Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/13

Rh tendency to the revolutionary attitude of the Marxian prediction.

Are we then to abandon the Marxian revolution notion as false to historic fact and therefore untenable?

By no means, the results so far merely show that the proletarian has not yet begun to operate either in the economic or the political field. But he is here and has to be reckoned with and will in the future begin more and more completely to prove the truth of the Marxian prediction.

For, what is a proletarian? He is one who has nothing but his labor power to sell, and in addition one whose labor power is incapable of being turned into property. In that respect he is differentiated from the skilled laborer who by association has to a certain extent been able to make his craft a property peculiar to the members of that craft, and to that extent interfere with free exchange in the market in terms of his particular commodity or property. The proletarian can only profit in terms of the profit of the whole class to which he belongs.

In the statement of Marx quoted above it is said that all labor is economically reducible to unskilled labor and may be expressed quantitatively in terms of ordinary unskilled labor.

But the truth is even stronger and broader than that statement. Skilled labor is being qualitatively reduced to terms of unskilled labor. The crafts are tottering and the future of the proletariat is no longer in the hands of the aristocracy of labor but is being transformed at an ever increasing speed into those of the common labor masses.

This comes about by the natural process of the economic system and the development of industrialism itself. The element of individual skill, which is the fundamental underlying base of the craft and upon which the craftsman relies for his superiority over unskilled labor, is being rapidly obliterated. Standardization and