NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE
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not only because class-consciousness is promoted thereby, but also because, from a purely technical point of view, the military concentration of the members of a class, as well as the production and the supply of arms are made easier. That happy local grouping of classes has favored all bourgeois revolutions;[1] it is almost lacking in the case of the proletarian revolution.[2]
The armies of mercenaries, which existed up to our own time, exhibit, like the question of armament, the direct transformation of economic power into physical power according to the Mephistophelian prescription:
"If I can purchase stallions six
Are not their powers mine a-plenty?
I journey on and am a mighty man
As if I had legs four and twenty."
- ↑ This also applies to the Russian revolution (of 1905) in its first stage. A characteristic instance, among innumerable others, is the armed rising in Moscow in December, 1905, the astonishing tenacity of which finds an explanation in the coöperation of the mass of the urban population with the fighting revolutionaries who, by the way, were not numerous. The tactics of the urban guerilla method, splendidly developed in Moscow, will be epochal.
- ↑ The working together in factories, etc., and the living together in the "working-class neighborhood" have however to be taken into account.
