Karl Johann Kautsky

“ The means of production have become so enormous, that they burst to-day the frame of private property. The productivity of labour is grown so huge that to-day already a considerable diminution of the labour time is possible for all workers. Thus grow the foundations for the abolition, not of the division of labour, not of the professions, but of the antagonism of rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, ignorant and wise. ”

“ The individual is so small compared to society that he has not the strength to defy their unanimous voice. This has so crushing an effect that it needs no further means of compulsion or punishment to secure the undisturbed course of the social life. Even to-day in the class society we see that the public opinion of their own class, or, where that has been abandoned, of the class or party which they join, is more powerful that the compulsory weapons of the State. Prison, poverty and death are preferred by people to shame. ”

“ Far faster does the process of development proceed in human society. But at the same time nothing can be more erroneous than to conceive it as the same as the development of the individual, and distinguish the stages of youth, of maturity, of decay and death in it. So long as the sources of force hold out over which the earth has command, therefore so long as the foundation of technical progress does not disappear, we have no decay and death of human society to expect. This, with the development of technique, must ever more and more advance, and is in this sense immortal. ”

“ But if it produces cruelty and blood-thirstiness on the one hand, it shows itself on the other as a powerful weapon to strengthen the bonds within the family or society. The greater the dangers which threaten the individual, so much the more dependent does he feel himself upon his society, his family, his class, who alone with their joint forces can protect him. So much the greater the respect enjoyed by the virtues of unselfishness or a bravery which will risk life for the society. The more bloody the wars between tribe and tribe, the more will the system of selection have effect among them ”

“ The proletariat alone, who have no share in the capitalist exploitation, fight it, and must fight it, and they will, on the foundation laid down by capital of world intercourse and world commerce, create a form of society, in which the equality of man before the moral law will—instead of a mere pious wish—become reality. ”

“ Although the world of freedom and of the moral law is thus certainly another than that of recognised necessity, it is not a timeless, spaceless and supersensual world, but a particular portion of the world of sense seen from a particular point of view. It is the world as seen in its approach to us ; the world on which we have to work, which we have to rearrange above all. But what is to-day the future will be to-morrow the past; thus what to-day is felt to be free action will be recognised to-morow as necesary action. ”

“ The bourgeoisie was obliged to close its eyes to all idea of a further social evolution, and repudiate every philosophy of evolution, which did not simply investigate the development of the past to understand this, and also in order to understand the tendencies of the new society of the future, and to hammer out weapons for the struggle of the present, which is destined to bring about this form of society of the future. ”

“ Competition, on the other hand, is a struggle between individuals, and indeed between individuals of the same society. This struggle is a regulator—although certainly a most peculiar one—which keeps the social co-operation of the various individuals going, and arranges that in the last resort these private producers shall always produce what is socially necessary, that is, what is under the given social conditions necessary. If war forms an occasional interruption of production, so does the struggle for life form its constant and necessary companion in the production of wares. ”

“ The consequence is, that despite our apparent freedom of action in the future, this action, nevertheless, as far as nature is concerned, comes to be looked on as determined at an early period. Dark as the future lies before me, I know of a certainty that summer will follow winter, that to-morrow the sun will rise, that to-morrow I shall have hunger and thirst, that in winter the need for warming myself will occur to me, and that my action will never be directed to escaping these natural necessities, but exercised with the idea of satisfying them. ”

“ It is impossible, however, to distinguish the realm of necessity and of freedom simply as past and future; their distinction often coincides also with that of nature and society, or, to be more exact, of society, and that other nature from which the former displays only one particular and peculiar portion.
If we look at nature in the narrower sense as apart from society, and then at both in their relation to the future, we find at once a serious difference. The natural conditions change much slower than the social. ”

“ The opponents of the materialist conception of history trace them back to force, or again to the difference of the ideas which form themselves at various periods in the various peoples.
Now it is certain that in the erection of all these methods of production force played a great part, and Marx called it the midwife of every new society. But whence comes this monopoly of force? How does it come that one section of the people conquers with it and the other not, and that the force produces this and not other results? To all these question the force theory has no answer to give. ”

