Ethilcs And The Materialist Conception Of History by Karl Kautsky

Author:Karl Kautsky [Kautsky, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Publisher: https://epub.press
Published: 2021-05-15T23:00:00+00:00

II. The Organization of Human Society

a. The Technical Development

Let us now regard man from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history at the stage at which we left him in the last chapter, at the boundary which divided him from the rest of the animal world. What is it that raises him above it? Do there exist between him and them only gradual differences or is there also an essential difference? Neither as a thinking nor as a moral being is man essentially different from the animals. Does not perhaps the difference lie in the fact that he produces, that is, adapts material found in nature by means of change of form or of place to his purposes? This activity is, however, also found in the animal world. To leave out of account many insects, such as bees and ants we find among many warm blooded animals, nay, even among many fishes, species of productive activity, namely, the production of refuges and dwellings, with underground buildings, and so on. And, however much of this productive activity is also the product and result of inherited instincts and the positions, they are often so suitably adapted to various circumstances, that consciousness, the knowledge of causal connections, must also play a part thereby.

Or is it the use of tools which raises man above the animals? Also note that among animals we find at least the beginnings of the application of tools, of branches, of trees for defence, of stones for cracking nuts and so on. This intelligence as well as the development of the feet to hands enables the apes to do that.

Thus not the production of means of consumption and not the use of tools distinguishes man from the animals. What, however, alone distinguishes the former is the production of tools, which serve for production, for defence or attack. The animal can at the most find the tool in nature: it is not capable of inventing such. It may produce things for its immediate use, prepare dwellings, collect provisions but it does not think so far as to produce things which will not serve for direct consumption, but the production of the means of consumption.

With the production of the means of production the animal man begins to become the human man; with that he breaks away from the animal world to found his own empire, an empire with its own kind of development, which is wholly unknown in the rest of nature, in which nothing similar is to be found.

So long as the animal only produces with the organs provided by nature, or only uses tools which nature gives him, it cannot rise above the means thus provided for them by nature. His development only occurs in the manner that his own organism develops itself, his own organs unfold themselves – the brain included: a slow and unconscious process carried on by means of the struggle for life, which the animal can in no way hurry on by its conscious activity.

On

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