Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/188

 on the surplus of products and labor powers which proceed from material production. It is possible only when material life is secured. If the latter falls into confusion then our whole existence is threatened. Consequently it is absolutely unimportant for society in what relations the existing surplus of products and labor powers are applied to the individual fields of free intellectual creation. The exception to this is the educational system which has its special laws, and has not yet been turned over to free competition in any society, but has been socially regulated. Society would fall into bad condition if all the world should set to work at the manufacture of one kind of commodities such, for example, as buttons, and thereby direct too much labor power to this, so that not enough was left for the production of others, such, for example, as bread. On the other hand the relation between lyric poems and tragedies, works on Assyriology and botany which are to be produced is no essential one; it has neither maximum nor minimum point. If to-day there should be twice as many dramas as yesterday, and at the same time one-half as many lyrics, or if to-day twenty works on Assyriology should appear and only ten Botanical, while yesterday the relations were reversed, still the existence of society would not be touched in the slightest thereby. These facts find their economic expression in that the law of value, in spite of all psychological theories of value, only holds good