Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/15

 logical sense in accordance with which he works out the problems of life independent of the preconceptions and prejudices which have so great a hold upon the reason of his fellow citizens who are not of the industrial proletariat. Without knowing why he arrives by dint of the experience of his daily toil at the same conclusions as Engels attained as the result of philosophic training and much erudition. The Church is well aware of this fact to her sorrow for the industrial proletarian seldom darkens her portals. He has no hatred of religion, as the atheistic radical bourgeois had, but with a good-natured "non possumus" says by his actions what Engels says by his philosophy.

Revolution is an every day occurrence with the industrial proletarian. He sees processes transformed in the twinkling of an eye. He wakes up one morning to find that the trade which he has learned laboriously has overnight become a drug on the market. He is used to seeing the machine whose energy has enchained him flung on the scrap heap and contemptuously disowned, in favor of a more competent successor whose motions he must learn to follow or be himself flung on the scrap heap also. This constant revolution in the industrial process enters into his blood. He becomes a revolutionist by force of habit. There is no need to preach the dialectic to him. It is continually preached. The transitoriness of phenomena is impressed upon him by the changes in industrial combinations, by the constant substitution of new modes of production for those to which he has been accustomed, substitutions which may make "an aristocrat of labor" of him to-day, and send him tramping to-morrow.

The industrial proletarian therefore knows practically what Engels has taught philosophically. So that when