Over against this class stood the broad masses of manual labourers who were organized in movements with a more or less radically Marxist tendency. These organized masses were firmly determined to break any kind of intellectual resistance by the use of brute force. They had no nationalist tendencies whatsoever and deliberately repudiated the idea of advancing the interests of the nation as such. On the contrary, they promoted the interests of the foreign oppressor. Numerically this class embraced the majority of the population and, what is more important, included all those elements of the nation without whose collaboration a national resurgence was not only a practical impossibility but was even inconceivable.