Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/102

38 create greater freedom for artistic and scientific development of the individuals, does it not more than undo it by fettering intellectual activity in those fields where it can only take place through social channels? Here is certainly a serious problem; but not an insoluble one.

In the first place, it must be observed that in the case of the social institutions for intellectual production, just as in that of production as a whole, not only the State, but also the municipality comes into account as manager and purveyor of means. This alone is a guarantee against all uniformity and over-ruling of the intellectual life on the part of the State. There are, however, yet other organisations to be considered as substitutes for the capitalist organisations of intellectual production, namely, private societies or associations for art, science, and public life, which will encourage or directly undertake production in these fields in the most various ways. To-day already we possess numerous societies which arrange for theatrical representations, publish newspapers, collect objects of art, publish books, fit out scientific expeditions, &c. The shorter the time of labour in the material production, and the higher the wages, the more will these free associations flourish, increase in number, and in the zeal and the understanding of their members, as well as in the means which the individual members can subscribe, which they collectively can raise. From these free associations I expect that they will play an ever greater part, and that it will be reserved for them, in the place of capitalism, to organise and lead the intellectual life, so far as it is of a social nature.

Thus even here the proletarian régime leads not to greater constraint, but to greater freedom.

The emancipation of education and of scientific research from the fetters of class rule; the emancipation of the individual from the pressure of exclusive and exhausting physical labour; the substitution for capitalist management of social intellectual production the management of free associations, this will be the direction in which a proletarian régime will proceed in the intellectual field.

We see its problems in the field of production are of a contradictory character. The capitalist mode of production has created the problem of organising the social process of production on a homogeneous and systematic basis. This problem involves the fitting in of the individual into a fixed order, to whose regulations he has to accommodate himself. On the other hand, the same mode of production has brought the individual more than ever to self-consciousness, placed him on his own feet, and divorced him from society. More than ever people demand to be allowed the opportunity of developing their own personality, and of determining their relations to each other, and that the more freely, the more delicate and individual those relations are; thus, in the first place, their marriage relations; also, moreover, their relations, as artists and thinkers, to the outside world. The regulation of the social chaos