Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/97

Rh accession of the proletariat to power, and could not be carried on in the same way as before. But I must desist from entering on these subjects, as I have already said the most essential that I have to say on them elsewhere (the attitude of a Socialist community towards the Colonies and the world-trade I have discussed in my preface to Atlanticus's "A Glimpse into the Future State," pp. xix. and following, and "The Future of the Home" in my "Agrarian Question," pp. 447 and the following). Only one more point I should like to discuss in this connection, about which a great deal of vagueness exists: The future of intellectual production.

We have hitherto only studied the problems of material production, which is the foundation. But on this foundation there is built up a production of works of art, of scientific research, of literary work of the most varied kinds. The continued progress of this production has become to the modern civilised man no less a necessity than the undisturbed progress of the production of bread and meat, coal and iron. A proletarian revolution, however, would make their continuation on the same lines as hitherto impossible. What would it put in their place?

That no sensible man believes nowadays that the victorious, proletariat would behave in the fashion of the ancient barbarians, and consign art and science as superfluous triflings to the lumber room; that, on the contrary, among the wider sections of the people the proletariat is precisely the one which evinces the greatest interest: in—nay, the highest respect for—art and science, has already been mentioned by me in the pamphlet on "Reform and Revolution." But the whole of my inquiry here concerns itself, not with what the victorious proletariat would wish to do, but what, by the logic of facts, it will be able and forced to do.

Of the necessary material means for art and science there would be no lack. We have seen how it is precisely the proletarian régime which, by the abolition of private property in the means of production, creates the possibility of getting rid, in the quickest possible manner, of those survivals of obsolete means and methods, of production, which to-day obstruct everywhere the development, of the modern productive forces, and are, under the present rule of private property, slowly and incompletely eliminated by competition. The wealth of Society must, in consequence, at once rise far above the level attained by capitalist society.

But the material means are not everything. Wealth alone does not suffice to produce a vigorous intellectual life. The question is whether the conditions of the production of material goods in a Socialist society are compatible with the necessary conditions of a highly developed intellectual production. That is frequently disputed by our opponents.

Let us first see what is the nature of the intellectual production, to-day. It is of three kinds—one carried on by organs of society, serving society to satisfy social needs; second, the production of