Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/89

 laws of this development, and a view which recognises necessary laws of society but denies the. social development, and believes it possible to discover in the psychology of primitive man all the economic categories of modern society. To these conceptions there was added naturalism (or scientific naturalism) which tries to reduce the laws of society to laws of biology—that is, to the laws of animal and plant organisms—and really amounts to nothing short of a denial of social development.

Since the bourgeoisie has grown conservative, only from the proletarian standpoint is a Materialist view of social development possible.

It is true that the dialectical materialism is a materialism of its own kind, which is quite different from the materialism of natural science (naturalism). Many friends have wished, accordingly, in order to avoid misunderstandings, to substitute another word for the word Materialism.

But if Marx and Engels retained the word Materialism, it was on the same ground as the refusal to re-christen their manifesto of the Communists as the manifesto of the Socialists. The word Socialism covers to-day such various wares, among them some really worthless, Christian and national Socialisms of all kinds; the word Communism, on the other hand, describes unmistakably and clearly the aims of a proletariat fighting a revolutionary fight for its emancipation.

So, also, by a designation of the dialectical materialism as dialectical "monism," or "criticism," or "realism," the entire sense of opposition to the bourgeois world is lost. The word "Materialism," on the other hand, has signified since the victory of Christianity a philosophy of the fight against the ruling powers. Therefore, has it come into disrepute with the bourgeoisie, but for that very reason we followers of the proletarian philosophy have the right to hold fast to this very name, which also can be justified in fact. And a conception of Ethics which rises from this philosophy can rank as a Materialistic one.