat there are many who live from the labour of their hands. Being possessed of no implements of production, and often without any technical training, they earn their scanty bread mostly as carriers. Corn, wood, vegetables, and other products of the country are transported