Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/34

 22 their horny hands they will break all the marble statues of beauty," &c.

As is well known, things have since become quite different. It is not the proletariat that threatens modern civilisation; on the contrary, it is the Communists who have become to-day the surest guardians of art and science, and have often stepped forward on their behalf in a most decided manner.

In the same way the fear which possessed the whole bourgeois world after the Paris commune, lest the victorious proletariat would behave in the midst of our civilisation like the Vandals of the great tribal migration, and establish on heaps of ruins an empire of barbaric asceticism has practically disappeared.

It is partly due to the disappearance of this fear that among the bourgeois Intellectuals there is a visibly growing sympathy with the proletariat and Socialism.

Like the proletariat, the Intellectuals as a class are also a peculiar feature of the capitalist mode of production. I have already pointed out that the ruling classes need and make use of them in so far as they, the ruling classes, have neither the interest nor the leisure to attend to the business of the administration of the State, or to apply themselves to art and science, as the aristocracy of Athens or the clergy at the best period of the Catholic Church did. The whole of the higher intellectual activity, which was formerly a privilege of the ruling classes, they leave to-day to paid workers, and the number of these professional scholars, artists, engineers, officials, &c., is rapidly increasing.

These make up the class of the so-called "Intellectuals," the "new middle-class;" but they differ essentially from the old middle-class in that they have no separate class consciousness. Particular sections of them have a separate consciousness of their order, very frequently a conceit of their order; but the interests of each of these sections is too particular to allow of a common class consciousness to develop. Their members ally themselves with the most different classes and parties; the Intellectuals provide each of these with its intellectual champions. Some champion the interests of the ruling classes, whom many of them have to serve in their professional capacity. Others have made the cause of the proletariat their own. The majority, however, have remained up till now hide-bound by the petty bourgeois way of thinking. Not only have they often come from a petty bourgeois stock, but their social position as a "middle class" is very similar to that of the petty bourgeois, namely, a cross between the proletariat and the ruling classes.

These sections of the Intellectuals it is who, as said above, evince more and more sympathy with the proletariat and Socialism. As they have no particular class interests, and are, thanks to their professional activity, the most accessible to scientific insight, they are the most easily won through scientific considerations for