Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/186

 but also their relation as artists and thinkers to the external world.

Regulation of social chaos and liberation of the individual—these are the two historical tasks that capitalism has placed before society. They appear to be contradictory, but they are simultaneously soluble because each of them belongs to a different sphere of social life. Undoubtedly whoever should seek to rule both spheres in the same manner would find himself involved in insoluble contradictions. It is on this point that anarchism is wrecked. Anarchism arises out of the reaction of the little bourgeois against the repressive and oppressive capitalism. The little handworker who was accustomed to direct his labor according to his own pleasure rebels against the discipline and the monotony of the factory. His ideal remains the free labor of the individual and when this is no longer possible he seeks to replace it by common working together in free unions wholly independent of each other.

The "new middle class," the intellectuals, is, as we have already seen many times, in its social position only a refined and more sensitive expression of the earlier little bourgeois. Its manner of working develops in them the same need for free labor, the same repugnance to discipline and uniformity. So it is that their social ideal becomes the same as that of the small bourgeois, that is the anarchist. But that which is a progressive ideal in their sphere