Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/139

 The very uprising classes are, indeed, often inclined to philosophical materialism, which the declining classes, oppose from the moment when they become conscious that reality has passed the sentence of death upon them, and feel that they can only look for salvation from Supernatural powers—divine or ethical.

The content of the new moral ideal is not always very clear. It does not emerge from any scientific knowledge of the social organism, which is often enough quite unknown to the authors of the ideal, but from a deep social need, a burning desire, an energetic will for something other than the existing, for something which is the opposite of the existing; and thus, also, this moral ideal is in reality only something purely negative, nothing more than opposition to the existing hypocrisy.

So long as class rule has existed, the ruling morality guards; wherever a sharp class antagonism has been formed, slavery, inequality, exploitation. Thus the moral ideal of the uprising classes in historical times has always had the same appearance, always that which the French Revolution summed up with the words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It would seem as if this were the ideal implanted in every human breast, independent of time and space, as if it were the task of the human race to strive from its beginning for the same moral ideal, as if the evolution of man consisted in the gradual approach to this ideal which continually looms before him.

But if we examine more closely, we find that the agreement of the moral ideal of the various historical epochs is only very superficial, and that behind these lie great differences of social aims, which correspond to the differences of the social situation at the time.

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