Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/21

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PROLETARIAN AND PETIT-BOURGEOIS
19

which the so-called skilled trades must operate. Since it is largely migratory in character and is used to the ebb and flow of demand lack of employment does not have the same terrors for its members; it can manage without strike pay, and by frequent strikes of short duration can inflict a vast amount of damage upon the enemy without much suffering to itself. Indeed, in France, where the organization of the unskilled is being so effectively carried out by the Syndicalists, the long strike has become almost extinct. To win or lose in two weeks and go back with the organization intact is the aim of the leaders. The superiority of this method over the old fashioned long fought out struggle with the suffering of families and the expenditure of strike pay is obvious. Industrial conflicts tend to become shorter and sharper.

The unskilled laborer of today is the pure Marxian proletarian; he has nothing but his labor power to sell, and his labor power cannot by any possibility become property in any sense. He closely approximates to the definition in the Communist Manifesto.

"The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with bourgeois family relations, modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests."

It is, of course, impossible in the course of a short paper to examine the testimony from which the above conclusions are reached. It may be noted in passing, however, that the unskilled laborer is not as a rule a voter; he can seldom stay long enough in one place to acquire residence. He is still more seldom a property owner, as so many of the craftsmen are, whose property represents so much impedimenta in the event of a strike, for it usually consists of a partly paid-up contract for the purchase of a house and lot. Owing to the present re-