I.

I.The True Shape of the Social Question, As Shewn in the Life of Modern ManDoes not the modern social movement stand revealed by the great catastrophe of the war, demonstrating in actualfactshow inadequate thethoughtswere, which for years have been supposed sufficient to an understanding of the working-class movement and its purport?It is a question forced upon us by the demands of the workers and all that these involve,—demands which formerly were kept in suppression, but which at the present time are forcing their way to the surface of life. The powers that were instrumental in suppression are partially destroyed; and the position they took up towardsthe forces of social growth in a large part of mankind is one that nobody can wish to maintain, who does not totally fail to recognise how indestructible such impulses of human nature are.The greatest illusions in respect to these social forces have been harboured by persons, whose situation in life gave them the power, by word and voice, either to assist or to check those influences in European life, which, in 1914, were rushing us into the catastrophe of war. These persons actually believed, that a military victory for their country would hush the mutterings of the social storm. They have since been obliged to recognise, that it was the consequences of their own attitude that first brought these social tendencies fully to light. Indeed, the present catastrophe,—which is the catastrophe of mankind,—has shewn itself to be the very event, through which, historically, these tendencies gained the opportunity to make themselves felt in their full force. During these last fateful years, both the leading persons and theleading classes have been constantly obliged to tune their own behaviour to the note sounded in socialist circles. Could they have disregarded the tone of these circles, they would often gladly have acted differently. And the effects of this live on in the form which events are taking to-day.And now the thing, which for years past has been drawing on in mankind’s life-evolution, preparing its way before it, has arrived at a decisive stage,—and now comes the tragedy: The facts are with us in all their ripeness, but the thoughts that came up with the growth of the facts are no match for them. There are many persons who trained their thoughts on the lines of the growing process, hoping thereby to serve the social ideal which they recognised in it; and these persons find themselves to-day practically powerless before the problems which the accomplished facts present, and on which the destinies of mankind hang. A good many of these persons, it is true, still believe that the thingsthey have so long thought necessary to the remodelling of human life will now be realised, and will then prove powerful enough to give these facts a possible turn and meet their requirements. One may dismiss the opinion of those, who, even now, are still under the delusion, that it must be possible to maintain the old scheme of things against the new demands that are being urged by a large part of mankind. We may confine ourselves to examining what is going on in the wills of those people who are convinced that a remodelling of social life is necessary. Even so, we shall be forced to own to ourselves, that party shibboleths go wandering up and down amongst us like the dessicated corpses of once animate creeds,—everywhere flouted and set at naught by the evolution of facts. The facts call for decisions, for which the creeds of the old parties are all unprepared. These parties certainly evolved along with the facts,—but they, and their habits of thought, have not kept pace with the facts. One may perhapsventure without presumption to hold,—in the face of still common opinion,—that the course of events throughout the world at the present time bears out what has just been said. One may draw the conclusion, that this is just the favorable moment to attempt to point out something, which, in its true character, is foreign even to those who are expert thinkers among the parties and persons belonging to the various schools of social thought. For it may well be, that the tragedy that reveals itself in all these attempts to solve the social question, arises precisely from the real purport of the working-class struggle having been misunderstood,—misunderstood even by those who, themselves with all their opinions, are the outcome of this struggle. For men by no means always read their own purposes aright.There may therefore seem some justification for putting these questions: What is, in reality, the purport of the modern working-class movement? What is itswill? Does this, its will and purport, correspondto what is usually thought about it, either by the workers themselves, or by the non-workers? Does what is commonly thought about the “social problem” reveal that question in itstrue form? Or is an altogether different line of thought needed? This is a question which one cannot approach impartially unless, through personal destiny, one has in a position oneself to enter into the life of the modern worker’s soul,—especially amongst that section of the workers who have most to do with the form the social movement is taking in the present day.People have talked a great deal about the evolution of modern technical science and modern capitalism. They have studied the rise of the present working-class in the process of this evolution, and how the developments of economic life in recent times have led on to the workers’ present demands. There is much that is to the point in what has been said about all this. But there is one critical feature which is never touched on, as one cannot help seeing, ifone refuses to be hypnotised by the theory that it is external conditions that give the stamp to a man’s life. It is a feature obvious to anyone who keeps an unclouded insight for impulses of the soul that work from within outwards, out of hidden depths. It is quite true, that the worker’s demands have been evolved during the growth of modern technical science and modern capitalism; but a recognition of this fact affords no further clue whatever to the impulses that are actuating these demands, and which are in factpurely humanin character. Nor, till one penetrates to the heart of these impulses, will one get to the true form of the social question.There is a word in frequent use among the workers, which is of striking significance for anyone able to penetrate to the deeper-seated forces active in the human will. It is this: the modern worker has become “class-conscious.” He no longer follows, more or less instinctively and unconsciously, the swing of the classes outsidehis own. He knows himself one of a class apart, and is determined, that the relation, which public life establishes between his class and the other classes, shall be turned to good account for his own interests. And anyone, who has comprehension for the undercurrents of men’s souls, finds in the word “class-conscious,” as used by the modern worker, a clue to very important facts in the worker’s view of life,—in particular amongst those classes of workers, whose life is cast amidst modern technical industry and modern capitalism. What will above all arrest his attention is, how strongly the worker’s soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on human destinies. Here one touches on a circumstance about which many people, who only thinkaboutthe workers, notwiththem, have very hazy notions,—notions indeed, which are downright mischievous, in view of the serious events taking place at the present day. The view, that the “uneducated” working manhas had his head turned by Marxism, and by later labour writers of the Marxist school, and other things one hears of the same sort, will not conduce towards that understanding of the subject and its connection with the whole historic situation of the world, which is so peculiarly necessary at the present day. In expressing such a view, one only shews that one lacks the will to examine an essential feature of the present social movement. For it is an essential feature, that the working-class consciousness has thus become filled with concepts that take their stamp from thescientificevolution of recent times. This class-consciousness continues to be dominated by the note struck in Lassalle’s speech on “Science and the Workers.” Such things may appear unessential to many a man who reckons himself a “practical person”; but anyone, who means to arrive at a really fruitful insight into the modern labour movement,is bound to turn his attention to these things. In the demands put forward by the workers to-day, be they moderates orradicals, we have the expression, not, as many people imagine, of economic life that has—somehow—become metamorphosed into human impulse, we have the expression ofeconomic science, by which the working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the labour movement, with its scientific flavour and popular journalistic renderings. To deny this, is to shut one’s eyes to actual facts. And it is a fundamental fact, and one which determines the whole social situation at the present day, that everything which forms the subject of the worker’s “class-consciousness” is couched for him in concepts of a scientific kind. The individual working at his machine may be no matter how completely a stranger to science; yet those, who enlighten him as to his own position and to whom he listens, borrow their method of enlightenment from this same science.All the disquisitions about modern economic life, about the machine age and capitalism, may throw ever so instructive alight on the facts underlying the modern working-class movement; but the decisive light on the present social situation does not proceed directly from the fact, that the worker has been placed at the machine, that he has been harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. It proceeds from the other, different, fact, that his class-consciousness has been filled with a quite definite kind ofthought, shaped at the machine and under the influence of the capitalist order of economy. Possibly the habits of thought peculiar to the present day may prevent many people from realising the full bearing of this circumstance, and may cause them to regard the stress laid upon it as a mere dialectic play upon terms. One can only say in reply: So much the worse for any prospect of a successful intervention in social life to-day by people who are unable to distinguish essentials. Anyone, who wants to understand the working-class movement, must first and foremost know, how the workerthinks. For the working-class movement,from its moderate efforts at reform to its most sweeping extravagances, is not created by “forces outside man,” by “economic impulses,” but byhuman-beings, by their mental conceptions and by the impulses of their will.Not in what capitalism and the machine have implanted in the worker’s consciousness, not here lie the ideas and will-forces, that give its character to the present social movement. This movement turned in the direction of modern science to find its fount of thought, because capitalism and the machine could give the worker no substance with which to content his soul as a human being. Such substance and content was afforded to the medieval craftsman by his craft. In the kind of connection which the medieval handworker felt between himself, as a human being, and his craft, there was something that shewed life within the whole human confraternity in a light which made it seem, for his individual consciousness, worth living. Whatever he might be doing, he was ableto regard it in such a way, that he seemed through it to be realising what he desired, as a “man,” to be. Tending a machine under the capitalist scheme of things the man was thrown back upon himself, upon his own inner life, whenever he tried to find some principle on which to base a general outlook on Man and one’s consciousness of what as a “man” one is. Technical industry, capitalism,—these could contribute nothing towards such an outlook. And so it came to pass, that the working-class consciousness took the bent towards the scientific type of thought. The direct human link with actual life was lost.Now this occurred just at a time, when the leading classes of mankind were working towards a scientific mode of thought, which in itself no longer possessed the spiritual energy to content man’s consciousness in every aspect and guide it along all the directions of its wants. The old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the spiritual complex of existence. Modern science views him as a natural objectamidst a purely natural order of things. This science is not felt as a stream flowing from a spiritual world into the soul of man, and on which man as a soul is buoyed and upborne. Whatever one’s opinion may be as to the relation of the religious impulses, and kindred things, to the scientific mode of thought of recent times, yet one must admit, if one considers historic evolution impartially, that the scientific conception has developed out of the religious one. But the old conceptions of the universe, that rested deep down on religious foundations, lacked power to impart their soul-bearing force to the newer form of scientific conception. They withdrew beyond its range, and lived on, contenting their consciousness with things in which the souls of the workers could find no resource. For the leading classes, this inner world of consciousness might still have a certain value. In some form or other it was bound up with their own position in life. They sought for no new substance for their consciousness, because they wereable to keep a hold on the old one, that had been handed down to them through actual life. But the modern worker was torn out of all his old setting in life. He was the man whose life had been put on a totally new basis. For him, when the old bases of life were withdrawn, there disappeared at the same time all possibility of drawing from the old spiritual springs. These lay far off in regions to which he was now become a stranger. Contemporaneous with modern technical science and modern capitalism,—in such a sense as one can speak of great worldstreams of history as contemporaneous,—there grew up the modern scientific conception of the world. To this the trust, the faith, of the modern worker turned. It was here he sought the new substance that he needed to content his inner consciousness. But the working-class and the leading classes were differently situated with regard to their scientific outlook. The leading classes felt no necessity for making the scientific mode of conception into a gospelof life, for the support of their souls. No matter how thoroughly they might have permeated themselves with the scientific conception of a natural order of things, in which a direct chain of causality leads up from the lowest animals to man, this mode of conception remained nevertheless a merely theoretic persuasion. It never stirred their feelings, and impelled them to take life through and through in a way befitting such a persuasion. Take naturalists such as Vogt and the popular writer, Buechner; they were unquestionably permeated with the scientific mode of conception; but, alongside this, there was something else at work in their souls which kept their lives interwoven with a whole complex of circumstances, such as can those whose only intelligible justification can be the belief in a spiritual order of the world. Putting aside all prejudice, let us just imagine, how differently the scientific outlook affects a man whose personal existence is anchored in such a complex, from the modern artisan, who, in the few eveninghours that he has free from work, hears the labour leader get up and address him in this fashion: “Science in our time has cured men of believing that they have their origin in a spiritual world. They have learnt better, and know now, that in the far ages, long ago, they climbed about on trees like any vulgar monkey. Science has taught them too, that they were all alike in their origin, and that it was a purely natural one.” It was a science that turned on such thoughts as these, which met the worker when he was looking for a substance to fill his soul and give him a sense of his own place as man in the life of the universe. He took the scientific outlook on the world in thorough earnest, and drew from it his own practical conclusions for life. The technical, capitalistic age laid hold of him differently from a member of the leading classes. The latter had his place in an order of life, which still bore the shape once given it by soul-sustaining forces; it was all to his interest to fit the acquisitions of the new age into this setting.But the worker, in his soul, was torn loose from this order of life. It was not capable of giving him one emotion that could illumine and fill his own life with anything of human worth. There was one thing only, which could give the worker any sense of what a “man” is, one thing only that seemed to have emerged from the old order of life endowed with the power that awakens faith, and that was—scientific thought. It may arouse a smile in some of those who read this, to be told of the “scientific” character of the worker’s conceptions. Let them smile, who can only think of the scientific habit of mind as something that is acquired by many years of application on the benches of “educational institutes,” and then contrast this sort of “science” with what fills the mind of the worker who has “never learnt anything.” What is for him a smiling matter, are facts of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. And these facts shew, that many a very learned manlivesunscientifically, whereas the unlearned workerbrings his whole view of life into line with that scientific learning, of which very likely nothing has fallen to his share. The educated man has made a place for science,—it has a pigeon-hole of its own in the recesses of his soul. But he himself has his place in a network of circumstances in actual life, and it is these which give the direction to his feelings. His feeling is not directed by his science. The worker, through the very conditions of his life, is led to bring his conception of existence into unison with thegeneral toneof this science. He may be very far from what the other classes call “scientific,” yet his life’s course is charted by the scientific lines of conception. For the other classes, some religious or aesthetic, some general spiritual principle is the determining basis;—for him, Science is turned into the creed of life,—even though often it may be science filtered away to its last little shallows and driblets of thought. Many a member of the “foremost” classes feels himself to be “enlightened” in religion, a “free-thinker.” Nodoubt his scientific convictions influence his conceptions; but in his feelings still throb the forgotten remnants of a traditional creed of life. What the scientific type of thought has not brought down from the old order, is the consciousness of being, as a spiritual type, rooted in a spiritual world. This was a peculiarity of the modern scientific outlook, which presented no difficulty to a member of the leading classes. Life to him was filled by old traditions. For the worker it was otherwise; his new situation in life drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over from the ruling classes as heritage the scientific mode of thought, and made this the basis of his consciousness of the life and being of man. But this “spiritual possession,” with which he filled his soul, knew nothing of its derivation from an actual life of the spirit. The only spiritual life, that the workers could take over from the ruling classes, was of a sort that denied its spiritual origin.I well know, how these thoughts willaffect people outside as well as inside the working-class, who, believing themselves to have a thorough practical acquaintance with life, regard the view here expressed as quite remote from realities. The language of actual facts, as spoken by the whole state of the world to-day, will more and more prove this belief of theirs to be a delusion. For anyone able to look at these facts without prejudice, it will be plain, that a view of life, which never gets beyond their external aspect, becomes ultimately inaccessible to any conceptions save such as have lost all touch with facts. Ruling thought has clung on so long in this “practical” way to facts,—that the thoughts themselves have ended by bearing no resemblance whatever to the facts. The present world-catastrophe might have taught many people a lesson in this respect. What did they think it possible might happen? And what really did happen? Is it to be the same with their thoughts about social problems?I know too, how someone who professesworking-class views will feel about what has been said, and can hear him saying: “Just like the rest of them! trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off on to lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois sort.” With his creed, he does not see how fate has brought him into this working-class life, and how he is trying to find his way in it with a type of thought inherited from the ruling-classes. Helivesas a working-man but hethinksas a bourgeois. The new age is making it necessary to learn not only a new way of life, but a new way of thought also. The scientific mode of conception can only become substantial and life-supporting, when it evolves, in its own fashion, a power to content the whole of human life in all its aspects, such as the old conceptions of life once evolved in their way.This points the path for the discovery in its true form of one factor in the modern labour movement. And having travelled it to the end, the worker’s soul utters this cry of conviction: “I am strivingafter spiritual life. Yet this spiritual life isideology, is merely man’s own reflection of what is going on in the world outside, it does not come to us from a spiritual world of its own.” In the transition to