“ Just because in England in the seventeeth century capital acquired power more rapidly than elsewhere, because there earlier than in other countries did it come to a struggle with the feudal aristocracy, this fight has ended with a compromise, which accounts for the fact that the feudal system of landed property is stronger in England even to-day than in any other country of Europe—Austro-Hungary alone, perhaps, excepted. For the same reason—that of her rapid economic development—the class war between proletariat and bourgeoisie first blazed up in England, of all countries in the world. ”

“ The "timeless moral law, that man ought to be an end, and at no time simply a means," has itself only an "end" in a society where men are used by other men as simple means to their ends. In a communist society, this possibility will disappear, and with it the necessity of the Kantian programme for the "entire future world history." What then is to become of this? We have then in the future either no Socialism or no world history to expect. ”

“ The foundation of a general human morality is being formed not by a moral improvement of humanity, whatever we are to understand by that, but by the development of the productive forms of man, by the extension of the social division of human labour, the perfection of the means of intercourse. This new morality is, however, even to-day, far from being a morality of all men, even in the economically progressive countries. It is in essence, even to-day, the morality of the class-conscious proletariat ”

“ If we compare Christianity, the French Revolution, and the Social-Democracy to-day, we find that Liberty and Equality for all meant something quite different, according to their attitude towards property and production. The primeval Christian demanded equality of property in the manner that they asked for its equal division for purposes of consumption for all, and under freedom they understood the emancipation from all work as is the lot of the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin and yet enjoy their life. ”

“ Thus pleasure is not to be a maxim which can serve as a principle of universal legislation, and that because it can call forth social disharmonies. The moral law has thus to create a harmonious society, and such must be possible, otherwise it would be absurd to wish to create it.
The Kantian moral law assumes thus in the first place a harmonious society as desirable and possible. But it also assumes that the moral law is the means to create such a society, that this result can be achieved through a rule which the individual sets to himself. ”

“ If we look, on the other hand, on immorality as an offence against the laws of morality, then it implies no longer the divergence from a distinct standard holding good for all times and places, but the contradiction of the moral practice to its own moral principles; it implies the transgression against moral laws which people themselves recognise and put forward as necessary. It is thus nonsense to declare particular moral principles of any people or class, which are recognised as such, to be immoral simply because they contradict our moral code. ”

“ History, as a whole, appeared simply as a rise and fall, a repetition of the same circle, and just as the simple individual can set himself continually higher aims than he arrives at, because as a rule he fails, so did this circle appear as a horrible tragi-comedy in which all that was most elevated and strongest was doomed to play wretched parts. ”

“ And miserable though frequently the present might be, the rising bourgeoisie felt that the best part of reality, the future, belonged to them, and they felt themselves capable of changing this Vale of Tears into a Paradise, in which each could follow his inclinations. In reality, and in the natural impulses of man, their thinkers saw the source of all good and not of all evil. ”

“ To recognise things in themselves may appear to many philosophers an important task; for our existence it is highly indifferent, whatever we have to understand by the theory in itself. On the other hand, for every being endowed with power of movement it is of the greatest importance to rightly distinguish the things and to recognise their relations to one another. The sharper his intelligence in this respect the better service will it do him. ”

“ The woman is torn from it, and drawn into the realm of division of labour, so long a monopoly of the men. With that, naturally, the natural distinctions which exist between the sexes do not disappear, it can also allow many social distinctions, as well as many a distinction in the moral demands which are made on them, to continue to exist or even revive such, but it will certainly cause all those distinctions to disappear from State and society which arise out of the fact that the woman is tied down to the private household duties, and excluded from the callings of the divided labour. ”

“ Every ethical question became a theological one, and as the most original and simple form of social indignation is the moral—the feeling of moral indignation, the feeling of the immorality of the existing institutions—so did every social uprising commence in the form of theological criticism, in which undeniably came, as an additional factor, the circumstance that the Church was played as the foremost means of class rule, and the Roman priesthood the worst exploiters in the Middle Ages, so that all rebellion against any form of exploitation always affected the Church in the first place. ”

“ That very fact in itself renders it easier for them to herd together, or to remain together, because they are more defencless; they will, however, through their greater numbers, need weapons in the struggle for life. The union of many weak forces to common action can produce a new and greater force. Then, through union, the greater strength of certain individuals is for the good of all. Unless the stronger ones fight now for themselves, they fight for the good of the weaker ”

