Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/103

Rh and the emancipation of the individual, those are the historical problems which capitalism has placed before society. They appear to contradict each other; yet they admit of simultaneous solution, because each of them concerns different fields of social life. Certainly, those who would try to regulate these two fields in the same fashion would soon land in a hopeless confusion. It is precisely here that Anarchism comes to grief. It arose from the reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against capitalism, which threatens and oppresses it. The small craftsman, who was accustomed to arrange his work as he thought best, rebelled against the discipline and the monotony of the factory. His ideal remained the free labour of the individual; where the latter was no longer possible, he sought to substitute for it the social co-operation in free associations which stood independently of one another.

The "new middle class," the intellectuals, is, as we have already remarked more than once, in its social position only a refined and delicate offshoot of the original petty bourgeoisie. Its method of working develops in it the same need for free labour, the same aversion towards discipline and uniformity. Therefore, its social ideal is also the same, that is the Anarchist ideal. But what, for its sphere of production, is a progressive ideal, proves reactionary for the sphere of material production, in which it corresponds to the ideal of the decaying handicraft.

In the present condition of production there are only two kinds of material production possible, so far as it is production en masse, and consequently ignoring certain survivals, which are for the most part only curiosities. On the one hand, the communistic, with social property in the means of production and a systematic arrangement of the production from a centre, and on the other the capitalist. The Anarchist mode of production could at best prove but a temporary episode. Material production by means of free associations without a central management would lead to chaos, unless it were production of commodities, accompanied by exchange of commodities on the basis of the law of value, asserting itself through free competition. We have already seen what importance this law has under free production by individual concerns. It brings about the proper proportionality of the individual branches of production to one another, prevents society from being flooded say, by buttons when it wants bread. Production of commodities, however, must, at the present state of social production, inevitably assume again the form of capitalist production, as the numerous co-operative societies prove. To strive after the Anarchist ideal in the material production, means at best to perform a labour of Sisyphus.

It is different with the intellectual production. It is based on the material production, on the surpluses of products and of labour-power yielded by that production; it flourishes only when the material life is assured. If the latter come to confusion, then our existence itself is threatened. On the other