the new age, the old spiritual life had turned to something which, for the working-class sense of life, is ideology. If one wants to understand the mood of soul amongst the workers, as it finds vent in the social demands of the present day, one must be able to grasp the full possible effects of the theory that spiritual life is ideology. It may be retorted: “What does the average working-man know of any such theory? it is only a will-o’-the-wisp in the brains of their more or less educated leaders.” But anyone who says so is talking wide of life, and his doings in actual life will be wide of it too. He simply does not know, what has been going on in the life of the working-class during the last half century. He does not know the threads that are woven from the theory, that spiritual life is ideology, to the demands and actions of the out-and-outsocialist, whom he thinks so “ignorant”;—yes, and to the deeds too of those who “hatch revolution” out of the blind promptings of the life within them.Herein lies the tragedy overshadowing all our interpretations of the social demands of the day, that in so many circles there is no sense of what is forcing its way up to the surface out of the souls of the great masses of mankind,—that people cannot turn their eyes to what is actually taking place in men’s inner life. The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker setting forth his demands; and this is what he hears:—“Nothing short of communalising the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest conception, of how his own class, in the transition from the old age to the new, not only summoned the worker to labour at means of production that were not his, but failed even to give him anything to satisfy and sustain his soul in his labour. People, who seeand act wide of the mark in this way, may say:—“But, after all, the working-man only wants to better his position in life and put himself on a level with the upper classes; where do the needs of his soul come in?” The working-man himself may even declare:—“I am not asking the other classes for anything for my soul; all I want, is to prevent them exploiting me any longer. I mean to put an end to existing classdistinctions.” Talk of this kind does not touch the essence of the social question. It reveals nothing of itstrue form. For, had the working population inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance, then they would have had a different consciousness within their souls, one which would have voiced their social demands in quite a different fashion from the modern workers, who can see in the spiritual life, as they have received it, merely an ideology. The workers, as a class, are convinced of the ideologic character of spiritual life; but the conviction renders them more and more unhappy. They arenot definitely conscious of this unhappiness in their souls, but they suffer acutely from it, and it far outweighs, in its significance for the social question to-day, all demands for an improvement in external conditions,—justifiable as these demands are too in their own way.The ruling classes do not recognise, that they are themselves the authors of that attitude of mind, which now confronts them militant in the labour-world. And yet, they are the authors of it, inasmuch as, out of their own spiritual world, they failed to bequeath to the workers anything but what must seem to the workers “ideology.”What gives to the present social movement its essential stamp, is not the demand for a change of conditions in the life of one class of men,—although that is the natural sign of it. Rather,it is the manner in which this demand is translated by this class from a thought-impulse into actual reality. Consider the facts impartially from this point of view. One will find personswho aim at keeping in touch with labour tendencies in thought, smile at any talk of a spiritual movement proposing to contribute anything towards the solution of the social question. They dismiss it with a smile, as ideology, empty theory. From thought, from the mere life of the spirit, there is nothing, they feel certain, to be contributed to the burning social problems of the hour. And yet, when one looks at the matter more closely, it is forced upon one, that the very nerve, the very root-impulse of the modern movement,—especially as a working-class movement,—does not lie in the things about which the modern worker talks, but inthoughts. The modern working-class movement has sprung, as perhaps no other similar movement in the world before it,out of thoughts. When studied more closely, it shews this in a most marked degree. I am not throwing this out as anaperçu, the result of long pondering over the social movement. If I may venture to introduce a personal remark I was for years lecturerat a working-man’s institute, giving instruction to working men in a wide variety of subjects; and I think that it taught me what is living and stirring in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. And from this starting point, I had occasion to go on, and follow up the tendencies at work in the various trades unions and different callings. I think I may say, that I am not approaching the subject merely from theoretical considerations, but am putting into words the results arrived at through actual living experience.Anyone,—only, unfortunately, so few of the leading intellectuals are in this position,—but anyone, who has learnt to know the modern labour movement where it was carried on by the workers themselves, knows how remarkable a feature it is in it, and how fraught with significance, that a certaintrend of thoughthas laid intense hold on the souls of large numbers of men. What makes it at the present moment hard to adopt any line as regards the social conundrums that present themselves, is thatthere is so little possibility of an understanding between the different classes. It is so hard for the middle-class to-day to put themselves into the soul of the worker,—so hard for them to understand how the worker’s still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx,—which, in its whole mode of conception, no matter how one regards its substance, measures the requirements of human thought by such a lofty standard. One man may agree with Karl Marx’s intellectual system,—another may refute it; and the arguments on either side may appear equally good. In some points it was revised, after the death of Marx and his friend Engels, by those who came later and saw social life under a different aspect from these leaders. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. It is not this that seems to me the significant thing in the modern working-class movement. The thing that to me seems significant above all others is, that it should be a fact, thatthe most powerfulimpulse at work in the labour world is a thought-system. One may go so far as to put it thus:—No practical movement, no movement that was altogether a movement of practical life, making the most matter-of-fact demands of every-day humanity, has ever before rested so almost entirely on a basis of thought alone, as the present working-class movement does. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind to take up its stand entirely on a scientific basis. One must however see this fact in its proper light. If one considers everything that the modern worker has consciously to say about his own views and purposes and sentiments, it does not seem to one, from a deeper observation of life, to be by any means the thing of main importance. What impresses itself as of real importance is, that what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the soul’s life,—thethought-basis, from which life takes its tone,—has been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole man turns. What has thus becomean inward reality in the worker is, however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This is a fact that one must clearly recognise in the human evolution of recent years, together with all that it involves,—otherwise it is impossible to understand the worker’s views of life and the way those, who hold these views, set about realising them in practice.From the picture drawn of the worker’s spiritual life in the preceding pages, it will be clear that the main features of this spiritual life must occupy the first place in any description of the working-class social movement in its true form. For it is essential to the worker’s way of feeling the causes of his unsatisfactory social condition and endeavoring to remove them, that both the feeling and the endeavour take the direction given them by his spirituallife. And yet, at present, he can only reject with contempt or anger the notion, that in the spiritual foundations of the social movement there is something that presents a remarkable driving force. How should he recognise in spiritual life a force able to bear him along, when he is bound to feel it as ideology? One cannot look to a spiritual life, that one feels as ideology, to open up the way out of a social situation, which one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of his thought has turned not only science, but religion, art, morality, and right also for the modern worker into so many constituent parts of human ideology. Behind these branches of the spiritual life he sees nothing of the workings of an actual reality, which finds its way into his own existence, and can contribute something to material life. To him, these things are only the reflected shine, or mirrored image of the material life. Whatever reflex influence they may have on the shaping of this material life,—whether roundabout, through the conceptionsof men’s brains, or through being taken up into the impulses of the will, yet, originally, they arise out of the material life itself as ideologic emanations from it. These of themselves can certainly yield nothing that will conduce to the removal of social difficulties. Only out of the sphere of material processes themselves can anything arise that will lead to the desired end.Modern spiritual life has been passed on from the leading classes of mankind to the working population in a form which prevents the latter from being aware of the force that dwells in it. This fact above all must be understood, when considering what are the forces that can help towards the solution of the social question. Should it continue to exert its present influence, then mankind’s spiritual life must see itself doomed to impotence before the social demands of our day and the time to come. Its impotence is in fact an article of faith with a large part of the working-class, and openly pressed in Marxism and similar creeds. “Modern economic life”—they say—“has evolved out of its earlier forms the present capitalistic one. This evolutionary process has brought the workers into an unendurable situation as regards capital. But evolution will not stop here, it will go on, and kill capitalism through the forces at work in capitalism itself and from the death of capitalism will spring the emancipation of the workers.” Later socialist thinkers have divested this creed of the fatalistic character it had assumed amongst a certain school of Marxists. But even so its essential feature remains, and shews itself in this way:—that it wouldnotoccur to anyone, who wishes to be a true socialist to-day, to say: “If we discover anywhere a life of the soul, having its rise in the forces of the age, rooted in a spiritual reality, and able to sustain the whole man,—then such a soul life as this could radiate the power needed as a motor-force for the social movement.” The man of to-day, who is obliged to lead the life of a worker, can cherish no such expectation from the spiritual life of the day; and this it is whichgives the key-note to his soul. He needs a spiritual life from which power can come,—power to give his soul the sense of his human worth. For when the capitalist economic order of recent times caught him up into its machinery, the man himself, with all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven for recourse to some such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which the leading classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. Running through all the demands of the modern working-class, is this longing for some link with the spiritual life, other than the present form of society can give; and this is what gives the directing impetus in the social movement to-day. This fact however is one that is rightly understood neither outside nor inside the working-class. Those outside the working-class do not suffer from the ideologic cast of modern spiritual life, which is of their own making. Those who are inside the working-class do suffer; but the very ideologic character of their inherited spiritual lifehas robbed them of all belief in the power of spiritual possessions, as such, to sustain and support them. On a right insight into this fact depends the discovery of a path out of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen. The path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen with the new form of industrial economy under the influence of the leading classes. The strength to open it must be achieved.People’s thoughts in this respect will undergo a complete change, when once they come really to feel the full weight of this fact: That, in a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideologic role, common social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. What ails the body social to-day, is impotence of the spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once the fact is acknowledged, there will then be a basis on which to develope the kind of thinking needed for the social movement.At present, the worker thinks that he has struck a main force in his soul, when he talks about his “class-consciousness.” But the truth is, that ever since he was caught up into the capitalist economic machine he has been searching for a spiritual life that could sustain his soul and give him a “human-consciousness,”—a consciousness of his worth as man,—which there is no possibility of developing with a spiritual life that is felt as ideology. This “human-consciousness”—was what he was seeking. He could not find it; and so he replaced it with “class-consciousness”born of the economic life. His eyes are rivetted upon the economic life alone, as though some overpowering suggestive influence held them there. And he no longer believes that elsewhere, in the spirit or in the soul, there can be anywhere a latent force capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in the social movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic life, devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state of things,which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. Thus he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of economic life alone. He has been forced to the conviction, that with the mere transformation of economic life all those ills would disappear, that have been brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and through the individual employer’s powerlessness to do justice to the claims of human self-respect in the employee. And so the modern worker was led on to believe, that the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of means of production into a communal concern, or into actual communal property. This conviction is due to people’s eyes having been removed, as it were, from everything belonging to soul and spirit, and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.Hence all the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern worker believes, that industrial economy, the economic life itself, will of necessity evolve allthat will ultimately give him his rights as man. These rights of man in full are what he is fighting for. And yet, in the heart of the fight something different makes its appearance,—something which never could be an outcome of the economic life alone. It is a significant thing, which speaks most forcibly, that here, right at the centre of the many forms which the social question assumes under the needs of human life to-day, there is something that seems, in men’s belief, to proceed out of economic life, which, however, never could proceed from economic life alone,—something, that lies rather in the direct line of evolution; leading up through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labour. The circulation of commodities, of money, the system of capital, property-ownership, the land system, these may have taken no matter what form under modern life; but at the heart of modern life something else has taken place, never distinctly expressed, not consciously felt even by the modern worker,but which is the fundamental force actuating all his social purpose. It is this:—The modern capitalist system of economy recognises, at bottom, nothing butcommoditieswithin its own province. It understands the creation of commodity-values as a process in the body economic. And in the capitalistic processes of the modern age something has been turned into a commodity, which the worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity.If it were only recognised what a fundamental force this is in the social movement amongst the modern workers: this loathing that the modern worker feels at being forced to barter his labour-power to the employer, as goods are bartered in the market,—loathing at seeing his personal labour-power play part as a factor in the supply and demand of the labour-market, just as the goods in the market are subject to supply and demand. When once people become aware what this loathing of the “labour-commodity” means for the modern social movement, when once theystraightly and honestly recognise, that the thing at work there is not even emphatically and drastically enough expressed in socialist doctrines,—then they will have discovered the second of the two impulses which are making the social question to-day so urgent, one may indeed say so burning,—the first being that spiritual life that is felt as an ideology.In old days there were slaves. The entire man was sold as a commodity. Rather less of the man, but still a portion of the human-being himself was incorporated in the economic process by serfdom. To-day, capitalism is the power, through which still a remnant of the human-being,—his labour-power,—is stamped with the character of a commodity. I am not saying, that this fact has remained unnoticed. On the contrary, it is a fact which in social life to-day is recognised as a fundamental one, and which is felt to be something that plays a very important part in the modern social movement. But people in studying it keep their attention solely fixed on economiclife. They make the question of the nature of a commodity solely an economic one. They look to economic life itself for the forces that shall bring about conditions, under which the worker shall no longer feel that his labour-power is playing a part unworthy of him in the body social. They see, how the modern form of industrial economy came about historically in the recent evolution of mankind. They see too, how it gave the commodity character to human labour-power. What they do not see, is, that it is a necessity inherent in economic life, that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity. Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labour-power of its commodity character, unless one can find a way of separating it out from the economic process. It is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give it a shape in which human labour may come by its rights inside that process itself. What one must endeavor, is to finda way of separating labour-power out from the economic process, and bringing it undersocialforces that will do away with its commodity character. The worker sets his desire upon some arrangement of economic life, where his labour-power shall find a fitting place; not seeing, that the commodity character of his labour is inherently and essentially due to his being bound up in the economic processes as part and parcel of them. Being obliged to surrender his labour-power to the economic processes, the whole man himself is caught up into them. So long as the economic system has the regulating of labour-power, it will go on consuming labour-power just as it consumes commodities,—in the manner that is most useful to its purposes. It is as though the power of economic life hypnotised people, so that they can look at nothing except what is going on inside it. They may look for ever in this direction without discovering how labour-power can escape being a commodity. Some other form of industrial economy will onlymake labour-power a commodity in some other manner. Thelabourquestion cannot find place in its true shape as part of thesocialquestion, until it is recognised that the considerations of economic life which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of commodities, are not such whose competence should be extended to human labour-power.New age thought has not learned to distinguish the totally different fashions in which the two things enter into economic life: i.e., on the one hand, labour-power, which is intimately bound up with the human-being himself; and, on the other hand, those things that proceed from another source and are dissociated from the human-being, and which circulate along those paths that all commodities must take from their production to their consumption. Sound thinking on these lines will shew both the true form of the labour-power question, and the place that economic life must occupy in a healthily constituted society.From this, it is obvious that the “social question” will divide itself into three distinct questions. The first is the question of a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social; the second, the consideration of the position of labour-power, and the right way to incorporate it in the life of the community. Thirdly, it will be possible to deduce the proper place and function of economic life.