“ Only the motive power of the class war can work fruitfully on the moral ideal, because only the class war, and not the single-handed endeavours of self-interested people, possesses the strength to develop society farther and to meet the needs of the higher developed method of production. And, so far as the moral ideal can in any degree be realised, is only to be attained through an alteration of society. ”

“ The capitalist nations of the circle of European Society spread this by widening their sphere of exploitation, which is only possible by means of force. They thus create the foundations of a future world peace by war; the foundations of the universal solidarity of the nations by a universal exploitation of all nations, and those of the drawing in of all colonial lands into the circle of European culture by the oppression of all colonial lands with the worst and most forcible weapons of a most brutal barbarism. ”

“ Are they prescribed to the human race from the beginning of time as an irrevocable demand of nature, or an eternal reason—as commands which man does not produce, but which confront man as a ruling force and show him the aims to which he has ever more and more to strive after? ”

“ Great as were its achievements for the bourgeoisie, they are not yet up to the expectations of an harmonious empire of "morality," general well-being, and happiness, such as had been looked for from the overthrow of the old. No one dared to build hopes on the new; the more unsatisfactory the present, so much the more terrifying were the reminiscences of the most recent past which the present had brought to a head, so much the more bright did the farther past appear. That produced, as is well known, Romanticism in art. ”

“ Nothing is more fallacious than the idea that the progress of culture and increase of knowledge necessarily bring also higher humanity with them. We could far better say, the ape is more human, therefore more human than man. Murder and slaughter of members of his species from economic notions are products of culture of technic in arms. And up to now the perfection of these has ranked as a great part of the intellectual labour of mankind. ”

“ But self-movement and knowledge by no means form by themselves a sufficient weapon in the struggle. What use are to me in this struggle the strongest muscles, the most agile joints, the sharpest senses, the greatest understanding, if I do not feel in me the impulse to employ them to my preservation ”

“ Every method of production is connected not only with particular tools and particular social relations, but also with the particular content of knowledge, with particular powers of intelligence, a particular view of cause and effect, a particular logic—in short, a particular form of thought. To understand earlier modes of thought is, however, uncommonly difficult, much more difficult than to understand the needs of another or his own society. ”

“ Just like the Platonic philosophy, it attached those who sought to derive the moral law from the pleasure or egoism of the individual; it recognised in him a higher power standing over the individual which can drive man to action, and which brings him pain and grief, nay, even to death. But different to Plato, it saw in the moral law nothing supernatural, only a product of nature. Virtue arises from the knowledge of nature; happiness is arrived at when man acts in accordance with nature, that is, in accordance with the universe, or universal reason. ”

“ Already at the beginning of that career, which was opened up by the discovery of the first tool, superior to the rest of the animals by reason of his adaptability and his intellectual powers, he was forced in the course of his history to develop both qualities in the highest degree.
If the changes in society are able to transform the organism of man, his hands, his feet, his brain, how much the more, and how much greater, to change his consciousness, his views of that which was useful and harmful, good and bad, possible and impossible. ”

“ It is simply impossible that anyone should follow all his instincts without restraint, because they restrain one another. Which, however, at a given moment wins, and what consequences this victory may bring to the individual and his society with it, neither the ethic of pleasure nor those of a moral law standing outside of space and time afford us any help to divine.
If, however, the moral law were recognised as a social instinct which, like all the instincts, is called out in us by the struggle for life, then the supersensuous world has lost a strong support in human thought. ”

“ But just as God rules nature, has the moral in man the force to overcome the natural, the desires of the flesh, and to triumph over them. Complete happiness is, nevertheless, impossible for man so long as he dwells in this vale of tears, where he is condemned to bear the burden of his flesh. Only then, when he is free from this and his spirit has returned to its original source, to God, can he enjoy unlimited happiness. ”

“ We have seen that the economic development introduces into the moral factors transmitted from the animal world an element of pronounced mutability, in that it gives a varying degree of force to the social instincts and virtues at different times, and also at the same time in different classes; that it, however, in addition, widens, and then again narrows down the scope within which the social impulses have effect; on the one side expanding its influence from the tiny tribe till it embraces the entire humanity, on the other side limiting it to a certain class within the society. ”