Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/174

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THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

a production of artistic works, scientific investigation and literary activities of various forms. The continuation of this production is no less necessary for modern civilization than the undisturbed continuance of the production of bread and meat, coal and iron. A proletarian revolution, however, renders its continuance in the former manner impossible. What has it to substitute therefor? That no reasonable man to-day fears that the victorious proletariat will cause a return to the old condition of barbarism or that it will fling art and science and superfluous rubbish into the lumber room, but that on the contrary it is just among those broad popular sections of the proletariat that the most interest and the highest regard for art and science is to be found, I have already shown in my essay concerning "Reform and Revolution." But my whole inquiry is not so much in the nature of an investigation into what the victorious proletariat might do as to what by virtue of the power of logic and facts it can and must do.

There will be no lack of the necessary material objects for art and science. We have already seen that it is one of the strong points of the proletarian regime that through the abolition of private property in the means of production the possibility will be created of wiping out in the quickest possible manner the ruins of the outgrown means and methods of production which to-day prevent the unfolding of the