I.The True Shape of the Social Question, As Shewn in the Life of Modern ManDoes not the modern social movement stand revealed by the great catastrophe of the war, demonstrating in actualfactshow inadequate thethoughtswere, which for years have been supposed sufficient to an understanding of the working-class movement and its purport?It is a question forced upon us by the demands of the workers and all that these involve,—demands which formerly were kept in suppression, but which at the present time are forcing their way to the surface of life. The powers that were instrumental in suppression are partially destroyed; and the position they took up towardsthe forces of social growth in a large part of mankind is one that nobody can wish to maintain, who does not totally fail to recognise how indestructible such impulses of human nature are.The greatest illusions in respect to these social forces have been harboured by persons, whose situation in life gave them the power, by word and voice, either to assist or to check those influences in European life, which, in 1914, were rushing us into the catastrophe of war. These persons actually believed, that a military victory for their country would hush the mutterings of the social storm. They have since been obliged to recognise, that it was the consequences of their own attitude that first brought these social tendencies fully to light. Indeed, the present catastrophe,—which is the catastrophe of mankind,—has shewn itself to be the very event, through which, historically, these tendencies gained the opportunity to make themselves felt in their full force. During these last fateful years, both the leading persons and theleading classes have been constantly obliged to tune their own behaviour to the note sounded in socialist circles. Could they have disregarded the tone of these circles, they would often gladly have acted differently. And the effects of this live on in the form which events are taking to-day.And now the thing, which for years past has been drawing on in mankind’s life-evolution, preparing its way before it, has arrived at a decisive stage,—and now comes the tragedy: The facts are with us in all their ripeness, but the thoughts that came up with the growth of the facts are no match for them. There are many persons who trained their thoughts on the lines of the growing process, hoping thereby to serve the social ideal which they recognised in it; and these persons find themselves to-day practically powerless before the problems which the accomplished facts present, and on which the destinies of mankind hang. A good many of these persons, it is true, still believe that the thingsthey have so long thought necessary to the remodelling of human life will now be realised, and will then prove powerful enough to give these facts a possible turn and meet their requirements. One may dismiss the opinion of those, who, even now, are still under the delusion, that it must be possible to maintain the old scheme of things against the new demands that are being urged by a large part of mankind. We may confine ourselves to examining what is going on in the wills of those people who are convinced that a remodelling of social life is necessary. Even so, we shall be forced to own to ourselves, that party shibboleths go wandering up and down amongst us like the dessicated corpses of once animate creeds,—everywhere flouted and set at naught by the evolution of facts. The facts call for decisions, for which the creeds of the old parties are all unprepared. These parties certainly evolved along with the facts,—but they, and their habits of thought, have not kept pace with the facts. One may perhapsventure without presumption to hold,—in the face of still common opinion,—that the course of events throughout the world at the present time bears out what has just been said. One may draw the conclusion, that this is just the favorable moment to attempt to point out something, which, in its true character, is foreign even to those who are expert thinkers among the parties and persons belonging to the various schools of social thought. For it may well be, that the tragedy that reveals itself in all these attempts to solve the social question, arises precisely from the real purport of the working-class struggle having been misunderstood,—misunderstood even by those who, themselves with all their opinions, are the outcome of this struggle. For men by no means always read their own purposes aright.There may therefore seem some justification for putting these questions: What is, in reality, the purport of the modern working-class movement? What is itswill? Does this, its will and purport, correspondto what is usually thought about it, either by the workers themselves, or by the non-workers? Does what is commonly thought about the “social problem” reveal that question in itstrue form? Or is an altogether different line of thought needed? This is a question which one cannot approach impartially unless, through personal destiny, one has in a position oneself to enter into the life of the modern worker’s soul,—especially amongst that section of the workers who have most to do with the form the social movement is taking in the present day.People have talked a great deal about the evolution of modern technical science and modern capitalism. They have studied the rise of the present working-class in the process of this evolution, and how the developments of economic life in recent times have led on to the workers’ present demands. There is much that is to the point in what has been said about all this. But there is one critical feature which is never touched on, as one cannot help seeing, ifone refuses to be hypnotised by the theory that it is external conditions that give the stamp to a man’s life. It is a feature obvious to anyone who keeps an unclouded insight for impulses of the soul that work from within outwards, out of hidden depths. It is quite true, that the worker’s demands have been evolved during the growth of modern technical science and modern capitalism; but a recognition of this fact affords no further clue whatever to the impulses that are actuating these demands, and which are in factpurely humanin character. Nor, till one penetrates to the heart of these impulses, will one get to the true form of the social question.There is a word in frequent use among the workers, which is of striking significance for anyone able to penetrate to the deeper-seated forces active in the human will. It is this: the modern worker has become “class-conscious.” He no longer follows, more or less instinctively and unconsciously, the swing of the classes outsidehis own. He knows himself one of a class apart, and is determined, that the relation, which public life establishes between his class and the other classes, shall be turned to good account for his own interests. And anyone, who has comprehension for the undercurrents of men’s souls, finds in the word “class-conscious,” as used by the modern worker, a clue to very important facts in the worker’s view of life,—in particular amongst those classes of workers, whose life is cast amidst modern technical industry and modern capitalism. What will above all arrest his attention is, how strongly the worker’s soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on human destinies. Here one touches on a circumstance about which many people, who only thinkaboutthe workers, notwiththem, have very hazy notions,—notions indeed, which are downright mischievous, in view of the serious events taking place at the present day. The view, that the “uneducated” working manhas had his head turned by Marxism, and by later labour writers of the Marxist school, and other things one hears of the same sort, will not conduce towards that understanding of the subject and its connection with the whole historic situation of the world, which is so peculiarly necessary at the present day. In expressing such a view, one only shews that one lacks the will to examine an essential feature of the present social movement. For it is an essential feature, that the working-class consciousness has thus become filled with concepts that take their stamp from thescientificevolution of recent times. This class-consciousness continues to be dominated by the note struck in Lassalle’s speech on “Science and the Workers.” Such things may appear unessential to many a man who reckons himself a “practical person”; but anyone, who means to arrive at a really fruitful insight into the modern labour movement,is bound to turn his attention to these things. In the demands put forward by the workers to-day, be they moderates orradicals, we have the expression, not, as many people imagine, of economic life that has—somehow—become metamorphosed into human impulse, we have the expression ofeconomic science, by which the working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the labour movement, with its scientific flavour and popular journalistic renderings. To deny this, is to shut one’s eyes to actual facts. And it is a fundamental fact, and one which determines the whole social situation at the present day, that everything which forms the subject of the worker’s “class-consciousness” is couched for him in concepts of a scientific kind. The individual working at his machine may be no matter how completely a stranger to science; yet those, who enlighten him as to his own position and to whom he listens, borrow their method of enlightenment from this same science.All the disquisitions about modern economic life, about the machine age and capitalism, may throw ever so instructive alight on the facts underlying the modern working-class movement; but the decisive light on the present social situation does not proceed directly from the fact, that the worker has been placed at the machine, that he has been harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. It proceeds from the other, different, fact, that his class-consciousness has been filled with a quite definite kind ofthought, shaped at the machine and under the influence of the capitalist order of economy. Possibly the habits of thought peculiar to the present day may prevent many people from realising the full bearing of this circumstance, and may cause them to regard the stress laid upon it as a mere dialectic play upon terms. One can only say in reply: So much the worse for any prospect of a successful intervention in social life to-day by people who are unable to distinguish essentials. Anyone, who wants to understand the working-class movement, must first and foremost know, how the workerthinks. For the working-class movement,from its moderate efforts at reform to its most sweeping extravagances, is not created by “forces outside man,” by “economic impulses,” but byhuman-beings, by their mental conceptions and by the impulses of their will.Not in what capitalism and the machine have implanted in the worker’s consciousness, not here lie the ideas and will-forces, that give its character to the present social movement. This movement turned in the direction of modern science to find its fount of thought, because capitalism and the machine could give the worker no substance with which to content his soul as a human being. Such substance and content was afforded to the medieval craftsman by his craft. In the kind of connection which the medieval handworker felt between himself, as a human being, and his craft, there was something that shewed life within the whole human confraternity in a light which made it seem, for his individual consciousness, worth living. Whatever he might be doing, he was ableto regard it in such a way, that he seemed through it to be realising what he desired, as a “man,” to be. Tending a machine under the capitalist scheme of things the man was thrown back upon himself, upon his own inner life, whenever he tried to find some principle on which to base a general outlook on Man and one’s consciousness of what as a “man” one is. Technical industry, capitalism,—these could contribute nothing towards such an outlook. And so it came to pass, that the working-class consciousness took the bent towards the scientific type of thought. The direct human link with actual life was lost.Now this occurred just at a time, when the leading classes of mankind were working towards a scientific mode of thought, which in itself no longer possessed the spiritual energy to content man’s consciousness in every aspect and guide it along all the directions of its wants. The old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the spiritual complex of existence. Modern science views him as a natural objectamidst a purely natural order of things. This science is not felt as a stream flowing from a spiritual world into the soul of man, and on which man as a soul is buoyed and upborne. Whatever one’s opinion may be as to the relation of the religious impulses, and kindred things, to the scientific mode of thought of recent times, yet one must admit, if one considers historic evolution impartially, that the scientific conception has developed out of the religious one. But the old conceptions of the universe, that rested deep down on religious foundations, lacked power to impart their soul-bearing force to the newer form of scientific conception. They withdrew beyond its range, and lived on, contenting their consciousness with things in which the souls of the workers could find no resource. For the leading classes, this inner world of consciousness might still have a certain value. In some form or other it was bound up with their own position in life. They sought for no new substance for their consciousness, because they wereable to keep a hold on the old one, that had been handed down to them through actual life. But the modern worker was torn out of all his old setting in life. He was the man whose life had been put on a totally new basis. For him, when the old bases of life were withdrawn, there disappeared at the same time all possibility of drawing from the old spiritual springs. These lay far off in regions to which he was now become a stranger. Contemporaneous with modern technical science and modern capitalism,—in such a sense as one can speak of great worldstreams of history as contemporaneous,—there grew up the modern scientific conception of the world. To this the trust, the faith, of the modern worker turned. It was here he sought the new substance that he needed to content his inner consciousness. But the working-class and the leading classes were differently situated with regard to their scientific outlook. The leading classes felt no necessity for making the scientific mode of conception into a gospelof life, for the support of their souls. No matter how thoroughly they might have permeated themselves with the scientific conception of a natural order of things, in which a direct chain of causality leads up from the lowest animals to man, this mode of conception remained nevertheless a merely theoretic persuasion. It never stirred their feelings, and impelled them to take life through and through in a way befitting such a persuasion. Take naturalists such as Vogt and the popular writer, Buechner; they were unquestionably permeated with the scientific mode of conception; but, alongside this, there was something else at work in their souls which kept their lives interwoven with a whole complex of circumstances, such as can those whose only intelligible justification can be the belief in a spiritual order of the world. Putting aside all prejudice, let us just imagine, how differently the scientific outlook affects a man whose personal existence is anchored in such a complex, from the modern artisan, who, in the few eveninghours that he has free from work, hears the labour leader get up and address him in this fashion: “Science in our time has cured men of believing that they have their origin in a spiritual world. They have learnt better, and know now, that in the far ages, long ago, they climbed about on trees like any vulgar monkey. Science has taught them too, that they were all alike in their origin, and that it was a purely natural one.” It was a science that turned on such thoughts as these, which met the worker when he was looking for a substance to fill his soul and give him a sense of his own place as man in the life of the universe. He took the scientific outlook on the world in thorough earnest, and drew from it his own practical conclusions for life. The technical, capitalistic age laid hold of him differently from a member of the leading classes. The latter had his place in an order of life, which still bore the shape once given it by soul-sustaining forces; it was all to his interest to fit the acquisitions of the new age into this setting.But the worker, in his soul, was torn loose from this order of life. It was not capable of giving him one emotion that could illumine and fill his own life with anything of human worth. There was one thing only, which could give the worker any sense of what a “man” is, one thing only that seemed to have emerged from the old order of life endowed with the power that awakens faith, and that was—scientific thought. It may arouse a smile in some of those who read this, to be told of the “scientific” character of the worker’s conceptions. Let them smile, who can only think of the scientific habit of mind as something that is acquired by many years of application on the benches of “educational institutes,” and then contrast this sort of “science” with what fills the mind of the worker who has “never learnt anything.” What is for him a smiling matter, are facts of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. And these facts shew, that many a very learned manlivesunscientifically, whereas the unlearned workerbrings his whole view of life into line with that scientific learning, of which very likely nothing has fallen to his share. The educated man has made a place for science,—it has a pigeon-hole of its own in the recesses of his soul. But he himself has his place in a network of circumstances in actual life, and it is these which give the direction to his feelings. His feeling is not directed by his science. The worker, through the very conditions of his life, is led to bring his conception of existence into unison with thegeneral toneof this science. He may be very far from what the other classes call “scientific,” yet his life’s course is charted by the scientific lines of conception. For the other classes, some religious or aesthetic, some general spiritual principle is the determining basis;—for him, Science is turned into the creed of life,—even though often it may be science filtered away to its last little shallows and driblets of thought. Many a member of the “foremost” classes feels himself to be “enlightened” in religion, a “free-thinker.” Nodoubt his scientific convictions influence his conceptions; but in his feelings still throb the forgotten remnants of a traditional creed of life. What the scientific type of thought has not brought down from the old order, is the consciousness of being, as a spiritual type, rooted in a spiritual world. This was a peculiarity of the modern scientific outlook, which presented no difficulty to a member of the leading classes. Life to him was filled by old traditions. For the worker it was otherwise; his new situation in life drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over from the ruling classes as heritage the scientific mode of thought, and made this the basis of his consciousness of the life and being of man. But this “spiritual possession,” with which he filled his soul, knew nothing of its derivation from an actual life of the spirit. The only spiritual life, that the workers could take over from the ruling classes, was of a sort that denied its spiritual origin.I well know, how these thoughts willaffect people outside as well as inside the working-class, who, believing themselves to have a thorough practical acquaintance with life, regard the view here expressed as quite remote from realities. The language of actual facts, as spoken by the whole state of the world to-day, will more and more prove this belief of theirs to be a delusion. For anyone able to look at these facts without prejudice, it will be plain, that a view of life, which never gets beyond their external aspect, becomes ultimately inaccessible to any conceptions save such as have lost all touch with facts. Ruling thought has clung on so long in this “practical” way to facts,—that the thoughts themselves have ended by bearing no resemblance whatever to the facts. The present world-catastrophe might have taught many people a lesson in this respect. What did they think it possible might happen? And what really did happen? Is it to be the same with their thoughts about social problems?I know too, how someone who professesworking-class views will feel about what has been said, and can hear him saying: “Just like the rest of them! trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off on to lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois sort.” With his creed, he does not see how fate has brought him into this working-class life, and how he is trying to find his way in it with a type of thought inherited from the ruling-classes. Helivesas a working-man but hethinksas a bourgeois. The new age is making it necessary to learn not only a new way of life, but a new way of thought also. The scientific mode of conception can only become substantial and life-supporting, when it evolves, in its own fashion, a power to content the whole of human life in all its aspects, such as the old conceptions of life once evolved in their way.This points the path for the discovery in its true form of one factor in the modern labour movement. And having travelled it to the end, the worker’s soul utters this cry of conviction: “I am strivingafter spiritual life. Yet this spiritual life isideology, is merely man’s own reflection of what is going on in the world outside, it does not come to us from a spiritual world of its own.” In the transition to