Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/104

40 hand it is absolutely of no consequence to it, in what proportion the existing surpluses of products and of labour-power are distributed among the different spheres of intellectual activity. The only exception is education, which has laws of its own and is even now, in a society of free competition, not left at the mercy of the latter, but is socially controlled. Society would be in a bad state if the entire world applied itself to the manufacturing of some one sort of commodities, say, buttons, and so much labour was attracted thereto, that not enough remained for the production of another, say, bread. On the contrary, the proportion in which lyrical poems and tragedies, works of assyriology and botany ought to be produced, is not a fixed one; it has neither a minimum nor a maximum limit, and if to-day twice as many dramas are written as yesterday, and on the other hand only half as many poems; if to-day twenty books on assyriology appear and only ten on botany, while yesterday, the proportions were reversed, the prosperity of society is not in the slightest degree affected by it. This fact finds its economic expression in that the law of value, despite of all psychological theories of value, is only valid for the field of material production and not for the intellectual. In this a central management of production is not only unnecessary, but directly opposed to reason; here can free production prevail, without becoming necessarily production of commodity- values or capitalist production on a large scale.

Communism in material production, anarchy in the intellectual—that is the type of a Socialist mode of production, as it will develop from the rule of the proletariat—in other words, from the Social Revolution through the logic of economic facts, whatever might be: the wishes, intentions, and theories of the proletariat.

It will, perhaps, have struck some readers that in this enquiry I have only spoken of economic conditions. I have not enquired what the ethical foundation of the new society should be, whether it should be based on the Spencerian or the Kantian ethics, whether the categoric imperative or the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be its guiding principle. Nor have I enquired what its highest legal principle must be, whether the