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

You see, a word had been spoken that the modern proletarian understood in a completely different way than the member of the previously leading strata of humanity was able to understand it. The member of the hitherto leading classes of humanity might have been convinced by such a word with his head, but he was completely caught in a social order that was a relic of world views of earlier times, in all sorts of ways, even if he did not admit it to himself, in all sorts of religious, artistic and other sentiments. He was not obliged to place his whole being in the light of such a philosophy. The proletarian, however, was compelled to see his whole being in the light of such a philosophy. Why? Not because the machine had come into being, not because capitalism had emerged, was the essential thing. The essential thing was that the proletarian was called away from his earlier living conditions, which, through his craft or the like, gave him something to answer the question: What are you worth as a human being among other human beings? Now he stood at the machine; that gives him no connection between himself and other people. Now he was standing in the midst of the bare economic system of capitalism. Now he was forced to answer the question from a completely different angle: What are you actually as a human being? — So he turned to this modern world view as he did to his new religion, which for others was a head-on conviction, but for him something that filled his entire being. Now, what had the proletarian taken over and what had ultimately filled everything that spread as a social outlook among the working class? It came, even if it was not always understood, from the development of the leading, namely the bourgeois, strata of human society. What the proletarian had adopted in the way of wisdom, of science, of materialistic views about man, had not grown in the proletarian's intellect; it was the heritage of what bourgeois thinking had developed in modern times. The proletarian, while living quite differently, only brought bourgeois thinking to its ultimate consequence, to its utmost development. And what did it become in his soul? Oh, he was convinced that this last legacy from the bourgeoisie must, after all, give him something soul-bearing. It was, so to speak, unconsciously the last great trust that the proletariat placed in the bourgeoisie, and that consisted in its taking over the newer materialistic world-view from the bourgeoisie. This last great trust has been betrayed. At least that is the unconscious feeling of the proletarian. And that is what underlies today's social facts, despite all the excesses, in their innermost essence.