Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/120

 Great as the changes might be which were wrought by wars and class-struggles, they seemed to affect nothing but the surface of things. Such convulsions did, as a matter of course, affect the foundations also, but this fact was hardly noticeable to the individual observer who stood in the midst of such events. History is essentially nothing but a more or less faithful chronicle of events recorded by such spectators; hence history remains essentially superficial. Although one who takes a bird's-eye view of the thousands of years of antiquity can clearly perceive a social evolution, the average historian takes no notice of it.

Not until the age of capitalist production was reached did social evolution proceed at such a pace that men became conscious of it. Of course they first looked for the causes of this evolution on the surface. But one who sticks to the surface can see only the forces which determine the immediate course of progress, and these are not the changing conditions of production, but the changing ideas of men.

As the capitalist system developed it created among the persons who depended upon it, capitalists, proletarians, etc., new wants wholly different from those of the people connected with the feudal system of production. To these different wants there corresponded also different ideas of right and wrong, of necessities and luxuries, of usefulness and harm. In proportion as the capitalist system grew and the classes that had part in it became more marked, the ideas which corresponded to this system of production became