Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/9

Rh itself, in which the proletarian elements might be considered to be the determining factors. It is clear that so far from the Socialist Party being a proletarian party, it is hardly a working class party, even, for the laborers and craftsmen combined only give 61 per cent as against the balance obviously and distinctly petit bourgeois.

It will be seen later, moreover, that the term working class by no means necessarily implies the term proletarian.

In fact the Socialist Party is just a rallying ground for the discontented petit-bourgeois and working class to coalesce. It is a cave of Adullam, as Robert Lowe would have called it, merely that.

It is very obvious that in this borderland we find but scant traces of that proletarianism which is to redeem the world.

 

We now shift our enquiry to the realm of the working class.

In Marx's "Capital" we find "Productive activity, if we take out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labor, is nothing but the expenditure of human labor power . . . it is the expenditure of simple labor-power, i. e., of the labor power, which on an average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual. Skilled labor-power counts only as simple labor-power intensified, or rather as multiplied simple labor, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labor. Experience shows that this reduction is being constantly made." (Vol. I. P. 51 Kerr's Edition.)

The differentiation between skilled and unskilled labor is therefore, according to Marx, merely quantitative. The proprietors of skilled labor have, however, persisted in regarding it as qualitative and have considered the possession of this particular species of property, 