As an oppressed and exploited class, it opposes all the forces of oppression and exploitation, the whole system of ownership, which debases it to be a mere instrument. It does not expect its emancipation from the good will of rulers or the spontaneous generosity of the propertied classes, but from the continual and methodical pressure which it exerts upon the privileged class and the government.
It sets before itself as its final aim, not a partial amelioration, but the total transformation of society. And since it acknowledges no right as belonging to capitalistic ownership, it feels bound to it by no contract. It is determined to fight it, thoroughly, and to the end; and it is in this sense that the proletariat, even while using the legal means which democracy puts into its hands, is and must remain a revolutionary class.
Already by winning universal suffrage, by winning and exercising the right of combining to strike and of forming trade-unions, by the first laws regulating labor and causing society to insure its members, the proletariat has begun to react against the fatal effects of capitalism; it will continue this great and unceasing effort, but it will only end the struggle when all capitalist property has been reabsorbed by the community, and when the antagonism of classes has been ended by the disappearance of the classes themselves, reconciled, or rather made one, in common production and common ownership.
How will be accomplished the supreme transformation of the capitalist régime into the collectivist or communist? The human mind cannot determine beforehand the mode in which history will be accomplished.
The democratic and bourgeois revolution, which originated in the great movement of France in 1789, has come about in different countries in the most different ways. The old feudal system has yielded in one case to force, in another to peaceful and slow evolution. The revolutionary bourgeoisie has at one place and time proceeded to brutal expropriation without compensation, at another to the buying out of feudal servitudes.
No one can know in what way the capitalist servitude will be abolished. The essential thing is that the proletariat should be always ready for the most vigorous and effective action. It would be dangerous to dismiss the possibility of revolutionary events occasioned either by the resistance or by the criminal aggression of the privileged class.
It would be fatal, trusting in the one word revolution, to neglect the great forces which the conscious, organized proletariat can employ within democracy.
These legal means, often won by revolution, represent an accumulation of revolutionary force, a revolutionary capital, of which it would be madness not to take advantage.
Too often the workers neglect to profit by the means of action which democracy and the Republic put into their hands. They do not demand from trade-unionist action, co-operative action, or universal suffrage, all that those forms of action can give.
No formula, no machinery, can enable the working-class to dispense with the constant effort of organization and education.