IV. The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life In the Present and the Future

About twenty years ago, I met with fierce opposition from proletarians and non-proletarians, from workers and middle-class people, when I expressed what I believed I had clearly recognized: that the modern labor movement, in the most eminent sense – it sounds paradoxical, but it is so – has the character of a movement of thought. However strange it may sound, it is true. It starts from thoughts. It starts from thoughts that, drawing ever wider and wider circles, sank into the souls of the proletarian population in the hours of the evening, when the proletarian population wrested itself from the fatigue of the day, and in which a truly more more real conception of social facts than was given by the political economists of the universities and teaching institutions, who essentially gave what the bourgeois class had to say about economic life and the other aspects of modern life. What has become part of the thoughts and especially the thought habits of the modern proletariat is, in essence, more important and significant than anything else for the movements that are taking place in the civilized world today. For what is actually at issue here? Well, as I said, with the advent of modern technology, with the advent of the capitalist economic system, the newer, more scientifically oriented worldview also emerged from the old worldviews, which had more of a general human or even a religious character. This scientifically oriented worldview, how did it confront the bourgeoisie, how did it confront the proletariat?