Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/177

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THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION.
171

monopolized by the governmental powers and the possessing classes.

At the very least a proletarian regime can abolish the conditions which hamper scientific activity at present. It must formulate its educational system, as was previously pointed out, so that each genius will have within his reach all the knowledge that the social educational system has at its disposal. It will increase enormously the demand for educated people, and therewith also for the power of scientific investigation. Finally it will operate through the abolition of class antagonisms to make the investigators in the sphere of social science, where employed by the State, internally and externally free. So long as there are class antagonisms there will be very different standpoints from which society will be observed. There is no greater hypocrisy or self-deception than the talk about an existing science which is above class antagonisms. Science exists only in the heads of investigators and these are the products of society and cannot get out of it or reach above it. Even in a socialist society science will be dependent upon social conditions, but these will then at least be uniform and not antagonistic.

Even worse than the internal dependence upon social conditions, from which no investigator can free himself, is the external dependence of many of those from governmental or other dominating institutions, for example,