the new age, the old spiritual life had turned to something which, for the working-class sense of life, is ideology. If one wants to understand the mood of soul amongst the workers, as it finds vent in the social demands of the present day, one must be able to grasp the full possible effects of the theory that spiritual life is ideology. It may be retorted: “What does the average working-man know of any such theory? it is only a will-o’-the-wisp in the brains of their more or less educated leaders.” But anyone who says so is talking wide of life, and his doings in actual life will be wide of it too. He simply does not know, what has been going on in the life of the working-class during the last half century. He does not know the threads that are woven from the theory, that spiritual life is ideology, to the demands and actions of the out-and-outsocialist, whom he thinks so “ignorant”;—yes, and to the deeds too of those who “hatch revolution” out of the blind promptings of the life within them.Herein lies the tragedy overshadowing all our interpretations of the social demands of the day, that in so many circles there is no sense of what is forcing its way up to the surface out of the souls of the great masses of mankind,—that people cannot turn their eyes to what is actually taking place in men’s inner life. The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker setting forth his demands; and this is what he hears:—“Nothing short of communalising the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest conception, of how his own class, in the transition from the old age to the new, not only summoned the worker to labour at means of production that were not his, but failed even to give him anything to satisfy and sustain his soul in his labour. People, who seeand act wide of the mark in this way, may say:—“But, after all, the working-man only wants to better his position in life and put himself on a level with the upper classes; where do the needs of his soul come in?” The working-man himself may even declare:—“I am not asking the other classes for anything for my soul; all I want, is to prevent them exploiting me any longer. I mean to put an end to existing classdistinctions.” Talk of this kind does not touch the essence of the social question. It reveals nothing of itstrue form. For, had the working population inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance, then they would have had a different consciousness within their souls, one which would have voiced their social demands in quite a different fashion from the modern workers, who can see in the spiritual life, as they have received it, merely an ideology. The workers, as a class, are convinced of the ideologic character of spiritual life; but the conviction renders them more and more unhappy. They arenot definitely conscious of this unhappiness in their souls, but they suffer acutely from it, and it far outweighs, in its significance for the social question to-day, all demands for an improvement in external conditions,—justifiable as these demands are too in their own way.The ruling classes do not recognise, that they are themselves the authors of that attitude of mind, which now confronts them militant in the labour-world. And yet, they are the authors of it, inasmuch as, out of their own spiritual world, they failed to bequeath to the workers anything but what must seem to the workers “ideology.”What gives to the present social movement its essential stamp, is not the demand for a change of conditions in the life of one class of men,—although that is the natural sign of it. Rather,it is the manner in which this demand is translated by this class from a thought-impulse into actual reality. Consider the facts impartially from this point of view. One will find personswho aim at keeping in touch with labour tendencies in thought, smile at any talk of a spiritual movement proposing to contribute anything towards the solution of the social question. They dismiss it with a smile, as ideology, empty theory. From thought, from the mere life of the spirit, there is nothing, they feel certain, to be contributed to the burning social problems of the hour. And yet, when one looks at the matter more closely, it is forced upon one, that the very nerve, the very root-impulse of the modern movement,—especially as a working-class movement,—does not lie in the things about which the modern worker talks, but inthoughts. The modern working-class movement has sprung, as perhaps no other similar movement in the world before it,out of thoughts. When studied more closely, it shews this in a most marked degree. I am not throwing this out as anaperçu, the result of long pondering over the social movement. If I may venture to introduce a personal remark I was for years lecturerat a working-man’s institute, giving instruction to working men in a wide variety of subjects; and I think that it taught me what is living and stirring in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. And from this starting point, I had occasion to go on, and follow up the tendencies at work in the various trades unions and different callings. I think I may say, that I am not approaching the subject merely from theoretical considerations, but am putting into words the results arrived at through actual living experience.Anyone,—only, unfortunately, so few of the leading intellectuals are in this position,—but anyone, who has learnt to know the modern labour movement where it was carried on by the workers themselves, knows how remarkable a feature it is in it, and how fraught with significance, that a certaintrend of thoughthas laid intense hold on the souls of large numbers of men. What makes it at the present moment hard to adopt any line as regards the social conundrums that present themselves, is thatthere is so little possibility of an understanding between the different classes. It is so hard for the middle-class to-day to put themselves into the soul of the worker,—so hard for them to understand how the worker’s still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx,—which, in its whole mode of conception, no matter how one regards its substance, measures the requirements of human thought by such a lofty standard. One man may agree with Karl Marx’s intellectual system,—another may refute it; and the arguments on either side may appear equally good. In some points it was revised, after the death of Marx and his friend Engels, by those who came later and saw social life under a different aspect from these leaders. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. It is not this that seems to me the significant thing in the modern working-class movement. The thing that to me seems significant above all others is, that it should be a fact, thatthe most powerfulimpulse at work in the labour world is a thought-system. One may go so far as to put it thus:—No practical movement, no movement that was altogether a movement of practical life, making the most matter-of-fact demands of every-day humanity, has ever before rested so almost entirely on a basis of thought alone, as the present working-class movement does. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind to take up its stand entirely on a scientific basis. One must however see this fact in its proper light. If one considers everything that the modern worker has consciously to say about his own views and purposes and sentiments, it does not seem to one, from a deeper observation of life, to be by any means the thing of main importance. What impresses itself as of real importance is, that what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the soul’s life,—thethought-basis, from which life takes its tone,—has been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole man turns. What has thus becomean inward reality in the worker is, however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This is a fact that one must clearly recognise in the human evolution of recent years, together with all that it involves,—otherwise it is impossible to understand the worker’s views of life and the way those, who hold these views, set about realising them in practice.From the picture drawn of the worker’s spiritual life in the preceding pages, it will be clear that the main features of this spiritual life must occupy the first place in any description of the working-class social movement in its true form. For it is essential to the worker’s way of feeling the causes of his unsatisfactory social condition and endeavoring to remove them, that both the feeling and the endeavour take the direction given them by his spirituallife. And yet, at present, he can only reject with contempt or anger the notion, that in the spiritual foundations of the social movement there is something that presents a remarkable driving force. How should he recognise in spiritual life a force able to bear him along, when he is bound to feel it as ideology? One cannot look to a spiritual life, that one feels as ideology, to open up the way out of a social situation, which one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of his thought has turned not only science, but religion, art, morality, and right also for the modern worker into so many constituent parts of human ideology. Behind these branches of the spiritual life he sees nothing of the workings of an actual reality, which finds its way into his own existence, and can contribute something to material life. To him, these things are only the reflected shine, or mirrored image of the material life. Whatever reflex influence they may have on the shaping of this material life,—whether roundabout, through the conceptionsof men’s brains, or through being taken up into the impulses of the will, yet, originally, they arise out of the material life itself as ideologic emanations from it. These of themselves can certainly yield nothing that will conduce to the removal of social difficulties. Only out of the sphere of material processes themselves can anything arise that will lead to the desired end.Modern spiritual life has been passed on from the leading classes of mankind to the working population in a form which prevents the latter from being aware of the force that dwells in it. This fact above all must be understood, when considering what are the forces that can help towards the solution of the social question. Should it continue to exert its present influence, then mankind’s spiritual life must see itself doomed to impotence before the social demands of our day and the time to come. Its impotence is in fact an article of faith with a large part of the working-class, and openly pressed in Marxism and similar creeds. “Modern economic life”—they say—“has evolved out of its earlier forms the present capitalistic one. This evolutionary process has brought the workers into an unendurable situation as regards capital. But evolution will not stop here, it will go on, and kill capitalism through the forces at work in capitalism itself and from the death of capitalism will spring the emancipation of the workers.” Later socialist thinkers have divested this creed of the fatalistic character it had assumed amongst a certain school of Marxists. But even so its essential feature remains, and shews itself in this way:—that it wouldnotoccur to anyone, who wishes to be a true socialist to-day, to say: “If we discover anywhere a life of the soul, having its rise in the forces of the age, rooted in a spiritual reality, and able to sustain the whole man,—then such a soul life as this could radiate the power needed as a motor-force for the social movement.” The man of to-day, who is obliged to lead the life of a worker, can cherish no such expectation from the spiritual life of the day; and this it is whichgives the key-note to his soul. He needs a spiritual life from which power can come,—power to give his soul the sense of his human worth. For when the capitalist economic order of recent times caught him up into its machinery, the man himself, with all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven for recourse to some such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which the leading classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. Running through all the demands of the modern working-class, is this longing for some link with the spiritual life, other than the present form of society can give; and this is what gives the directing impetus in the social movement to-day. This fact however is one that is rightly understood neither outside nor inside the working-class. Those outside the working-class do not suffer from the ideologic cast of modern spiritual life, which is of their own making. Those who are inside the working-class do suffer; but the very ideologic character of their inherited spiritual lifehas robbed them of all belief in the power of spiritual possessions, as such, to sustain and support them. On a right insight into this fact depends the discovery of a path out of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen. The path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen with the new form of industrial economy under the influence of the leading classes. The strength to open it must be achieved.People’s thoughts in this respect will undergo a complete change, when once they come really to feel the full weight of this fact: That, in a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideologic role, common social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. What ails the body social to-day, is impotence of the spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once the fact is acknowledged, there will then be a basis on which to develope the kind of thinking needed for the social movement.At present, the worker thinks that he has struck a main force in his soul, when he talks about his “class-consciousness.” But the truth is, that ever since he was caught up into the capitalist economic machine he has been searching for a spiritual life that could sustain his soul and give him a “human-consciousness,”—a consciousness of his worth as man,—which there is no possibility of developing with a spiritual life that is felt as ideology. This “human-consciousness”—was what he was seeking. He could not find it; and so he replaced it with “class-consciousness”born of the economic life. His eyes are rivetted upon the economic life alone, as though some overpowering suggestive influence held them there. And he no longer believes that elsewhere, in the spirit or in the soul, there can be anywhere a latent force capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in the social movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic life, devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state of things,which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. Thus he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of economic life alone. He has been forced to the conviction, that with the mere transformation of economic life all those ills would disappear, that have been brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and through the individual employer’s powerlessness to do justice to the claims of human self-respect in the employee. And so the modern worker was led on to believe, that the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of means of production into a communal concern, or into actual communal property. This conviction is due to people’s eyes having been removed, as it were, from everything belonging to soul and spirit, and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.Hence all the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern worker believes, that industrial economy, the economic life itself, will of necessity evolve allthat will ultimately give him his rights as man. These rights of man in full are what he is fighting for. And yet, in the heart of the fight something different makes its appearance,—something which never could be an outcome of the economic life alone. It is a significant thing, which speaks most forcibly, that here, right at the centre of the many forms which the social question assumes under the needs of human life to-day, there is something that seems, in men’s belief, to proceed out of economic life, which, however, never could proceed from economic life alone,—something, that lies rather in the direct line of evolution; leading up through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labour. The circulation of commodities, of money, the system of capital, property-ownership, the land system, these may have taken no matter what form under modern life; but at the heart of modern life something else has taken place, never distinctly expressed, not consciously felt even by the modern worker,but which is the fundamental force actuating all his social purpose. It is this:—The modern capitalist system of economy recognises, at bottom, nothing butcommoditieswithin its own province. It understands the creation of commodity-values as a process in the body economic. And in the capitalistic processes of the modern age something has been turned into a commodity, which the worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity.If it were only recognised what a fundamental force this is in the social movement amongst the modern workers: this loathing that the modern worker feels at being forced to barter his labour-power to the employer, as goods are bartered in the market,—loathing at seeing his personal labour-power play part as a factor in the supply and demand of the labour-market, just as the goods in the market are subject to supply and demand. When once people become aware what this loathing of the “labour-commodity” means for the modern social movement, when once theystraightly and honestly recognise, that the thing at work there is not even emphatically and drastically enough expressed in socialist doctrines,—then they will have discovered the second of the two impulses which are making the social question to-day so urgent, one may indeed say so burning,—the first being that spiritual life that is felt as an ideology.In old days there were slaves. The entire man was sold as a commodity. Rather less of the man, but still a portion of the human-being himself was incorporated in the economic process by serfdom. To-day, capitalism is the power, through which still a remnant of the human-being,—his labour-power,—is stamped with the character of a commodity. I am not saying, that this fact has remained unnoticed. On the contrary, it is a fact which in social life to-day is recognised as a fundamental one, and which is felt to be something that plays a very important part in the modern social movement. But people in studying it keep their attention solely fixed on economiclife. They make the question of the nature of a commodity solely an economic one. They look to economic life itself for the forces that shall bring about conditions, under which the worker shall no longer feel that his labour-power is playing a part unworthy of him in the body social. They see, how the modern form of industrial economy came about historically in the recent evolution of mankind. They see too, how it gave the commodity character to human labour-power. What they do not see, is, that it is a necessity inherent in economic life, that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity. Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labour-power of its commodity character, unless one can find a way of separating it out from the economic process. It is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give it a shape in which human labour may come by its rights inside that process itself. What one must endeavor, is to finda way of separating labour-power out from the economic process, and bringing it undersocialforces that will do away with its commodity character. The worker sets his desire upon some arrangement of economic life, where his labour-power shall find a fitting place; not seeing, that the commodity character of his labour is inherently and essentially due to his being bound up in the economic processes as part and parcel of them. Being obliged to surrender his labour-power to the economic processes, the whole man himself is caught up into them. So long as the economic system has the regulating of labour-power, it will go on consuming labour-power just as it consumes commodities,—in the manner that is most useful to its purposes. It is as though the power of economic life hypnotised people, so that they can look at nothing except what is going on inside it. They may look for ever in this direction without discovering how labour-power can escape being a commodity. Some other form of industrial economy will onlymake labour-power a commodity in some other manner. Thelabourquestion cannot find place in its true shape as part of thesocialquestion, until it is recognised that the considerations of economic life which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of commodities, are not such whose competence should be extended to human labour-power.New age thought has not learned to distinguish the totally different fashions in which the two things enter into economic life: i.e., on the one hand, labour-power, which is intimately bound up with the human-being himself; and, on the other hand, those things that proceed from another source and are dissociated from the human-being, and which circulate along those paths that all commodities must take from their production to their consumption. Sound thinking on these lines will shew both the true form of the labour-power question, and the place that economic life must occupy in a healthily constituted society.From this, it is obvious that the “social question” will divide itself into three distinct questions. The first is the question of a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social; the second, the consideration of the position of labour-power, and the right way to incorporate it in the life of the community. Thirdly, it will be possible to deduce the proper place and function of economic life.

