Page:Marx and Engels on Revolution in America - Heinz Neumann.djvu/47

 every one could become, if not a capitalist, at all events an independent man, producing or trading, with his own means, for his own account. And because there were not, as yet, classes with opposing interests, our—and your—bourgeois thought that America stood above class antagonisms and struggles. The delusion has now broken down, the last bourgeois Paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatorio, and can only be prevented from becoming like Europe, an Inferno, by the go-ahead pace at which the development of the newly-fledged proletariat of America will take place."

This analysis of the international significance of the proletarian class struggle in America holds true even today, stronger and more vital than ever. There already exists in America a "standing hereditary proletariat." The illusion of the bourgeois paradise has already been dissipated. The outbreak of the class war in America, its leadership by a revolutionary mass party, at the head of which the American Communists will place themselves, and the inception of revolutionary mass struggles in America, would in reality signify the "snapping of the mainstay" of imperialism throughout the world.