From this critical finding, they concluded that the new working class must put an end to its new kind of poverty and exploitation by revolting against the system of wage labor and creating production conditions in which wealth is produced for all in a planned way. They saw that working people had no choice but to defend themselves from their circumstances. They grasped that the capitalist mode of production increases the wealth of society with unprecedented efficiency, generally overcomes the natural causes of need and scarcity but only in a way that excludes the majority, who are needed to produce a growing supply of goods, from the created abundance, in order to use their labor all the more effectively to increase the property accumulating in the hands of the few. The communists, who Karl Marx wanted to point in the right direction with a “manifesto”, showed themselves to be the most active organizers of proletarian resistance, the most uncompromising agitators for the fundamental abolition of the causes of all the misery – and at the same time, the most hopeful interpreters of the awakening labor movement. The impoverished wage laborers of the 19th century took on these living conditions that were being forced on them, combined – gradually and in the end in enough numbers – into associations and parties founded by outraged activists, and fought back as well as they knew how and as best they could. Against the capitalists and against the state power that puts their interests into law so that a whole mode of production emerges, they had to make themselves into a counter-power – even if only to be able to function as an exploited class in the long run: a political-economic cynicism of the highest order.

In order to sustain themselves and make ends meet with their earnings, they were forced to make an additional effort: they had to join forces and fight for decent working conditions and wages and for minimal lifelong existential security. To work in the way they were required and to make do on the wages they were paid – that wasn’t enough in serving the pleasures of the propertied class and obeying the dictates of the political authorities, they were merely handing themselves over to the destructive effects that their employers inflicted on their labor-power in accord with the objective laws of their business and their competition. In order to be able to survive, wage workers had to be rebellious. 2 of Das Proletariat: die grosse Karriere der lohnarbeitenden Klasse kommt an ihr gerechtes Ende, Peter Decker/Konrad Hecker. The survival of the proletariat Ruthless Criticism

Das Proletariat by Peter Decker