I.The True Shape of the Social Question, As Shewn in the Life of Modern Man

Does not the modern social movement stand revealed by the great catastrophe of the war, demonstrating in actualfactshow inadequate thethoughtswere, which for years have been supposed sufficient to an understanding of the working-class movement and its purport?It is a question forced upon us by the demands of the workers and all that these involve,—demands which formerly were kept in suppression, but which at the present time are forcing their way to the surface of life. The powers that were instrumental in suppression are partially destroyed; and the position they took up towardsthe forces of social growth in a large part of mankind is one that nobody can wish to maintain, who does not totally fail to recognise how indestructible such impulses of human nature are.The greatest illusions in respect to these social forces have been harboured by persons, whose situation in life gave them the power, by word and voice, either to assist or to check those influences in European life, which, in 1914, were rushing us into the catastrophe of war. These persons actually believed, that a military victory for their country would hush the mutterings of the social storm. They have since been obliged to recognise, that it was the consequences of their own attitude that first brought these social tendencies fully to light. Indeed, the present catastrophe,—which is the catastrophe of mankind,—has shewn itself to be the very event, through which, historically, these tendencies gained the opportunity to make themselves felt in their full force. During these last fateful years, both the leading persons and theleading classes have been constantly obliged to tune their own behaviour to the note sounded in socialist circles. Could they have disregarded the tone of these circles, they would often gladly have acted differently. And the effects of this live on in the form which events are taking to-day.And now the thing, which for years past has been drawing on in mankind’s life-evolution, preparing its way before it, has arrived at a decisive stage,—and now comes the tragedy: The facts are with us in all their ripeness, but the thoughts that came up with the growth of the facts are no match for them. There are many persons who trained their thoughts on the lines of the growing process, hoping thereby to serve the social ideal which they recognised in it; and these persons find themselves to-day practically powerless before the problems which the accomplished facts present, and on which the destinies of mankind hang. A good many of these persons, it is true, still believe that the thingsthey have so long thought necessary to the remodelling of human life will now be realised, and will then prove powerful enough to give these facts a possible turn and meet their requirements. One may dismiss the opinion of those, who, even now, are still under the delusion, that it must be possible to maintain the old scheme of things against the new demands that are being urged by a large part of mankind. We may confine ourselves to examining what is going on in the wills of those people who are convinced that a remodelling of social life is necessary. Even so, we shall be forced to own to ourselves, that party shibboleths go wandering up and down amongst us like the dessicated corpses of once animate creeds,—everywhere flouted and set at naught by the evolution of facts. The facts call for decisions, for which the creeds of the old parties are all unprepared. These parties certainly evolved along with the facts,—but they, and their habits of thought, have not kept pace with the facts. One may perhapsventure without presumption to hold,—in the face of still common opinion,—that the course of events throughout the world at the present time bears out what has just been said. One may draw the conclusion, that this is just the favorable moment to attempt to point out something, which, in its true character, is foreign even to those who are expert thinkers among the parties and persons belonging to the various schools of social thought. For it may well be, that the tragedy that reveals itself in all these attempts to solve the social question, arises precisely from the real purport of the working-class struggle having been misunderstood,—misunderstood even by those who, themselves with all their opinions, are the outcome of this struggle. For men by no means always read their own purposes aright.There may therefore seem some justification for putting these questions: What is, in reality, the purport of the modern working-class movement? What is itswill? Does this, its will and purport, correspondto what is usually thought about it, either by the workers themselves, or by the non-workers? Does what is commonly thought about the “social problem” reveal that question in itstrue form? Or is an altogether different line of thought needed? This is a question which one cannot approach impartially unless, through personal destiny, one has in a position oneself to enter into the life of the modern worker’s soul,—especially amongst that section of the workers who have most to do with the form the social movement is taking in the present day.People have talked a great deal about the evolution of modern technical science and modern capitalism. They have studied the rise of the present working-class in the process of this evolution, and how the developments of economic life in recent times have led on to the workers’ present demands. There is much that is to the point in what has been said about all this. But there is one critical feature which is never touched on, as one cannot help seeing, ifone refuses to be hypnotised by the theory that it is external conditions that give the stamp to a man’s life. It is a feature obvious to anyone who keeps an unclouded insight for impulses of the soul that work from within outwards, out of hidden depths. It is quite true, that the worker’s demands have been evolved during the growth of modern technical science and modern capitalism; but a recognition of this fact affords no further clue whatever to the impulses that are actuating these demands, and which are in factpurely humanin character. Nor, till one penetrates to the heart of these impulses, will one get to the true form of the social question.There is a word in frequent use among the workers, which is of striking significance for anyone able to penetrate to the deeper-seated forces active in the human will. It is this: the modern worker has become “class-conscious.” He no longer follows, more or less instinctively and unconsciously, the swing of the classes outsidehis own. He knows himself one of a class apart, and is determined, that the relation, which public life establishes between his class and the other classes, shall be turned to good account for his own interests. And anyone, who has comprehension for the undercurrents of men’s souls, finds in the word “class-conscious,” as used by the modern worker, a clue to very important facts in the worker’s view of life,—in particular amongst those classes of workers, whose life is cast amidst modern technical industry and modern capitalism. What will above all arrest his attention is, how strongly the worker’s soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on human destinies. Here one touches on a circumstance about which many people, who only thinkaboutthe workers, notwiththem, have very hazy notions,—notions indeed, which are downright mischievous, in view of the serious events taking place at the present day. The view, that the “uneducated” working manhas had his head turned by Marxism, and by later labour writers of the Marxist school, and other things one hears of the same sort, will not conduce towards that understanding of the subject and its connection with the whole historic situation of the world, which is so peculiarly necessary at the present day. In expressing such a view, one only shews that one lacks the will to examine an essential feature of the present social movement. For it is an essential feature, that the working-class consciousness has thus become filled with concepts that take their stamp from thescientificevolution of recent times. This class-consciousness continues to be dominated by the note struck in Lassalle’s speech on “Science and the Workers.” Such things may appear unessential to many a man who reckons himself a “practical person”; but anyone, who means to arrive at a really fruitful insight into the modern labour movement,is bound to turn his attention to these things. In the demands put forward by the workers to-day, be they moderates orradicals, we have the expression, not, as many people imagine, of economic life that has—somehow—become metamorphosed into human impulse, we have the expression ofeconomic science, by which the working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the labour movement, with its scientific flavour and popular journalistic renderings. To deny this, is to shut one’s eyes to actual facts. And it is a fundamental fact, and one which determines the whole social situation at the present day, that everything which forms the subject of the worker’s “class-consciousness” is couched for him in concepts of a scientific kind. The individual working at his machine may be no matter how completely a stranger to science; yet those, who enlighten him as to his own position and to whom he listens, borrow their method of enlightenment from this same science.All the disquisitions about modern economic life, about the machine age and capitalism, may throw ever so instructive alight on the facts underlying the modern working-class movement; but the decisive light on the present social situation does not proceed directly from the fact, that the worker has been placed at the machine, that he has been harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. It proceeds from the other, different, fact, that his class-consciousness has been filled with a quite definite kind ofthought, shaped at the machine and under the influence of the capitalist order of economy. Possibly the habits of thought peculiar to the present day may prevent many people from realising the full bearing of this circumstance, and may cause them to regard the stress laid upon it as a mere dialectic play upon terms. One can only say in reply: So much the worse for any prospect of a successful intervention in social life to-day by people who are unable to distinguish essentials. Anyone, who wants to understand the working-class movement, must first and foremost know, how the workerthinks. For the working-class movement,from its moderate efforts at reform to its most sweeping extravagances, is not created by “forces outside man,” by “economic impulses,” but byhuman-beings, by their mental conceptions and by the impulses of their will.Not in what capitalism and the machine have implanted in the worker’s consciousness, not here lie the ideas and will-forces, that give its character to the present social movement. This movement turned in the direction of modern science to find its fount of thought, because capitalism and the machine could give the worker no substance with which to content his soul as a human being. Such substance and content was afforded to the medieval craftsman by his craft. In the kind of connection which the medieval handworker felt between himself, as a human being, and his craft, there was something that shewed life within the whole human confraternity in a light which made it seem, for his individual consciousness, worth living. Whatever he might be doing, he was ableto regard it in such a way, that he seemed through it to be realising what he desired, as a “man,” to be. Tending a machine under the capitalist scheme of things the man was thrown back upon himself, upon his own inner life, whenever he tried to find some principle on which to base a general outlook on Man and one’s consciousness of what as a “man” one is. Technical industry, capitalism,—these could contribute nothing towards such an outlook. And so it came to pass, that the working-class consciousness took the bent towards the scientific type of thought. The direct human link with actual life was lost.Now this occurred just at a time, when the leading classes of mankind were working towards a scientific mode of thought, which in itself no longer possessed the spiritual energy to content man’s consciousness in every aspect and guide it along all the directions of its wants. The old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the spiritual complex of existence. Modern science views him as a natural objectamidst a purely natural order of things. This science is not felt as a stream flowing from a spiritual world into the soul of man, and on which man as a soul is buoyed and upborne. Whatever one’s opinion may be as to the relation of the religious impulses, and kindred things, to the scientific mode of thought of recent times, yet one must admit, if one considers historic evolution impartially, that the scientific conception has developed out of the religious one. But the old conceptions of the universe, that rested deep down on religious foundations, lacked power to impart their soul-bearing force to the newer form of scientific conception. They withdrew beyond its range, and lived on, contenting their consciousness with things in which the souls of the workers could find no resource. For the leading classes, this inner world of consciousness might still have a certain value. In some form or other it was bound up with their own position in life. They sought for no new substance for their consciousness, because they wereable to keep a hold on the old one, that had been handed down to them through actual life. But the modern worker was torn out of all his old setting in life. He was the man whose life had been put on a totally new basis. For him, when the old bases of life were withdrawn, there disappeared at the same time all possibility of drawing from the old spiritual springs. These lay far off in regions to which he was now become a stranger. Contemporaneous with modern technical science and modern capitalism,—in such a sense as one can speak of great worldstreams of history as contemporaneous,—there grew up the modern scientific conception of the world. To this the trust, the faith, of the modern worker turned. It was here he sought the new substance that he needed to content his inner consciousness. But the working-class and the leading classes were differently situated with regard to their scientific outlook. The leading classes felt no necessity for making the scientific mode of conception into a gospelof life, for the support of their souls. No matter how thoroughly they might have permeated themselves with the scientific conception of a natural order of things, in which a direct chain of causality leads up from the lowest animals to man, this mode of conception remained nevertheless a merely theoretic persuasion. It never stirred their feelings, and impelled them to take life through and through in a way befitting such a persuasion. Take naturalists such as Vogt and the popular writer, Buechner; they were unquestionably permeated with the scientific mode of conception; but, alongside this, there was something else at work in their souls which kept their lives interwoven with a whole complex of circumstances, such as can those whose only intelligible justification can be the belief in a spiritual order of the world. Putting aside all prejudice, let us just imagine, how differently the scientific outlook affects a man whose personal existence is anchored in such a complex, from the modern artisan, who, in the few eveninghours that he has free from work, hears the labour leader get up and address him in this fashion: “Science in our time has cured men of believing that they have their origin in a spiritual world. They have learnt better, and know now, that in the far ages, long ago, they climbed about on trees like any vulgar monkey. Science has taught them too, that they were all alike in their origin, and that it was a purely natural one.” It was a science that turned on such thoughts as these, which met the worker when he was looking for a substance to fill his soul and give him a sense of his own place as man in the life of the universe. He took the scientific outlook on the world in thorough earnest, and drew from it his own practical conclusions for life. The technical, capitalistic age laid hold of him differently from a member of the leading classes. The latter had his place in an order of life, which still bore the shape once given it by soul-sustaining forces; it was all to his interest to fit the acquisitions of the new age into this setting.But the worker, in his soul, was torn loose from this order of life. It was not capable of giving him one emotion that could illumine and fill his own life with anything of human worth. There was one thing only, which could give the worker any sense of what a “man” is, one thing only that seemed to have emerged from the old order of life endowed with the power that awakens faith, and that was—scientific thought. It may arouse a smile in some of those who read this, to be told of the “scientific” character of the worker’s conceptions. Let them smile, who can only think of the scientific habit of mind as something that is acquired by many years of application on the benches of “educational institutes,” and then contrast this sort of “science” with what fills the mind of the worker who has “never learnt anything.” What is for him a smiling matter, are facts of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. And these facts shew, that many a very learned manlivesunscientifically, whereas the unlearned workerbrings his whole view of life into line with that scientific learning, of which very likely nothing has fallen to his share. The educated man has made a place for science,—it has a pigeon-hole of its own in the recesses of his soul. But he himself has his place in a network of circumstances in actual life, and it is these which give the direction to his feelings. His feeling is not directed by his science. The worker, through the very conditions of his life, is led to bring his conception of existence into unison with thegeneral toneof this science. He may be very far from what the other classes call “scientific,” yet his life’s course is charted by the scientific lines of conception. For the other classes, some religious or aesthetic, some general spiritual principle is the determining basis;—for him, Science is turned into the creed of life,—even though often it may be science filtered away to its last little shallows and driblets of thought. Many a member of the “foremost” classes feels himself to be “enlightened” in religion, a “free-thinker.” Nodoubt his scientific convictions influence his conceptions; but in his feelings still throb the forgotten remnants of a traditional creed of life. What the scientific type of thought has not brought down from the old order, is the consciousness of being, as a spiritual type, rooted in a spiritual world. This was a peculiarity of the modern scientific outlook, which presented no difficulty to a member of the leading classes. Life to him was filled by old traditions. For the worker it was otherwise; his new situation in life drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over from the ruling classes as heritage the scientific mode of thought, and made this the basis of his consciousness of the life and being of man. But this “spiritual possession,” with which he filled his soul, knew nothing of its derivation from an actual life of the spirit. The only spiritual life, that the workers could take over from the ruling classes, was of a sort that denied its spiritual origin.I well know, how these thoughts willaffect people outside as well as inside the working-class, who, believing themselves to have a thorough practical acquaintance with life, regard the view here expressed as quite remote from realities. The language of actual facts, as spoken by the whole state of the world to-day, will more and more prove this belief of theirs to be a delusion. For anyone able to look at these facts without prejudice, it will be plain, that a view of life, which never gets beyond their external aspect, becomes ultimately inaccessible to any conceptions save such as have lost all touch with facts. Ruling thought has clung on so long in this “practical” way to facts,—that the thoughts themselves have ended by bearing no resemblance whatever to the facts. The present world-catastrophe might have taught many people a lesson in this respect. What did they think it possible might happen? And what really did happen? Is it to be the same with their thoughts about social problems?I know too, how someone who professesworking-class views will feel about what has been said, and can hear him saying: “Just like the rest of them! trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off on to lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois sort.” With his creed, he does not see how fate has brought him into this working-class life, and how he is trying to find his way in it with a type of thought inherited from the ruling-classes. Helivesas a working-man but hethinksas a bourgeois. The new age is making it necessary to learn not only a new way of life, but a new way of thought also. The scientific mode of conception can only become substantial and life-supporting, when it evolves, in its own fashion, a power to content the whole of human life in all its aspects, such as the old conceptions of life once evolved in their way.This points the path for the discovery in its true form of one factor in the modern labour movement. And having travelled it to the end, the worker’s soul utters this cry of conviction: “I am strivingafter spiritual life. Yet this spiritual life isideology, is merely man’s own reflection of what is going on in the world outside, it does not come to us from a spiritual world of its own.” In the transition to