614 THE CLASS STRUGGLE ECONOMIC AND MENSHEVIK DETERMINATION 615 be a very deceptive sort of liberty. Both chattel slavery and Feudalism recognized the principle that the world owes a man a living; not that it was ever formulated in so many words, but it was inherent in the nature of the institutions themselves, in the same way as feeding and taking care of a horse or a dog nowadays is incumbent not on the animals but on their owners. Neither slave nor serf had to worry where to pitch their tent the next day, nor where the next meal was to come from. But when a man owns himself and nothing else, that is to say when he has become a complete proletarian, he is not guaranteed the right to live nor the right to work, he is guaranteed the right or rather the need of attaching himself to the property of someone productively, or otherwise he is entitled to the privilege of dying by starvation or otherwise.
This proletarization of the masses began around the time of the Renaissance in the sphere of agriculture, then the predominating form of production; it was the result of the productivity of the worker, and those who were not needed by the owning interests were driven out by these interests, which retained only as many producers as were necessary. Thus the peasants were expropriated on a large scale, and many of those who were driven from the soil took refuge in the cities where handicraft and commerce flourished: the increased productivity led to an increased variety of activity, corresponding to the rise of commerce and industry and the growth of the cities, and in addition to these internal changes there began a period of voyage and discovery, e. a process of expansion or radiation. People sought their fortunes either by a new form of activity or in new fields of activity, and this two fold tendency checked the proletarization of the agricultural population, by acting as an absorbent.
This stage of proletarization began with peasant revolts and uprisings, and ended in the bourgeoisie middle class program of the French Revolution. But the reign of the middle class ideal was of short duration, for it was brought to a sudden termination by the invention of machinery and the introduction of the factory system, giving rise to the big capitalist on the one hand and the industrial proletariat on the other.
With the entry of the industrial proletariat on the scene, the character of class relations and antagonisms reaches a stage that is historically decisive. The proletarization of the masses can no longer be relieved by enlarging the sphere of activity, such as was the case when the rising cities and the voyages of discovery and migration opened up new channels of social drainage for population not needed in old spheres of production. For as a result of the penetration of continents, and the complete colonization of all known lands in recent years, the world has been grub staked from end to end, and further expansion means, not the enlarging of the sphere of activity of an old society, but the collision of the expanding societies. External expansion means in that event, mutual destruction as a means of evading internal issues instead of solving them.
There is no absorbent for the modern industrial proletariat. It cannot be offered possibilities of ownership outside of the old society by which it was cast off and ostracized. The solution of the condition where part of society members are the owners of all that society has and needs, must be met not outside of but inside of that society. The rehabilitation of the modern industrial proletariat cannot be accomplished by applying the old cures, by making the workers owners, by combining earning and owning in the person of each individual; additional property for that purpose is no longer available. Owning that interferes with earning is a condition that cannot be dealt with by the incorporation of new spheres of ownership, in other words by evasion. The problem must be faced not evaded; it cannot be shifted from the inside to the outside of the country, there is no longer a place to which the difficulty can be shifted. We have reached the point where we lack elbow room. Ownership must be prevented from interfering with earning, the owning portion of society can no longer be permitted to ostracize the mass from earn