Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/35

 to the towns in oxen-spanned waggons and on the backs of asses. Within the town the means of transport are mostly the backs of men. In Tiflis a furniture van is unknown. When a family changes its dwelling 60 to 80 muschas (carriers) are hired, who carry the furniture from house to house, piece by piece. Even pianos arc removed in this manner.

This class of proletarians is not organised, and is politically indifferent. They are proletarians of the same kind as we find in antiquity, for example, in Rome. They are without the capacity to engage in independent politics.

In sharp contrast to them is the proletariat composed of the wage-workers of the large undertakings. The important difference between the two kinds of the Proletariat, of which we have hitherto only read in books, can be seen in Tiflis.

The wage-workers in the large undertakings are quite steeped in modern ideas; above all, the railway workers, who are the proletarian elite in economically backward countries, where Capitalism has commenced to penetrate. The railway is responsible for carrying the modes of thought and the struggles of the modem proletariat to the farthest corners of the earth.

I also remarked scarcely any difference from their prototypes in the West among the other members of this class of the proletariat whom I learned to know, such as printers, metal workers, employees in the electricity works, tobacco factories, and commercial clerks. They were well disciplined and had learned to think socialistically, but also on economic lines, so that Socialism does not appear to them, as a mere question of power, but also one of economic conditions.

They are organised in Trade Unions as well as in the Social-Democratic Party. Of course, such Trade Unions are very young. During the first Revolution numerous unions were formed in Georgia, as in Russia, but in the reactionary period they were mercilessly suppressed, more so than in Russia itself, as Georgia