the new age, the old spiritual life had turned to something which, for the working-class sense of life, is ideology. If one wants to understand the mood of soul amongst the workers, as it finds vent in the social demands of the present day, one must be able to grasp the full possible effects of the theory that spiritual life is ideology. It may be retorted: “What does the average working-man know of any such theory? it is only a will-o’-the-wisp in the brains of their more or less educated leaders.” But anyone who says so is talking wide of life, and his doings in actual life will be wide of it too. He simply does not know, what has been going on in the life of the working-class during the last half century. He does not know the threads that are woven from the theory, that spiritual life is ideology, to the demands and actions of the out-and-outsocialist, whom he thinks so “ignorant”;—yes, and to the deeds too of those who “hatch revolution” out of the blind promptings of the life within them.Herein lies the tragedy overshadowing all our interpretations of the social demands of the day, that in so many circles there is no sense of what is forcing its way up to the surface out of the souls of the great masses of mankind,—that people cannot turn their eyes to what is actually taking place in men’s inner life. The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker setting forth his demands; and this is what he hears:—“Nothing short of communalising the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest conception, of how his own class, in the transition from the old age to the new, not only summoned the worker to labour at means of production that were not his, but failed even to give him anything to satisfy and sustain his soul in his labour. People, who seeand act wide of the mark in this way, may say:—“But, after all, the working-man only wants to better his position in life and put himself on a level with the upper classes; where do the needs of his soul come in?” The working-man himself may even declare:—“I am not asking the other classes for anything for my soul; all I want, is to prevent them exploiting me any longer. I mean to put an end to existing classdistinctions.” Talk of this kind does not touch the essence of the social question. It reveals nothing of itstrue form. For, had the working population inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance, then they would have had a different consciousness within their souls, one which would have voiced their social demands in quite a different fashion from the modern workers, who can see in the spiritual life, as they have received it, merely an ideology. The workers, as a class, are convinced of the ideologic character of spiritual life; but the conviction renders them more and more unhappy. They arenot definitely conscious of this unhappiness in their souls, but they suffer acutely from it, and it far outweighs, in its significance for the social question to-day, all demands for an improvement in external conditions,—justifiable as these demands are too in their own way.The ruling classes do not recognise, that they are themselves the authors of that attitude of mind, which now confronts them militant in the labour-world. And yet, they are the authors of it, inasmuch as, out of their own spiritual world, they failed to bequeath to the workers anything but what must seem to the workers “ideology.”What gives to the present social movement its essential stamp, is not the demand for a change of conditions in the life of one class of men,—although that is the natural sign of it. Rather,it is the manner in which this demand is translated by this class from a thought-impulse into actual reality. Consider the facts impartially from this point of view. One will find personswho aim at keeping in touch with labour tendencies in thought, smile at any talk of a spiritual movement proposing to contribute anything towards the solution of the social question. They dismiss it with a smile, as ideology, empty theory. From thought, from the mere life of the spirit, there is nothing, they feel certain, to be contributed to the burning social problems of the hour. And yet, when one looks at the matter more closely, it is forced upon one, that the very nerve, the very root-impulse of the modern movement,—especially as a working-class movement,—does not lie in the things about which the modern worker talks, but inthoughts. The modern working-class movement has sprung, as perhaps no other similar movement in the world before it,out of thoughts. When studied more closely, it shews this in a most marked degree. I am not throwing this out as anaperçu, the result of long pondering over the social movement. If I may venture to introduce a personal remark I was for years lecturerat a working-man’s institute, giving instruction to working men in a wide variety of subjects; and I think that it taught me what is living and stirring in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. And from this starting point, I had occasion to go on, and follow up the tendencies at work in the various trades unions and different callings. I think I may say, that I am not approaching the subject merely from theoretical considerations, but am putting into words the results arrived at through actual living experience.Anyone,—only, unfortunately, so few of the leading intellectuals are in this position,—but anyone, who has learnt to know the modern labour movement where it was carried on by the workers themselves, knows how remarkable a feature it is in it, and how fraught with significance, that a certaintrend of thoughthas laid intense hold on the souls of large numbers of men. What makes it at the present moment hard to adopt any line as regards the social conundrums that present themselves, is thatthere is so little possibility of an understanding between the different classes. It is so hard for the middle-class to-day to put themselves into the soul of the worker,—so hard for them to understand how the worker’s still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx,—which, in its whole mode of conception, no matter how one regards its substance, measures the requirements of human thought by such a lofty standard. One man may agree with Karl Marx’s intellectual system,—another may refute it; and the arguments on either side may appear equally good. In some points it was revised, after the death of Marx and his friend Engels, by those who came later and saw social life under a different aspect from these leaders. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. It is not this that seems to me the significant thing in the modern working-class movement. The thing that to me seems significant above all others is, that it should be a fact, thatthe most powerfulimpulse at work in the labour world is a thought-system. One may go so far as to put it thus:—No practical movement, no movement that was altogether a movement of practical life, making the most matter-of-fact demands of every-day humanity, has ever before rested so almost entirely on a basis of thought alone, as the present working-class movement does. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind to take up its stand entirely on a scientific basis. One must however see this fact in its proper light. If one considers everything that the modern worker has consciously to say about his own views and purposes and sentiments, it does not seem to one, from a deeper observation of life, to be by any means the thing of main importance. What impresses itself as of real importance is, that what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the soul’s life,—thethought-basis, from which life takes its tone,—has been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole man turns. What has thus becomean inward reality in the worker is, however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This is a fact that one must clearly recognise in the human evolution of recent years, together with all that it involves,—otherwise it is impossible to understand the worker’s views of life and the way those, who hold these views, set about realising them in practice.From the picture drawn of the worker’s spiritual life in the preceding pages, it will be clear that the main features of this spiritual life must occupy the first place in any description of the working-class social movement in its true form. For it is essential to the worker’s way of feeling the causes of his unsatisfactory social condition and endeavoring to remove them, that both the feeling and the endeavour take the direction given them by his spirituallife. And yet, at present, he can only reject with contempt or anger the notion, that in the spiritual foundations of the social movement there is something that presents a remarkable driving force. How should he recognise in spiritual life a force able to bear him along, when he is bound to feel it as ideology? One cannot look to a spiritual life, that one feels as ideology, to open up the way out of a social situation, which one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of his thought has turned not only science, but religion, art, morality, and right also for the modern worker into so many constituent parts of human ideology. Behind these branches of the spiritual life he sees nothing of the workings of an actual reality, which finds its way into his own existence, and can contribute something to material life. To him, these things are only the reflected shine, or mirrored image of the material life. Whatever reflex influence they may have on the shaping of this material life,—whether roundabout, through the conceptionsof men’s brains, or through being taken up into the impulses of the will, yet, originally, they arise out of the material life itself as ideologic emanations from it. These of themselves can certainly yield nothing that will conduce to the removal of social difficulties. Only out of the sphere of material processes themselves can anything arise that will lead to the desired end.Modern spiritual life has been passed on from the leading classes of mankind to the working population in a form which prevents the latter from being aware of the force that dwells in it. This fact above all must be understood, when considering what are the forces that can help towards the solution of the social question. Should it continue to exert its present influence, then mankind’s spiritual life must see itself doomed to impotence before the social demands of our day and the time to come. Its impotence is in fact an article of faith with a large part of the working-class, and openly pressed in Marxism and similar creeds. “Modern economic life”—they say—“has evolved out of its earlier forms the present capitalistic one. This evolutionary process has brought the workers into an unendurable situation as regards capital. But evolution will not stop here, it will go on, and kill capitalism through the forces at work in capitalism itself and from the death of capitalism will spring the emancipation of the workers.” Later socialist thinkers have divested this creed of the fatalistic character it had assumed amongst a certain school of Marxists. But even so its essential feature remains, and shews itself in this way:—that it wouldnotoccur to anyone, who wishes to be a true socialist to-day, to say: “If we discover anywhere a life of the soul, having its rise in the forces of the age, rooted in a spiritual reality, and able to sustain the whole man,—then such a soul life as this could radiate the power needed as a motor-force for the social movement.” The man of to-day, who is obliged to lead the life of a worker, can cherish no such expectation from the spiritual life of the day; and this it is whichgives the key-note to his soul. He needs a spiritual life from which power can come,—power to give his soul the sense of his human worth. For when the capitalist economic order of recent times caught him up into its machinery, the man himself, with all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven for recourse to some such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which the leading classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. Running through all the demands of the modern working-class, is this longing for some link with the spiritual life, other than the present form of society can give; and this is what gives the directing impetus in the social movement to-day. This fact however is one that is rightly understood neither outside nor inside the working-class. Those outside the working-class do not suffer from the ideologic cast of modern spiritual life, which is of their own making. Those who are inside the working-class do suffer; but the very ideologic character of their inherited spiritual lifehas robbed them of all belief in the power of spiritual possessions, as such, to sustain and support them. On a right insight into this fact depends the discovery of a path out of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen. The path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen with the new form of industrial economy under the influence of the leading classes. The strength to open it must be achieved.People’s thoughts in this respect will undergo a complete change, when once they come really to feel the full weight of this fact: That, in a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideologic role, common social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. What ails the body social to-day, is impotence of the spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once the fact is acknowledged, there will then be a basis on which to develope the kind of thinking needed for the social movement.At present, the worker thinks that he has struck a main force in his soul, when he talks about his “class-consciousness.” But the truth is, that ever since he was caught up into the capitalist economic machine he has been searching for a spiritual life that could sustain his soul and give him a “human-consciousness,”—a consciousness of his worth as man,—which there is no possibility of developing with a spiritual life that is felt as ideology. This “human-consciousness”—was what he was seeking. He could not find it; and so he replaced it with “class-consciousness”born of the economic life. His eyes are rivetted upon the economic life alone, as though some overpowering suggestive influence held them there. And he no longer believes that elsewhere, in the spirit or in the soul, there can be anywhere a latent force capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in the social movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic life, devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state of things,which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. Thus he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of economic life alone. He has been forced to the conviction, that with the mere transformation of economic life all those ills would disappear, that have been brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and through the individual employer’s powerlessness to do justice to the claims of human self-respect in the employee. And so the modern worker was led on to believe, that the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of means of production into a communal concern, or into actual communal property. This conviction is due to people’s eyes having been removed, as it were, from everything belonging to soul and spirit, and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.Hence all the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern worker believes, that industrial economy, the economic life itself, will of necessity evolve allthat will ultimately give him his rights as man. These rights of man in full are what he is fighting for. And yet, in the heart of the fight something different makes its appearance,—something which never could be an outcome of the economic life alone. It is a significant thing, which speaks most forcibly, that here, right at the centre of the many forms which the social question assumes under the needs of human life to-day, there is something that seems, in men’s belief, to proceed out of economic life, which, however, never could proceed from economic life alone,—something, that lies rather in the direct line of evolution; leading up through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labour. The circulation of commodities, of money, the system of capital, property-ownership, the land system, these may have taken no matter what form under modern life; but at the heart of modern life something else has taken place, never distinctly expressed, not consciously felt even by the modern worker,but which is the fundamental force actuating all his social purpose. It is this:—The modern capitalist system of economy recognises, at bottom, nothing butcommoditieswithin its own province. It understands the creation of commodity-values as a process in the body economic. And in the capitalistic processes of the modern age something has been turned into a commodity, which the worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity.If it were only recognised what a fundamental force this is in the social movement amongst the modern workers: this loathing that the modern worker feels at being forced to barter his labour-power to the employer, as goods are bartered in the market,—loathing at seeing his personal labour-power play part as a factor in the supply and demand of the labour-market, just as the goods in the market are subject to supply and demand. When once people become aware what this loathing of the “labour-commodity” means for the modern social movement, when once theystraightly and honestly recognise, that the thing at work there is not even emphatically and drastically enough expressed in socialist doctrines,—then they will have discovered the second of the two impulses which are making the social question to-day so urgent, one may indeed say so burning,—the first being that spiritual life that is felt as an ideology.In old days there were slaves. The entire man was sold as a commodity. Rather less of the man, but still a portion of the human-being himself was incorporated in the economic process by serfdom. To-day, capitalism is the power, through which still a remnant of the human-being,—his labour-power,—is stamped with the character of a commodity. I am not saying, that this fact has remained unnoticed. On the contrary, it is a fact which in social life to-day is recognised as a fundamental one, and which is felt to be something that plays a very important part in the modern social movement. But people in studying it keep their attention solely fixed on economiclife. They make the question of the nature of a commodity solely an economic one. They look to economic life itself for the forces that shall bring about conditions, under which the worker shall no longer feel that his labour-power is playing a part unworthy of him in the body social. They see, how the modern form of industrial economy came about historically in the recent evolution of mankind. They see too, how it gave the commodity character to human labour-power. What they do not see, is, that it is a necessity inherent in economic life, that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity. Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labour-power of its commodity character, unless one can find a way of separating it out from the economic process. It is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give it a shape in which human labour may come by its rights inside that process itself. What one must endeavor, is to finda way of separating labour-power out from the economic process, and bringing it undersocialforces that will do away with its commodity character. The worker sets his desire upon some arrangement of economic life, where his labour-power shall find a fitting place; not seeing, that the commodity character of his labour is inherently and essentially due to his being bound up in the economic processes as part and parcel of them. Being obliged to surrender his labour-power to the economic processes, the whole man himself is caught up into them. So long as the economic system has the regulating of labour-power, it will go on consuming labour-power just as it consumes commodities,—in the manner that is most useful to its purposes. It is as though the power of economic life hypnotised people, so that they can look at nothing except what is going on inside it. They may look for ever in this direction without discovering how labour-power can escape being a commodity. Some other form of industrial economy will onlymake labour-power a commodity in some other manner. Thelabourquestion cannot find place in its true shape as part of thesocialquestion, until it is recognised that the considerations of economic life which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of commodities, are not such whose competence should be extended to human labour-power.New age thought has not learned to distinguish the totally different fashions in which the two things enter into economic life: i.e., on the one hand, labour-power, which is intimately bound up with the human-being himself; and, on the other hand, those things that proceed from another source and are dissociated from the human-being, and which circulate along those paths that all commodities must take from their production to their consumption. Sound thinking on these lines will shew both the true form of the labour-power question, and the place that economic life must occupy in a healthily constituted society.From this, it is obvious that the “social question” will divide itself into three distinct questions. The first is the question of a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social; the second, the consideration of the position of labour-power, and the right way to incorporate it in the life of the community. Thirdly, it will be possible to deduce the proper place and function of economic life.

