back, not only to "labor
right or wrong," but even to "labor working in harmony with capital."

"The skilled workingman," he says, "is not a proletarian. He has an
interest to conserve, he has that additional skill for which he receives
compensation in addition to his ordinary labor power."

Mr. Sladden adds that the _real_ proletarian is "uncultured and uncouth
in appearance," that he has "no manners and little education," and that
his religion is "the religion of hate." Of course this is a mere
caricature of the attitude of the majority of Socialists.

Some of the partisans of revolutionary unionism in this country are
little less extreme. The late Louis Duchez, for example, reminds us that
Marx spoke of the proletariat as "the lowest stratum of our present
society," those "who have nothing to lose but their chains," and that he
said that "along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates
of capital who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process
of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery,
degradation, exploitation; but with this, too, grows the revolt of the
working class." It is true that Marx said these things and said them
with emphasis. But he did not wish to make any rigid or dogmatic
definition of "the proletariat" and much that he has said pointed to an
entirely different conception than would be gained from these
quotations.

In speaking of "the lowest stratum of society" Marx was thinking, not of
a community divided into numerous strata, but chiefly of three classes,
the large capitalists, the workers, and the middle class. It was the
lowest of these three, and not the lowest of their many subdivisions,
that he had in mind. From the first the whole Socialist movement has
recognized the almost complete hopelessness, as an aid to Socialism, of
the lowest stratum in the narrow sense, of what is called the "lumpen
proletariat," the bulk of the army of beggars and toughs. Mr. Duchez
undoubtedly would have accepted this point, for he wishes to say that
the Socialist movement must be advanced by the organization of unions
not among this class, but among the next lowest, economically speaking,
the great mass of unskilled workers. This argument, also, that the
unskilled have a better strategic position than the skilled on account
of their solidarity and unity is surely a doubtful one. European
Socialists, as a rule, have reached the opposite conclusion, namely,
that it