In fact, modern industry is forcing the workers more and more every day to comprehend the necessity of association or combination in their disputes with the possessors of the means of labor, and thus the interests to be defended have to the workers less and less the false aspect of individual interests; they appear to them in their naked reality as class interests. Born of strikes, of coalitions of every kind imposed upon them by the customs and conditions of life in a capitalist society, their class activity soon takes an a political character. To this then are due the working-class agitations resulting in the recognition of political equality and the establishment of universal suffrage. In possession of political rights, the workingmen are obviously led to make use of these rights in behalf of their own interests. Inevitably, therefore, the political struggle is becoming more and more a class struggle which cannot end until the political power, in the hands of the workingmen, shall at last place the State at the service of the interests of all the exploited, and thus enable the latter to proceed to the economic reforms which will lead to the disappearance of classes as a direct consequence.
Therefore, the Class Struggle is not an invention of the socialists, but the very substance of the facts and acts of history in the making that are daily taking place under their eyes.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The French Webster.
[3] "In fact the different classes dove-tail into each other, and there are always between two classes a multitude of unclassifiable hybrids, belonging wholly to neither class, in part to both."—Karl Kautsky.
III.
We know that those whose activity is subordinate in its exercise to a capital which they have not—and these compose the working-class—are compelled to sell their labor-power to some of the possessors of this capital who form, on their side, the bourgeois[4] class.