Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/140

 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.

The French Revolution again understood by equality the equality of property rights. Private property was declared to be sacred. And true freedom was for it the freedom to apply property in economic life, according to pleasure, in the most profitable manner.

Finally, the Social-Democracy neither swears by private property nor does it demand its division. It demands its socialisation, and the equality which it strives for is the equal right of all to the products of social labour. Again, the social freedom which it asks for is neither freedom to dispose arbitrarily of the means of production and to produce at will, but the limitation of the necessary labour through the gathering in of those capable of working and through the most extended application of labour-saving machinery and methods. In this way the necessary labour which cannot be free, but must be socially regulated, can be reduced to a minimum for all, and to all a sufficient time assured of freedom, for free artistic and scientific activity, for free enjoyment of life. Social freedom—we do not speak here of political—through the greatest possible shortening of the period of necessary labour: that is freedom as meant by the Social-Democracy.

It will be seen that the same moral ideal of Freedom and Equality can embrace very different social ideals. The external agreement of the moral ideals of different times and countries is, however, not the result of a moral law independent of time and space which springs up in man from a supernatural world, but only the consequence of the fact that despite all social differences the main outlines of class rule in human society have always been the same.

All the same, a new moral ideal cannot simply arise from the class antagonism. Even within the conservative classes there may be individuals who develop with their class socially only loose ties and are without class consciousness. With that, however, they possess strong social instincts and virtues, which makes them