roups of more or less
privileged manual laborers who are in the same position. And
finally, he contends that their superior schooling and education is
a disadvantage when compared to the lack of education of the manual
laborers:--

"They have great notions of their own education and refinement,
feel themselves above the masses; it naturally never occurs to them
that the ideals of these masses may be scientifically correct and
that the 'science' of their professors may be false. As theorizers
seeing the world always with their minds, knowing little or nothing
of material activities, they are fairly convinced that mind
controls the world."

On the contrary, nearly all influential Socialist thinkers agree
that present-day science, _poorly as it is taught_, is not only an
aid to Socialism, but the very best basis for it.

Pannekoek is right, for instance, when he says that most of the
brain workers in the Socialist movement come from the circles of
the small capitalists and bring an anti-Socialist prejudice with
them, but he forgets that, on the other side, the overwhelming
majority of the world's working people are the children of farmers,
peasants, or of absolutely unskilled and illiterate workers, whose
views of life were even more prejudiced and whose minds were
perhaps even more filled up with the ideas that the ruling classes
have placed there.

The arguments of the American Socialist, Thomas Sladden, representing
as they do the views of _many thousands of revolutionary workingmen in
this country_, are also worthy of note. His bitterness, it will be seen,
is leveled less against capitalism itself than against what he considers
to be intrusion of certain middle-class elements into Socialist ranks.

"We find in the United States to-day," writes Sladden, "that we
have created several new religions, one of the most interesting of
which is called Socialism, and is the religion of a decadent middle
class. This fake Socialism or middle-class religion can readily be
distinguished from the real Socialist movement, which is simply the
wage working class in revolt on both the industrial and political
fields against present conditions.... Yesterday I was a bad
capitalist--to-day I am a good Socialist, but I pay my wage slaves
the same wages to-day as I did yesterd