Does not the modern social movement stand revealed by the great catastrophe of the war, demonstrating in actualfactshow inadequate thethoughtswere, which for years have been supposed sufficient to an understanding of the working-class movement and its purport?

It is a question forced upon us by the demands of the workers and all that these involve,—demands which formerly were kept in suppression, but which at the present time are forcing their way to the surface of life. The powers that were instrumental in suppression are partially destroyed; and the position they took up towardsthe forces of social growth in a large part of mankind is one that nobody can wish to maintain, who does not totally fail to recognise how indestructible such impulses of human nature are.

The greatest illusions in respect to these social forces have been harboured by persons, whose situation in life gave them the power, by word and voice, either to assist or to check those influences in European life, which, in 1914, were rushing us into the catastrophe of war. These persons actually believed, that a military victory for their country would hush the mutterings of the social storm. They have since been obliged to recognise, that it was the consequences of their own attitude that first brought these social tendencies fully to light. Indeed, the present catastrophe,—which is the catastrophe of mankind,—has shewn itself to be the very event, through which, historically, these tendencies gained the opportunity to make themselves felt in their full force. During these last fateful years, both the leading persons and theleading classes have been constantly obliged to tune their own behaviour to the note sounded in socialist circles. Could they have disregarded the tone of these circles, they would often gladly have acted differently. And the effects of this live on in the form which events are taking to-day.

And now the thing, which for years past has been drawing on in mankind’s life-evolution, preparing its way before it, has arrived at a decisive stage,—and now comes the tragedy: The facts are with us in all their ripeness, but the thoughts that came up with the growth of the facts are no match for them. There are many persons who trained their thoughts on the lines of the growing process, hoping thereby to serve the social ideal which they recognised in it; and these persons find themselves to-day practically powerless before the problems which the accomplished facts present, and on which the destinies of mankind hang. A good many of these persons, it is true, still believe that the thingsthey have so long thought necessary to the remodelling of human life will now be realised, and will then prove powerful enough to give these facts a possible turn and meet their requirements. One may dismiss the opinion of those, who, even now, are still under the delusion, that it must be possible to maintain the old scheme of things against the new demands that are being urged by a large part of mankind. We may confine ourselves to examining what is going on in the wills of those people who are convinced that a remodelling of social life is necessary. Even so, we shall be forced to own to ourselves, that party shibboleths go wandering up and down amongst us like the dessicated corpses of once animate creeds,—everywhere flouted and set at naught by the evolution of facts. The facts call for decisions, for which the creeds of the old parties are all unprepared. These parties certainly evolved along with the facts,—but they, and their habits of thought, have not kept pace with the facts. One may perhapsventure without presumption to hold,—in the face of still common opinion,—that the course of events throughout the world at the present time bears out what has just been said. One may draw the conclusion, that this is just the favorable moment to attempt to point out something, which, in its true character, is foreign even to those who are expert thinkers among the parties and persons belonging to the various schools of social thought. For it may well be, that the tragedy that reveals itself in all these attempts to solve the social question, arises precisely from the real purport of the working-class struggle having been misunderstood,—misunderstood even by those who, themselves with all their opinions, are the outcome of this struggle. For men by no means always read their own purposes aright.

There may therefore seem some justification for putting these questions: What is, in reality, the purport of the modern working-class movement? What is itswill? Does this, its will and purport, correspondto what is usually thought about it, either by the workers themselves, or by the non-workers? Does what is commonly thought about the “social problem” reveal that question in itstrue form? Or is an altogether different line of thought needed? This is a question which one cannot approach impartially unless, through personal destiny, one has in a position oneself to enter into the life of the modern worker’s soul,—especially amongst that section of the workers who have most to do with the form the social movement is taking in the present day.

People have talked a great deal about the evolution of modern technical science and modern capitalism. They have studied the rise of the present working-class in the process of this evolution, and how the developments of economic life in recent times have led on to the workers’ present demands. There is much that is to the point in what has been said about all this. But there is one critical feature which is never touched on, as one cannot help seeing, ifone refuses to be hypnotised by the theory that it is external conditions that give the stamp to a man’s life. It is a feature obvious to anyone who keeps an unclouded insight for impulses of the soul that work from within outwards, out of hidden depths. It is quite true, that the worker’s demands have been evolved during the growth of modern technical science and modern capitalism; but a recognition of this fact affords no further clue whatever to the impulses that are actuating these demands, and which are in factpurely humanin character. Nor, till one penetrates to the heart of these impulses, will one get to the true form of the social question.

There is a word in frequent use among the workers, which is of striking significance for anyone able to penetrate to the deeper-seated forces active in the human will. It is this: the modern worker has become “class-conscious.” He no longer follows, more or less instinctively and unconsciously, the swing of the classes outsidehis own. He knows himself one of a class apart, and is determined, that the relation, which public life establishes between his class and the other classes, shall be turned to good account for his own interests. And anyone, who has comprehension for the undercurrents of men’s souls, finds in the word “class-conscious,” as used by the modern worker, a clue to very important facts in the worker’s view of life,—in particular amongst those classes of workers, whose life is cast amidst modern technical industry and modern capitalism. What will above all arrest his attention is, how strongly the worker’s soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on human destinies. Here one touches on a circumstance about which many people, who only thinkaboutthe workers, notwiththem, have very hazy notions,—notions indeed, which are downright mischievous, in view of the serious events taking place at the present day. The view, that the “uneducated” working manhas had his head turned by Marxism, and by later labour writers of the Marxist school, and other things one hears of the same sort, will not conduce towards that understanding of the subject and its connection with the whole historic situation of the world, which is so peculiarly necessary at the present day. In expressing such a view, one only shews that one lacks the will to examine an essential feature of the present social movement. For it is an essential feature, that the working-class consciousness has thus become filled with concepts that take their stamp from thescientificevolution of recent times. This class-consciousness continues to be dominated by the note struck in Lassalle’s speech on “Science and the Workers.” Such things may appear unessential to many a man who reckons himself a “practical person”; but anyone, who means to arrive at a really fruitful insight into the modern labour movement,is bound to turn his attention to these things. In the demands put forward by the workers to-day, be they moderates orradicals, we have the expression, not, as many people imagine, of economic life that has—somehow—become metamorphosed into human impulse, we have the expression ofeconomic science, by which the working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the labour movement, with its scientific flavour and popular journalistic renderings. To deny this, is to shut one’s eyes to actual facts. And it is a fundamental fact, and one which determines the whole social situation at the present day, that everything which forms the subject of the worker’s “class-consciousness” is couched for him in concepts of a scientific kind. The individual working at his machine may be no matter how completely a stranger to science; yet those, who enlighten him as to his own position and to whom he listens, borrow their method of enlightenment from this same science.

All the disquisitions about modern economic life, about the machine age and capitalism, may throw ever so instructive alight on the facts underlying the modern working-class movement; but the decisive light on the present social situation does not proceed directly from the fact, that the worker has been placed at the machine, that he has been harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. It proceeds from the other, different, fact, that his class-consciousness has been filled with a quite definite kind ofthought, shaped at the machine and under the influence of the capitalist order of economy. Possibly the habits of thought peculiar to the present day may prevent many people from realising the full bearing of this circumstance, and may cause them to regard the stress laid upon it as a mere dialectic play upon terms. One can only say in reply: So much the worse for any prospect of a successful intervention in social life to-day by people who are unable to distinguish essentials. Anyone, who wants to understand the working-class movement, must first and foremost know, how the workerthinks. For the working-class movement,from its moderate efforts at reform to its most sweeping extravagances, is not created by “forces outside man,” by “economic impulses,” but byhuman-beings, by their mental conceptions and by the impulses of their will.

Not in what capitalism and the machine have implanted in the worker’s consciousness, not here lie the ideas and will-forces, that give its character to the present social movement. This movement turned in the direction of modern science to find its fount of thought, because capitalism and the machine could give the worker no substance with which to content his soul as a human being. Such substance and content was afforded to the medieval craftsman by his craft. In the kind of connection which the medieval handworker felt between himself, as a human being, and his craft, there was something that shewed life within the whole human confraternity in a light which made it seem, for his individual consciousness, worth living. Whatever he might be doing, he was ableto regard it in such a way, that he seemed through it to be realising what he desired, as a “man,” to be. Tending a machine under the capitalist scheme of things the man was thrown back upon himself, upon his own inner life, whenever he tried to find some principle on which to base a general outlook on Man and one’s consciousness of what as a “man” one is. Technical industry, capitalism,—these could contribute nothing towards such an outlook. And so it came to pass, that the working-class consciousness took the bent towards the scientific type of thought. The direct human link with actual life was lost.

Now this occurred just at a time, when the leading classes of mankind were working towards a scientific mode of thought, which in itself no longer possessed the spiritual energy to content man’s consciousness in every aspect and guide it along all the directions of its wants. The old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the spiritual complex of existence. Modern science views him as a natural objectamidst a purely natural order of things. This science is not felt as a stream flowing from a spiritual world into the soul of man, and on which man as a soul is buoyed and upborne. Whatever one’s opinion may be as to the relation of the religious impulses, and kindred things, to the scientific mode of thought of recent times, yet one must admit, if one considers historic evolution impartially, that the scientific conception has developed out of the religious one. But the old conceptions of the universe, that rested deep down on religious foundations, lacked power to impart their soul-bearing force to the newer form of scientific conception. They withdrew beyond its range, and lived on, contenting their consciousness with things in which the souls of the workers could find no resource. For the leading classes, this inner world of consciousness might still have a certain value. In some form or other it was bound up with their own position in life. They sought for no new substance for their consciousness, because they wereable to keep a hold on the old one, that had been handed down to them through actual life. But the modern worker was torn out of all his old setting in life. He was the man whose life had been put on a totally new basis. For him, when the old bases of life were withdrawn, there disappeared at the same time all possibility of drawing from the old spiritual springs. These lay far off in regions to which he was now become a stranger. Contemporaneous with modern technical science and modern capitalism,—in such a sense as one can speak of great worldstreams of history as contemporaneous,—there grew up the modern scientific conception of the world. To this the trust, the faith, of the modern worker turned. It was here he sought the new substance that he needed to content his inner consciousness. But the working-class and the leading classes were differently situated with regard to their scientific outlook. The leading classes felt no necessity for making the scientific mode of conception into a gospelof life, for the support of their souls. No matter how thoroughly they might have permeated themselves with the scientific conception of a natural order of things, in which a direct chain of causality leads up from the lowest animals to man, this mode of conception remained nevertheless a merely theoretic persuasion. It never stirred their feelings, and impelled them to take life through and through in a way befitting such a persuasion. Take naturalists such as Vogt and the popular writer, Buechner; they were unquestionably permeated with the scientific mode of conception; but, alongside this, there was something else at work in their souls which kept their lives interwoven with a whole complex of circumstances, such as can those whose only intelligible justification can be the belief in a spiritual order of the world. Putting aside all prejudice, let us just imagine, how differently the scientific outlook affects a man whose personal existence is anchored in such a complex, from the modern artisan, who, in the few eveninghours that he has free from work, hears the labour leader get up and address him in this fashion: “Science in our time has cured men of believing that they have their origin in a spiritual world. They have learnt better, and know now, that in the far ages, long ago, they climbed about on trees like any vulgar monkey. Science has taught them too, that they were all alike in their origin, and that it was a purely natural one.” It was a science that turned on such thoughts as these, which met the worker when he was looking for a substance to fill his soul and give him a sense of his own place as man in the life of the universe. He took the scientific outlook on the world in thorough earnest, and drew from it his own practical conclusions for life. The technical, capitalistic age laid hold of him differently from a member of the leading classes. The latter had his place in an order of life, which still bore the shape once given it by soul-sustaining forces; it was all to his interest to fit the acquisitions of the new age into this setting.But the worker, in his soul, was torn loose from this order of life. It was not capable of giving him one emotion that could illumine and fill his own life with anything of human worth. There was one thing only, which could give the worker any sense of what a “man” is, one thing only that seemed to have emerged from the old order of life endowed with the power that awakens faith, and that was—scientific thought. It may arouse a smile in some of those who read this, to be told of the “scientific” character of the worker’s conceptions. Let them smile, who can only think of the scientific habit of mind as something that is acquired by many years of application on the benches of “educational institutes,” and then contrast this sort of “science” with what fills the mind of the worker who has “never learnt anything.” What is for him a smiling matter, are facts of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. And these facts shew, that many a very learned manlivesunscientifically, whereas the unlearned workerbrings his whole view of life into line with that scientific learning, of which very likely nothing has fallen to his share. The educated man has made a place for science,—it has a pigeon-hole of its own in the recesses of his soul. But he himself has his place in a network of circumstances in actual life, and it is these which give the direction to his feelings. His feeling is not directed by his science. The worker, through the very conditions of his life, is led to bring his conception of existence into unison with thegeneral toneof this science. He may be very far from what the other classes call “scientific,” yet his life’s course is charted by the scientific lines of conception. For the other classes, some religious or aesthetic, some general spiritual principle is the determining basis;—for him, Science is turned into the creed of life,—even though often it may be science filtered away to its last little shallows and driblets of thought. Many a member of the “foremost” classes feels himself to be “enlightened” in religion, a “free-thinker.” Nodoubt his scientific convictions influence his conceptions; but in his feelings still throb the forgotten remnants of a traditional creed of life. What the scientific type of thought has not brought down from the old order, is the consciousness of being, as a spiritual type, rooted in a spiritual world. This was a peculiarity of the modern scientific outlook, which presented no difficulty to a member of the leading classes. Life to him was filled by old traditions. For the worker it was otherwise; his new situation in life drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over from the ruling classes as heritage the scientific mode of thought, and made this the basis of his consciousness of the life and being of man. But this “spiritual possession,” with which he filled his soul, knew nothing of its derivation from an actual life of the spirit. The only spiritual life, that the workers could take over from the ruling classes, was of a sort that denied its spiritual origin.

I well know, how these thoughts willaffect people outside as well as inside the working-class, who, believing themselves to have a thorough practical acquaintance with life, regard the view here expressed as quite remote from realities. The language of actual facts, as spoken by the whole state of the world to-day, will more and more prove this belief of theirs to be a delusion. For anyone able to look at these facts without prejudice, it will be plain, that a view of life, which never gets beyond their external aspect, becomes ultimately inaccessible to any conceptions save such as have lost all touch with facts. Ruling thought has clung on so long in this “practical” way to facts,—that the thoughts themselves have ended by bearing no resemblance whatever to the facts. The present world-catastrophe might have taught many people a lesson in this respect. What did they think it possible might happen? And what really did happen? Is it to be the same with their thoughts about social problems?

I know too, how someone who professesworking-class views will feel about what has been said, and can hear him saying: “Just like the rest of them! trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off on to lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois sort.” With his creed, he does not see how fate has brought him into this working-class life, and how he is trying to find his way in it with a type of thought inherited from the ruling-classes. Helivesas a working-man but hethinksas a bourgeois. The new age is making it necessary to learn not only a new way of life, but a new way of thought also. The scientific mode of conception can only become substantial and life-supporting, when it evolves, in its own fashion, a power to content the whole of human life in all its aspects, such as the old conceptions of life once evolved in their way.

