Max Beer

“ In any great work, in any serious crisis, the class will stand together and its solidarity will be the stronger in the same measure as its members are conscious of their common interests and of their importance in the evolution of society. That consciousness leads to a political, economic and legal theory, a special philosophy, and to the formulation of an ideal. The landed interests find their ideal in Conservatism, the capitalist interests in Liberalism, the labour interests in Socialism. ”

“ So it is with society. The atomic units, the individuals, may appear to be involved in a disordered, foolish scramble. Yet that scramble is but one of the consequences of the division of the bases of life. If there is a system of private property and there are numbers of people in possession of the means of production, while other numbers of people have nothing save their labour power, the individual scramble is inevitable. ”

“ When we do that we see that the individual scramble is a minor, subordinate point in the great movements of classes and nations. In any serious work, in any social crisis, in any undertaking on a national scale we see not separate, atomised scrambling individuals, but ordered groups, classes and nations warring against each other. ”

“ It is exceedingly hard for the mass of mankind to shake itself free from old instincts, ideas, and deeply-rooted authorities, and it is those mental factors which largely control our will. Considering all those drawbacks with which the new truths and the new ideals of a nascent social stage have to battle there is reason to rejoice at the progress we are making rather than to be disheartened by the particular difficulties we encounter. ”

“ By elimination of the minor, incidental characteristics and by gathering together the essential, primary characteristics they have in common. The division of phenomena into classes is thus an abstraction, a result of scientific thinking: we must first recognise which characteristics are incidental and which essential. In social economics we, as Marxists, divide society into two or three classes, that is, into capitalists, proletarians, and landed interests, though the units of one class may differ in some points from each other or may have points in common with units of another class. ”

“ Things in nature and in society do not, as a rule, exhibit such salient, undeniable, rigidly differentiated characteristics as to render their classification as easy as, for instance, the division of the higher organisms into two sexes, or the human species into white, black, and yellow races. ”

“ Those who think our theory to be wrong have something more to do than to point to the individual scramble. They have to explain by their theory such phenomena as the rise and decay of Feudalism, the rise of the Reformation, of absolute monarchy, of national States, of the outbreak of the English, French, German, and Russian revolutions, of the growth of the industrial period, of Chartism, of the international Socialist movement. A hypothesis which explains one phenomenon only is of no value, Anyone can find an explanation for an isolated occurrence. ”

“ The difficulties of our propaganda arise chiefly from the conservatism of the human mind. Our mind does not precede social evolution, but lags behind it. To that conservatism are added the effects of centuries of degradation in which the labouring masses have been kept, partly by social necessity and partly by a deliberate policy of the ruling classes. ”

“ It does not matter that each of those classes and parties is involved in minor cross movements, just as it does not matter to the astronomer that the atoms of the planets are involved in disordered movements of their own. ”

“ The international Socialist movement is an essentially working-class movement and cannot be anything else, notwithstanding the fact that a few highly-educated men and women are its leaders and are therefore conspicuous, Socialism being the theory of the Labour movement can never be accepted by the bulk of the other economic classes, and will earlier or later pervade all groups of Labour. ”