Kautsky is evidently right when he asserts that in our time the advancement of the workers has depended on their revolutionary spirit. At the end of a study on social reform and revolution he says, "It is hopeless to try, by means of moral homilies, to inspire the English workman with a more exalted conception of life, a feeling of nobler effort. The ethics of the proletariat spring from its revolutionary aspirations, these are what give it the greatest force and elevation. It is the idea of revolution which has raised the proletariat from its degradation."[1] It is clear that for Kautsky morality is always subordinate to the idea of sublimity.
The Socialist point of view is quite different from that of former democratic literature; our fathers believed that the nearer man approached Nature the better he was, and that a man of the people was a sort of savage; that consequently the lower we descend the more virtue we find. The democrats have many times, in support of this idea, called attention to the fact that during revolutions the poorest people have often given the finest examples of heroism; they explain this by taking for granted that these obscure heroes were true children of Nature. I explain it by saying that, these men being engaged in a war which was bound to end in their triumph or their enslavement, the sentiment of sublimity was bound to be engendered by the conditions of the struggle. As a rule, during a revolution the higher classes show themselves in a particularly unfavourable light, for this reason, that, belonging to a defeated army, they experience the feelings of conquered people, suppliant, or about to capitulate.
When working-class circles are reasonable, as the
- ↑ Karl Kautsky, La Révolution sociale, French trans., pp. 123–124. I have pointed out elsewhere that the decay of the revolutionary idea in the minds of former militants who have become moderate seems to be accompanied by a moral decadence that I have compared to that which as a rule one finds in the case of a priest who has lost his faith (Insegnamente sociali, pp. 344–345).
