Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/212

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destitution that absolute liberation could come. Poor as the German proletariat was, it was not supremely poor. In the first place, the modern workman embodies henceforward all that part of humanity conquered by the abolition of primitive

    answering the attack of Dr. David, whose arguments are practically those of Jaurès.

    "The Communist Manifesto has been appealed to. I affirm that already in 1872, Engels, in concert with Karl Marx, declared that they wished to republish it only as a historical document. Whoever has studied the works of Marx and Engels in detail can have no doubt that they never set up the Theory of Increasing Misery in the sense explained by David. If anything is characteristic, and refutes large passages in Bernstein's Presuppositions of Socialism, it is the passage from Capital, prefixed as a motto to Bernstein's book, in which Karl Marx describes the Ten Hours' Bill as the victory of a principle. Marx took the view that by organisation the working class can counteract the depressing tendencies of capital, and if by the strength of their organisation they succeeded in inciting the State to take such steps, then it was not merely a great moral advance, but the victory of a new principle. Even a man like Lassalle, who took so decidedly the standpoint of the Brazen Law of Wages,—even he gives no occasion for his being invoked as a witness on behalf of a false conception of the Theory of Increasing Misery. In his Open Letter in Reply he says: 'People tell you workers you are to-day in quite a different position from that of three or four hundred years ago. No doubt you are better off than the Botokudiens or than cannibal savages.' 'Every human satisfaction,' he says further on, 'depends always on the relation of the means of satisfaction to what the custom of the period demands