have the effect of removing the causes of the enslavement process; it cannot secure employment for the working class; it cannot suspend the operation of the economic laws which create an over-population, a reserve army, although it can organize rationally the distribution of the employment that there is, thereby palliating somewhat the sharpness of the economic process. But it can counteract the results of the economic process on the psychology of the working class. In the breast of the slave who is riveted to his master capital there still may develop the spirit of a free man and the courage to fight for freedom. The discipline, union, and organization of the working class cannot give him any freedom under capitalism because the economic conditions enslave him to capital, but they enable him to fight for some liberties while in slavery and for better conditions of servitude. This fight, however, in itself develops the desire for ultimate freedom and educates the workingman to an understanding of the causes and the conditions of the struggle, thus making of him an active and intelligent opponent of the present order. At the same time the struggle must be growing more intense as time passes on. For the fight only affecting the results of the downward tendency, and being powerless to remove its cause, whatever gains are made cannot be kept unless the fight for them is kept up, and the fight must be intensified as the tendency increases. Hence the growing revolt of the working class of which Marx speaks. Hence, also, the absurdity of the passage quoted below from Rudolf Goldscheid's very recent booklet: "Impoverishment or Amelioration Theory?" which forms a new departure in Revisionism. This latest manifestation of Revisionism is in effect an admission of the fiasco of the old-style Revisionism, and proceeds in different manner. But only the form has changed; the substance, however, remained the same. Particularly the metaphysical way of looking at things from their formal, stagnant, so to say, separatist, point of view, and the failure to see the inner connection between them while in motion. So says Goldscheid:
Page:The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (1907).djvu/232
Appearance