Page:Zelda Kahan - Karl Marx His Life And Teaching (1918).pdf/24

 morals as immutable, and yet we allow the product of the labour of the majority to be appropriated by a minority, and regard it as a legal, honest, righteous action. Why? Because, as Marx has shown, the morals and laws of the governing class are, unconsciously to ourselves, imposed on the whole of society, and growing up, as we do, in their atmosphere, we regard as natural what is in reality but the outcome of a given form of economic industrial conditions.

But many of us are revolting against this; we proclaim that we do not necessarily regard as moral and as right principles which are thus regarded simply because they have been hallowed by custom or because they coincide with the convenience of the governing class. We are ready to sacrifice everything to bring about a new social order, in which the horrors of the present day shall be buried for ever. How is it that we are imbued with these ideas, ideals, and enthusiasms, and what is it that has given them the form which they have actually taken, of demanding the establishment of socialism? Because capitalism is fast outliving its time, because, as Marx has so well shown, and as we have indicated above, the giant advances made in the mode of industry are fast, becoming no longer compatible with the existence of society under capitalism. Moreover, the whole mode of life which has resulted from the capitalist form of society, the aggregation of vast masses of the people in town, the association of large numbers of workers in factories, the more and more centralised and collectivist forms of production resulting from the advances in industry, the sight of the unheard of wealth and luxuries of the possessing classes in comparison with the untold misery and poverty of the propertyless classes—all that and more that we have no room to mention here, has resulted in giving us new ideals, new hopes, new enthusiasms. The germs of the new are already sprouting in the old, and the new ideals are gradually taking the place of the old. If we say that the breakdown of capitalism and the establishment of socialism is inevitable, we do not mean that if we sit still with folded arms, eyes shut and mouths open, the plums of socialism will fall into our mouths. No, we mean that it is inevitable that we do not sit with folded arms and do nothing. It is inevitable