[pf] The reason D.Mac can be so critical of present society. (from AJP T

. I recently found _why_ I can take a far more radical line than almost
everyone else. Historian AJP Taylor, in his Introduction to Marx's
"Communist Manifesto" says: "revolutionaries come from those who are
economically independent, not from factory workers."
  D.

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>From AJP Taylor's Introduction to the Marx/Engels "Communist Manifesto".
Penguin Books 1967 (before ISBNs).
 - bottom of pg.18, to page 21:

Once more Marx had made a universal generalization from a single example.
For him, the cotton industry [of Lancashire] was synonymous with
capitalism, ... capitalism had hardly started. ... The true industrial
revolution began only with the railways, which in their turn launched the
age of iron and steel. ...
  On the other side, Marx, prompted by Engels, equated the workers in the
cotton mills with the proletariat. ... false ... The proletariat, if the
phrase meant enything, were at the very bottom of the social ladder and
possessed literally nothing. They were driven to revolt by their increasing
misery. The industrial workers had a higher standard of life than most
members of the lower classes even in 1844, ... and their standard of life
moved steadily upwards. Even in Marx's time, they had a form of property in
the cooperative stores, and soon they acquired their own houses. ... 
  Already, factory workers were not the stuff of which rioters were made.
They were no longer Luddites. Still less did they man the barricades. Their
chosen weapon of conflict was the strike, and the object of a strike was to
reach agreement with the employer, ... not to get rid of him. Marx did not
grasp this, and later Communists followed his teaching. ...
  Marx's system was now complete in skeleton form: dialectical pattern,
political revolutionary outcome, economic driving force. He still needed to
announce ... needed disciples. He found them among Germans living in Paris,
Brussels and London. None of them was a proletarian in the new Marxist
sense; none, that is, was a factory worker. Their occupations provide
striking examples of the class from which revolutionaries are often drawn.
Most of them were tailors - an occupation which gives a man much time for
solitary revolutionary reflection and also perhaps an intimate distaste for
the upper classes. Then came a type-setter, a cobbler, a watch-maker, a
painter of miniatures,  a few students, a Prussian officer who had been
cashiered, and Marx's aristocratic brother-in-law. Engels [manager of the
Manchester office of his father, a cotton merchant] no doubt had a bigger
income than that of all the other German revolutionaries put together.
  There was nothing surprising in their unproletarian character. On the
contrary, all experience shows that revolutionaries come from those who are
economically independent, not from factory workers. Very few revolutionary
leaders have done manual work, and those who did soon abandoned it for
political activities. The factory worker wants higher wages and better
conditions, not a revolution. It is the man on his own who wants to remake
society, and moreover he can hapily defy those in power without economic
risk. In old England the village cobbler was always the radical and the
Dissenter. ... The independent craftsman, like the intellectual, cannot be
dismissed from his job. His skill protects him from the penalties which
society imposes on the non-conformist. 

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sent to Positive Futures by David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
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