Page:The War and the Future.djvu/20

 was the sum of all sans-culottish destruction and dissolution, of chaotic anarchy. I can still hear our school principal shout at some naughty boys who had defaced tables and benches with their pocket knives: "You have behaved like social democrats!" Today he would say: "like communists!" for the social democrat has in the meantime become a thoroughly respectable person whom nobody fears.

Please understand me correctly. Communism is a sharply circumscribed political economic program founded upon the dictatorship of one class, the proletariat, born of the historical materialism of the nineteenth century: in this form it is the product of a particular period and subjected to the changes of tune. But as a vision it is much older and contains at the same time elements that belong only to a future world. It is older because already the religious movements of the late Middle Ages had an escatological communist character; even then the earth, water, air, wild game, fishes, and birds were to be common property, the lords were to work for their daily bread, and all burdens and taxes were to be done away with. In this sense, communism is older than Marx and the nineteenth century. But it belongs to the future in as much as the world that will be when we are gone, whose outlines are beginning to emerge and in which our children and grandchildren will live, can scarcely be imagined without certain communistic traits—that means, without the fundamental idea of common rights of ownership and enjoyment of earthly good, without a progressive equalization of class differences, without the right to work and the duty to work for all. A country of America's courageous progressivity which has never denied its origin in the pioneer spirit, gives us premonitions of this coming world in its equalitarianism and in its feeling that work disgraces nobody. The common possession of opportunities for enjoyment and education are largely achieved. The whole world smokes the same cigarettes, eats the same ice cream, sees the same movies, hears the same music on the radio; even the difference in clothing is disappearing more and more, and the college student who earns his way through college, which would have been very much beneath his class dignity in Europe, is here a commonplace. 20