PARTISAN REVIEW
of the proletariat. But if a political analysis of our age ought neces–
sarily to undertake a criticism of those who claim today to represent
the interests of the proletariat, it cannot stop there. Unless we are
prepared to say that the whole evil lies in the fact that nature has
not produced the germs from which upright, farseeing leaders can
emerge, we are constrained to examine the social situation and
political history of the working class in order to seek out the causes
of its century-old political incapacity.*
On more than one occasion Marx and Engels compared the
future triumph of the proletariat to the earlier triumph of the bourge–
oisie. In their wake, socialists have all too often repeated that the
modern proletariat is in some sense to play the role that the bourge–
oisie took in the past. At this point, however, the differences rather
than the similarities must be emphasized.
The bourgeoisie was a propertied class, growing richer and
richer, sure of itself, educated, and cultivated. As a whole, it under–
stood very well how to take hold of society and, in the eyes of almost
all the nation, to act as the representative of general welfare, thereby
inculcating its o·wn social system and assuring its political supremacy.
This, precisely, is the task that the proletariat has until now shown
itself incapable of undertaking.
Occasionally the authors of.the Manifesto compared the modern
proletarian to the slave of antiquity, but they hastened to underscore
the differences. Capitalism concentrates more and more proletarians
in the big cities and develops a technology which should make an
abundance for all possible in the future. Whereas the slave of antiq–
uity could do nothing to retrieve society from its fallen state, the
modern proletarian, concentrated in the cities with the technical
apparatus in his hands, cannot long fail to recognize his own strength,
and then to seize political power and advance mankind toward
commumsm.
These arguments had some weight in 1848, and the fundamental
hypothesis of the authors of the Manifesto was then perfectly legit–
imate- in fact, the whole development of society since 1789 pointed
to it. But, legitimate as it was, the hypothesis was only an hypothesis.
Marx and Engels had no dynamometer available in 1848 for meas-
*
"The fact that we repeatedly fail in some venture merely through chance
is perhaps the best proof that chance is not the cause ·or our failure." (Cournot)
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