This points the path for the discovery in its true form of one factor in the modern labour movement. And having travelled it to the end, the worker’s soul utters this cry of conviction: “I am strivingafter spiritual life. Yet this spiritual life isideology, is merely man’s own reflection of what is going on in the world outside, it does not come to us from a spiritual world of its own.” In the transition to the new age, the old spiritual life had turned to something which, for the working-class sense of life, is ideology. If one wants to understand the mood of soul amongst the workers, as it finds vent in the social demands of the present day, one must be able to grasp the full possible effects of the theory that spiritual life is ideology. It may be retorted: “What does the average working-man know of any such theory? it is only a will-o’-the-wisp in the brains of their more or less educated leaders.” But anyone who says so is talking wide of life, and his doings in actual life will be wide of it too. He simply does not know, what has been going on in the life of the working-class during the last half century. He does not know the threads that are woven from the theory, that spiritual life is ideology, to the demands and actions of the out-and-outsocialist, whom he thinks so “ignorant”;—yes, and to the deeds too of those who “hatch revolution” out of the blind promptings of the life within them.

Herein lies the tragedy overshadowing all our interpretations of the social demands of the day, that in so many circles there is no sense of what is forcing its way up to the surface out of the souls of the great masses of mankind,—that people cannot turn their eyes to what is actually taking place in men’s inner life. The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker setting forth his demands; and this is what he hears:—“Nothing short of communalising the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest conception, of how his own class, in the transition from the old age to the new, not only summoned the worker to labour at means of production that were not his, but failed even to give him anything to satisfy and sustain his soul in his labour. People, who seeand act wide of the mark in this way, may say:—“But, after all, the working-man only wants to better his position in life and put himself on a level with the upper classes; where do the needs of his soul come in?” The working-man himself may even declare:—“I am not asking the other classes for anything for my soul; all I want, is to prevent them exploiting me any longer. I mean to put an end to existing classdistinctions.” Talk of this kind does not touch the essence of the social question. It reveals nothing of itstrue form. For, had the working population inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance, then they would have had a different consciousness within their souls, one which would have voiced their social demands in quite a different fashion from the modern workers, who can see in the spiritual life, as they have received it, merely an ideology. The workers, as a class, are convinced of the ideologic character of spiritual life; but the conviction renders them more and more unhappy. They arenot definitely conscious of this unhappiness in their souls, but they suffer acutely from it, and it far outweighs, in its significance for the social question to-day, all demands for an improvement in external conditions,—justifiable as these demands are too in their own way.

The ruling classes do not recognise, that they are themselves the authors of that attitude of mind, which now confronts them militant in the labour-world. And yet, they are the authors of it, inasmuch as, out of their own spiritual world, they failed to bequeath to the workers anything but what must seem to the workers “ideology.”

What gives to the present social movement its essential stamp, is not the demand for a change of conditions in the life of one class of men,—although that is the natural sign of it. Rather,it is the manner in which this demand is translated by this class from a thought-impulse into actual reality. Consider the facts impartially from this point of view. One will find personswho aim at keeping in touch with labour tendencies in thought, smile at any talk of a spiritual movement proposing to contribute anything towards the solution of the social question. They dismiss it with a smile, as ideology, empty theory. From thought, from the mere life of the spirit, there is nothing, they feel certain, to be contributed to the burning social problems of the hour. And yet, when one looks at the matter more closely, it is forced upon one, that the very nerve, the very root-impulse of the modern movement,—especially as a working-class movement,—does not lie in the things about which the modern worker talks, but inthoughts. The modern working-class movement has sprung, as perhaps no other similar movement in the world before it,out of thoughts. When studied more closely, it shews this in a most marked degree. I am not throwing this out as anaperçu, the result of long pondering over the social movement. If I may venture to introduce a personal remark I was for years lecturerat a working-man’s institute, giving instruction to working men in a wide variety of subjects; and I think that it taught me what is living and stirring in the soul of the modern proletarian worker. And from this starting point, I had occasion to go on, and follow up the tendencies at work in the various trades unions and different callings. I think I may say, that I am not approaching the subject merely from theoretical considerations, but am putting into words the results arrived at through actual living experience.

Anyone,—only, unfortunately, so few of the leading intellectuals are in this position,—but anyone, who has learnt to know the modern labour movement where it was carried on by the workers themselves, knows how remarkable a feature it is in it, and how fraught with significance, that a certaintrend of thoughthas laid intense hold on the souls of large numbers of men. What makes it at the present moment hard to adopt any line as regards the social conundrums that present themselves, is thatthere is so little possibility of an understanding between the different classes. It is so hard for the middle-class to-day to put themselves into the soul of the worker,—so hard for them to understand how the worker’s still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx,—which, in its whole mode of conception, no matter how one regards its substance, measures the requirements of human thought by such a lofty standard. One man may agree with Karl Marx’s intellectual system,—another may refute it; and the arguments on either side may appear equally good. In some points it was revised, after the death of Marx and his friend Engels, by those who came later and saw social life under a different aspect from these leaders. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. It is not this that seems to me the significant thing in the modern working-class movement. The thing that to me seems significant above all others is, that it should be a fact, thatthe most powerfulimpulse at work in the labour world is a thought-system. One may go so far as to put it thus:—No practical movement, no movement that was altogether a movement of practical life, making the most matter-of-fact demands of every-day humanity, has ever before rested so almost entirely on a basis of thought alone, as the present working-class movement does. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind to take up its stand entirely on a scientific basis. One must however see this fact in its proper light. If one considers everything that the modern worker has consciously to say about his own views and purposes and sentiments, it does not seem to one, from a deeper observation of life, to be by any means the thing of main importance. What impresses itself as of real importance is, that what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the soul’s life,—thethought-basis, from which life takes its tone,—has been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole man turns. What has thus becomean inward reality in the worker is, however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This is a fact that one must clearly recognise in the human evolution of recent years, together with all that it involves,—otherwise it is impossible to understand the worker’s views of life and the way those, who hold these views, set about realising them in practice.

From the picture drawn of the worker’s spiritual life in the preceding pages, it will be clear that the main features of this spiritual life must occupy the first place in any description of the working-class social movement in its true form. For it is essential to the worker’s way of feeling the causes of his unsatisfactory social condition and endeavoring to remove them, that both the feeling and the endeavour take the direction given them by his spirituallife. And yet, at present, he can only reject with contempt or anger the notion, that in the spiritual foundations of the social movement there is something that presents a remarkable driving force. How should he recognise in spiritual life a force able to bear him along, when he is bound to feel it as ideology? One cannot look to a spiritual life, that one feels as ideology, to open up the way out of a social situation, which one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of his thought has turned not only science, but religion, art, morality, and right also for the modern worker into so many constituent parts of human ideology. Behind these branches of the spiritual life he sees nothing of the workings of an actual reality, which finds its way into his own existence, and can contribute something to material life. To him, these things are only the reflected shine, or mirrored image of the material life. Whatever reflex influence they may have on the shaping of this material life,—whether roundabout, through the conceptionsof men’s brains, or through being taken up into the impulses of the will, yet, originally, they arise out of the material life itself as ideologic emanations from it. These of themselves can certainly yield nothing that will conduce to the removal of social difficulties. Only out of the sphere of material processes themselves can anything arise that will lead to the desired end.

Modern spiritual life has been passed on from the leading classes of mankind to the working population in a form which prevents the latter from being aware of the force that dwells in it. This fact above all must be understood, when considering what are the forces that can help towards the solution of the social question. Should it continue to exert its present influence, then mankind’s spiritual life must see itself doomed to impotence before the social demands of our day and the time to come. Its impotence is in fact an article of faith with a large part of the working-class, and openly pressed in Marxism and similar creeds. “Modern economic life”—they say—“has evolved out of its earlier forms the present capitalistic one. This evolutionary process has brought the workers into an unendurable situation as regards capital. But evolution will not stop here, it will go on, and kill capitalism through the forces at work in capitalism itself and from the death of capitalism will spring the emancipation of the workers.” Later socialist thinkers have divested this creed of the fatalistic character it had assumed amongst a certain school of Marxists. But even so its essential feature remains, and shews itself in this way:—that it wouldnotoccur to anyone, who wishes to be a true socialist to-day, to say: “If we discover anywhere a life of the soul, having its rise in the forces of the age, rooted in a spiritual reality, and able to sustain the whole man,—then such a soul life as this could radiate the power needed as a motor-force for the social movement.” The man of to-day, who is obliged to lead the life of a worker, can cherish no such expectation from the spiritual life of the day; and this it is whichgives the key-note to his soul. He needs a spiritual life from which power can come,—power to give his soul the sense of his human worth. For when the capitalist economic order of recent times caught him up into its machinery, the man himself, with all the deepest needs of his soul, was driven for recourse to some such spiritual life. But the kind of spiritual life which the leading classes handed on to him as ideology left his soul void. Running through all the demands of the modern working-class, is this longing for some link with the spiritual life, other than the present form of society can give; and this is what gives the directing impetus in the social movement to-day. This fact however is one that is rightly understood neither outside nor inside the working-class. Those outside the working-class do not suffer from the ideologic cast of modern spiritual life, which is of their own making. Those who are inside the working-class do suffer; but the very ideologic character of their inherited spiritual lifehas robbed them of all belief in the power of spiritual possessions, as such, to sustain and support them. On a right insight into this fact depends the discovery of a path out of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen. The path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen with the new form of industrial economy under the influence of the leading classes. The strength to open it must be achieved.

People’s thoughts in this respect will undergo a complete change, when once they come really to feel the full weight of this fact: That, in a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideologic role, common social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. What ails the body social to-day, is impotence of the spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once the fact is acknowledged, there will then be a basis on which to develope the kind of thinking needed for the social movement.

At present, the worker thinks that he has struck a main force in his soul, when he talks about his “class-consciousness.” But the truth is, that ever since he was caught up into the capitalist economic machine he has been searching for a spiritual life that could sustain his soul and give him a “human-consciousness,”—a consciousness of his worth as man,—which there is no possibility of developing with a spiritual life that is felt as ideology. This “human-consciousness”—was what he was seeking. He could not find it; and so he replaced it with “class-consciousness”born of the economic life. His eyes are rivetted upon the economic life alone, as though some overpowering suggestive influence held them there. And he no longer believes that elsewhere, in the spirit or in the soul, there can be anywhere a latent force capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in the social movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic life, devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state of things,which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. Thus he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of economic life alone. He has been forced to the conviction, that with the mere transformation of economic life all those ills would disappear, that have been brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and through the individual employer’s powerlessness to do justice to the claims of human self-respect in the employee. And so the modern worker was led on to believe, that the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of means of production into a communal concern, or into actual communal property. This conviction is due to people’s eyes having been removed, as it were, from everything belonging to soul and spirit, and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.

Hence all the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern worker believes, that industrial economy, the economic life itself, will of necessity evolve allthat will ultimately give him his rights as man. These rights of man in full are what he is fighting for. And yet, in the heart of the fight something different makes its appearance,—something which never could be an outcome of the economic life alone. It is a significant thing, which speaks most forcibly, that here, right at the centre of the many forms which the social question assumes under the needs of human life to-day, there is something that seems, in men’s belief, to proceed out of economic life, which, however, never could proceed from economic life alone,—something, that lies rather in the direct line of evolution; leading up through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labour. The circulation of commodities, of money, the system of capital, property-ownership, the land system, these may have taken no matter what form under modern life; but at the heart of modern life something else has taken place, never distinctly expressed, not consciously felt even by the modern worker,but which is the fundamental force actuating all his social purpose. It is this:—The modern capitalist system of economy recognises, at bottom, nothing butcommoditieswithin its own province. It understands the creation of commodity-values as a process in the body economic. And in the capitalistic processes of the modern age something has been turned into a commodity, which the worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity.

If it were only recognised what a fundamental force this is in the social movement amongst the modern workers: this loathing that the modern worker feels at being forced to barter his labour-power to the employer, as goods are bartered in the market,—loathing at seeing his personal labour-power play part as a factor in the supply and demand of the labour-market, just as the goods in the market are subject to supply and demand. When once people become aware what this loathing of the “labour-commodity” means for the modern social movement, when once theystraightly and honestly recognise, that the thing at work there is not even emphatically and drastically enough expressed in socialist doctrines,—then they will have discovered the second of the two impulses which are making the social question to-day so urgent, one may indeed say so burning,—the first being that spiritual life that is felt as an ideology.

In old days there were slaves. The entire man was sold as a commodity. Rather less of the man, but still a portion of the human-being himself was incorporated in the economic process by serfdom. To-day, capitalism is the power, through which still a remnant of the human-being,—his labour-power,—is stamped with the character of a commodity. I am not saying, that this fact has remained unnoticed. On the contrary, it is a fact which in social life to-day is recognised as a fundamental one, and which is felt to be something that plays a very important part in the modern social movement. But people in studying it keep their attention solely fixed on economiclife. They make the question of the nature of a commodity solely an economic one. They look to economic life itself for the forces that shall bring about conditions, under which the worker shall no longer feel that his labour-power is playing a part unworthy of him in the body social. They see, how the modern form of industrial economy came about historically in the recent evolution of mankind. They see too, how it gave the commodity character to human labour-power. What they do not see, is, that it is a necessity inherent in economic life, that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity. Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labour-power of its commodity character, unless one can find a way of separating it out from the economic process. It is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give it a shape in which human labour may come by its rights inside that process itself. What one must endeavor, is to finda way of separating labour-power out from the economic process, and bringing it undersocialforces that will do away with its commodity character. The worker sets his desire upon some arrangement of economic life, where his labour-power shall find a fitting place; not seeing, that the commodity character of his labour is inherently and essentially due to his being bound up in the economic processes as part and parcel of them. Being obliged to surrender his labour-power to the economic processes, the whole man himself is caught up into them. So long as the economic system has the regulating of labour-power, it will go on consuming labour-power just as it consumes commodities,—in the manner that is most useful to its purposes. It is as though the power of economic life hypnotised people, so that they can look at nothing except what is going on inside it. They may look for ever in this direction without discovering how labour-power can escape being a commodity. Some other form of industrial economy will onlymake labour-power a commodity in some other manner. Thelabourquestion cannot find place in its true shape as part of thesocialquestion, until it is recognised that the considerations of economic life which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of commodities, are not such whose competence should be extended to human labour-power.

New age thought has not learned to distinguish the totally different fashions in which the two things enter into economic life: i.e., on the one hand, labour-power, which is intimately bound up with the human-being himself; and, on the other hand, those things that proceed from another source and are dissociated from the human-being, and which circulate along those paths that all commodities must take from their production to their consumption. Sound thinking on these lines will shew both the true form of the labour-power question, and the place that economic life must occupy in a healthily constituted society.

From this, it is obvious that the “social question” will divide itself into three distinct questions. The first is the question of a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social; the second, the consideration of the position of labour-power, and the right way to incorporate it in the life of the community. Thirdly, it will be possible to deduce the proper place and function of economic life.

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