Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/141

 hate all hypocrisy and cynicism, and, being highly intelligent, they see clearly the contradiction between the traditional moral code and the social needs. Such individuals are bound also, to come to the point of setting up the new moral ideal. But whether their new ideal shall obtain social force depends upon whether they result in class ideals or not. 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.

A peculiar fatality has ruled hitherto that the moral ideal should never be reached. That will be easily understood when we consider its origin. The moral ideal is nothing else than the complex of wishes and endeavours which are called forth by the opposition to the existing state of affairs. As the motive power of the class war, as a means to collect the forces of the uprising classes to the struggle against the existing, and to spur them on, it is a powerful lever in the overturning of this. But the new social conditions, which come in the place of the old, do not depend on the form of the moral ideal, but upon the given natural conditions: the technical conditions, the natural milieu, the nature of the neighbours and predecessors of the existing society, etc.

A new society can thus easily diverge a considerable distance from the moral ideal of those who brought it about, and so much the more the less the moral indignation was allied with knowledge of the material conditions. Thus the ideal ended continually in disillusionment; proving itself to be an illusion after it had done its historical duty and had worked as an inspirer in the destruction of the old.

We have seen above how in the conservative classes the opposition between moral theory and practice arises, so that morality appears to them as that which