Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/51

 it is only with fear and shuddering that I think of the epoch when these dark iconoclasts come to power; with their callous hands they will destroy all the marble statues of beauty, etc."

Undeniably it has now become wholly different. It is not by the proletariat that modern civilization is threatened. It is those very communists who to-day constitute the safe refuge of art and science, for which they stand in the most decisive manner.

So it is that the fear is rapidly disappearing, which after the Paris Commune dominated the whole capitalist class; the fear that the conquering proletariat would come into our culture like the Vandals in their race migrations and on its ruins found a government of barbaric ascetics.

It is partially owing to the disappearance of this fear that sympathy with the proletariat and with socialism is on the increase among the bourgeois intellectuals.

Like the proletariat, class intelligence is a peculiarity of the capitalist system of production. I have already shown that this system makes such demands upon the ruling class that they have neither the interest nor the leisure to care for the business of government, or to cultivate art and science, as did the aristocracy of Athens or the clergy of the best days of the Catholic Church. The whole sphere of the higher intellectual activity, that was formerly a privilege of the ruling classes, is now left by these to paid laborers, and the number of these