Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/116

 whom it in consequence became a mere phrase; this was the conception of the equality of men, the view that the social instincts, the moral virtues are to be exercised towards all men in equal fashion. 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; that part of the proletariat which in its feeling and thinking has emancipated itself from the rest of the people, and has formed its own morality in opposition to that of the bourgeoisie.

Certainly it is capital which creates the material foundation for a general human morality, but. it only creates the foundation by treading this morality continually under its feet. 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. 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.

But if the economic development thus tends to widen the circle of society within which the social