Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/35

 adds to the force and operates upon economics, "making otherwise" the things produced by economics. Such a view is only possible in minds that have only a scholastic conception of economics, that have gathered their ideas entirely from books, and that treat it purely intellectually, without the slightest vital conception of the actual economic process. Here, at least, the proletariat is superior to them, and in spite of Maurenbrecher and Eisner, is better capable of comprehending this process and its historic role, than the capitalist theoretician to whom economic practice is foreign, or than the capitalist practical man to whom every theoretical interest is foreign, and who has no conception of the necessity of understanding anything more of economics than is essential to successful profit making.

All economic theory becomes mere mental gymnastics for those who do not proceed from the knowledge that the motive force back of every economic event is the human will. Certainly not a will, not a will existing by itself (Wollen an sich), but a  (bestimmtes) will. It is, in the last analysis, the which lies at the basis of all economics, which appeared with life as soon as it was gifted with movement and sensation. Every expression of the will is, in the last analysis, to be traced back to the will to live.

Whatever especial forms this life impulse (Lebenswille) of an organism may take in individual cases depends upon the conditions of that life, taking the word condition in the widest possible sense, as including all the dangers and limitations of life, not merely the means of its sustenance. The conditions of life determine the character of its volition, the nature of its acts and their results.

This knowledge forms the starting point of the materialistic conception of history. But, to be sure, the simplicity of the relations, that must be explained in this