Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/7

Rh dominant capitalism, efforts which are distinctly reactionary, though apparently progressive, and still less does it recognize the unexpected vulgarization of the socialist party by the same petite-bourgeoisie.

The British Reform Acts as well as the development of liberalism in Europe placed the old world on a practical level with the new as regards the influence of the petite-bourgeoisie. In Europe the old aristrocracyaristocracy [sic] was more and more forced to make common cause with the capitalistic magnates and both landed and moneyed aristocracy, forgetting their old differences, were driven into the same fold.

The non-existence of those differences in the United States made the progress of the latter country in the direction of economic concentration more easy and the vastly greater opportunities afforded to the individual to prosper economically for a long time obscured the issue between the petite-bourgeoisie and the dominant class.

In Europe the process of bourgeois development was retarded by the complications of the fight for liberalism. On the continent that fight is still going on, though involved with the introduction of social ameliorative tendencies on a scale unknown to the liberalism of Great Britain until very recent times. But as time went on and as the inability of the small bourgeois to maintain a position on the economic field became more and more obvious, he was obliged to turn his attention from laissez faire of which he had formerly been the exponent to the very antithesis of liberalism, to-wit: state interference.

Thereupon he began to view with some complacency the socialist platform which by its denial of laissez faire and its demand for interference with those capitalistic activities which at the beginning had been the very basis of liberalism, served to offer some relief from the pressure to which he was subjected.

But it will be observed that the small bourgeois did not turn his attention to the socialism of Marx with its proclamation of the class struggle and its insistence upon