Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/148

 result will be the relapse of society into barbarism. Consequently, socialism is impracticable."

The fallacy of this reasoning is too glaring to need exposure. This much may be said: Should socialist society ever decide to decree equality of incomes, and should the effect of such a measure threaten to be the dire one prophesied, the natural result would be, not that socialist production, but that the principle of equality of incomes, would be thrown overboard.

The foes of socialism would be justified in concluding from the equality of incomes that socialism is impracticable if they could prove:

(1) That this equality would be under all circumstances irreconcilable with the progress of production. This they never have, and never can, prove, because the activity of the individual in production does not depend solely upon his remuneration, but upon a great variety of circumstances—his sense of duty, his ambition, his dignity, his pride, etc.—none of which can be the subject of positive prophecy, but only of conjecture, a conjecture which makes against, and not for, the opinion expressed by the opponents of socialism.

(2) That the equality of incomes is so essential to a socialist society that the latter cannot be conceived without the former. The opponents of socialism will find it equally impossible to prove this. A glance over the various forms of communist production from the primitive communism down to the latest communist societies will reveal how manifold are the forms of distribution that are applicable to a community