Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/105

Rh right to the entire product of labour, the right to existence, or some other economic fundamental right discovered by juridical Socialism. Undoubtedly law and ethics will also play a part in the Social Revolution, but what will always assert itself, will be the demands of economics.

But besides ethics and law, psychology also has to be considered. Will not some problems, and those of the greatest importance, arise from psychology which the proletarian régime will have to solve? Does not the Socialist society presuppose extraordinary human beings, real angels as regards unselfishness and gentleness, joy of work and intelligence? Is not the Social Revolution, with the present brutal and egoistical race of men, bound to become the signal for desolating struggles for the booty or for general idleness, in which it would go to ruin? All change in the economic foundation is useless; so long as men are not reformed.

The text and the tune are not new. They were already sung a century ago, when the song was of the limited intelligence of the subjects. The gentle shepherds of the Holy Alliance would have only too willingly granted their flocks every possible freedom. But they had first to attain the requisite "ripeness."

Now, I would not dream of denying that every form of production requires not only certain technical, but also psychological pre-requisites, without which it cannot come into existence. Of what nature these psychological pre-requisites for a given method of production must be, follows from the nature of the economic problem which it sets itself to solve.

No one will wish to assert that in my investigation I have assumed men of angelic character. The problems which were to be solved presupposed intelligence, discipline and ability to organise. Those are the psychological pre-requisites for a Socialist society. But they are precisely the ones which already to-day are called into being by capitalism. It is the historical mission of capitalism to discipline the workers, and to organise them, and to widen their mental horizon far beyond the range of the workshop and the parish church steeple.

To pass over to Socialism from handicraft or peasant industry is not only on economic grounds impossible, that is, on account of the small productivity of the concerns, but also on psychological grounds. I have already pointed out how the petty-bourgeois psychology inclines towards Anarchism and rebels against the discipline of a productive concern, carried on on social lines. This is one of the greatest difficulties which capitalism encounters at the beginning of the capitalist mode of production, since it has to draw its first workers from the handicrafts or the peasantry. That was what it had to contend with in England in the 18th century, that is it which, in the Southern States of the American Union, renders even to-day difficult the rapid progress of the large industry so favoured otherwise by the proximity of important raw material.