66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST certain stages: the stage of the working class as a passive and exploited mass, the proletariat as a growing factor in economic and social struggles and then the working class as a conscious social force—the vanguard contingent of the working people and an active fighter for mankind's general emancipation from exploitation, national and social oppression. In this background, chapter 1 of this volume assumes special importance. Investigation into the objective prerequisites for the formation of the class of wage workers and the structure of the proletariat in the nascent bourgeois society is an extremely complex task no doubt, but here in this chapter the authors have quite deftly handled the subject. In fact wage labour existed under all antagonistic social systems, but the peculiarity in the last of them is that the exploitation of wage labour constitutes the very basis of the society. Wage labour has a continuity in the antagonistic social systems and thus the urban labour of the middle ages bore some characteristics which ultimately fully flowered into the wage labour of the capitalistic system. Marx himself noted these characteristics, and the origination of embryonic capitalistic relations in some cities of Italy did not appear to him as accidental; rather he concluded that "the urban labour of the Middle Ages already constitutes a great advance and serves as a preparatory school for the capitalistic mode of production, as regards the continuity and steadiness of labour.'51 The process of origination of the proletariat in Great Britain and other countries of Europe amply confirms Marx's postulate. The same holds for the United States. What in the United States is called the economic system of the colonial period was also marked by capitalist relations in a rudimentary form. In fact, the 16th century opened this epoch when the system of wage labour and the proletariat actually came into being with the process lasting unto the final stage of genesis of capitalism, or, in other words, the industrial revolution. The prerequisite for the prevalence of wage labour was what is known as the primary accumulation of capital. And very rightly, according to the authors, "it was mainly rooted in the separation of the producer in pre-capitalistic society (i. e. the peasant and the craftsman who had acquired personal freedom) from the means of production". But from the very beginning, capitalism entailed further pauperisation of the already poor masses. Who constituted the proletariat? It was the peasants ruined by the burden of heavy taxes who abandoned the land and also the craftsmen deprived of their economic independence, who ultimately turned proletarian. So wage slavery was the logical outcome of the process of primary accumulation through which the peasants and craftsmen, torn out their habitual conditions of work and life, often found themselves out of work and without any means of subsistence. But the most brutal aspect of the nascent capitalism was the enactment of a series of statutes designed