ot recommend, as she did, that the
masters should be banished to starve but rather that they should be
allowed to become producers and to live then as such, not as robbers, as
they now live.
This is bolshevism. It is not anarchy, but a new dictatorship instead of
the old, that of the proletariat in place of the bourgeoisie. But this
dictatorship (though necessary during the period of transition from the
capitalist system, by which commodities are made only for the profit of
a few to an industrial system by which they will be made only for use of
the many) is not the goal of socialism. Its goal is a classless world--a
world in which all who are able to work shall directly or at least
indirectly contribute their due proportion, according to their abilities
and opportunities, towards feeding, clothing, housing and educating it.
Perhaps the truest thing in the Bible relates to the utterly corrupt
condition of civilization, nor was it ever truer than now, and it always
must be equally true while the world is divided into master and slave
classes under the dictatorship of the masters:
The whole head is sick and the whole heart faint. From the sole of
the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it, but
wounds and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been
closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.
Capitalism and Socialism differ fundamentally in that the former always
has sought and always will seek to exercise a permanent dictatorship,
whereas that of the latter is to constitute the temporary bridge over
which the world is to pass from the economic system under which
commodities are competitively made for the profit of the few, to the
economic system under which they will be co-operatively made for the use
of the many.
It is contended with much show of reason that the dictatorship of the
proletariat will not lead to the goal, because human nature being what
it is the slaves will automatically develop into another class of
masters.
But those who raise this contention proceed upon the assumption that
human nature is a constant quantity so that it cannot be essentially
changed and that it has made the economic systems, what they have been.
This is not the case. Human nature, like animal nature, is constantly
changing and neither the one nor the other voluntarily changes itself,
but both are forced to change by the development of new and external
conditions and b
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