The disillusioning consequences of the World War, the inability of the nations to extricate themselves from the financial and defensive burdens which the war left them as an unholy legacy, the comparative failure of the peace machinery devised to prevent future conflicts, the world depression and the consequent misery and insecurity of millions of workers in every land, and finally the dramatic success of the Russian Revolution, all these factors have made the despised political philosophy of rebellious helots, the great promise and the great peril of the political life of the Western world. It no longer expresses merely the political conviction of advanced proletarians. Intellectuals show covert and overt sympathy toward it, and the business men use it as the bogey man with which to scare the timorous community and prevent it from granting significant concessions to the impatient and sullenly rebellious labor world. The breadth and the depth of the world depression have, moreover, tempted others beside proletarians to express a temper of catastrophism. If they do not share the proletarian hope, that salvation will come out of catastrophe, they are at least inclined to question the possibility of avoiding catastrophe by methods of gradual social change, and await the revolution in the ambivalence of hope and fear.

In spite of the more general consideration and sympathy which the prophecies of revolution receive in the middle-class community, the methods of revolution remain abhorrent to it. Violence and revolution are usually ruled out as permissible instruments of social change on a priori grounds. The middle classes and the rational moralists, who have a natural abhorrence of violence, may be right in their general thesis; but they are wrong in their assumption that violence is intrinsically immoral. Nothing is intrinsically immoral except ill-will and nothing intrinsically good except goodwill. We have previously examined proletarian motives and discovered that, while they are not altogether pure, they are as pure as the motives of collective man usually are; and are certainly not less moral than the motives of those who defend special privileges by more covert means of coercion than the proletarians are able to command.

Since it is very difficult to judge human motives, it is natural that, from an external perspective, the social consequences of an action or policy should be regarded as more adequate tests of its morality than the hidden motives. The good motive is judged by its social goal. Does it have the general welfare as its objective? When viewing a historic situation all moralists become pragmatists and utilitarians. Some general good, some summum bonum, "the greatest good of the greatest number" or "the most inclusive harmony of all vital capacities" is set up as the criterion of the morality of specific actions and each action is judged with reference to its relation to the ultimate goal. We have previously analysed the ultimate objectives of Marxian politics and have found them to be identical with the most rational possible social goal, that of equal justice.

The choice of instruments and immediate objectives which fall between motive and ultimate objective, raises issues which are pragmatic to such a degree that they may be said to be more political than they are ethical. The realm of politics is a twilight zone where ethical and technical issues meet. A political policy cannot be intrinsically evil if it can be proved to be an efficacious instrument for the achievement of a morally approved end. Neither can it be said to be wholly good merely because it seems to make for ultimately good consequences. Immediate consequences must be weighed against the ultimate consequences. The destruction of a life or the suppression of freedom result in the immediate destruction of moral values. Whether the ultimate good, which is hoped to be accomplished by this immediate destruction, justifies the sacrifice, is a question which depends upon many considerations for its answer. How great is the immediate and less inclusive value which is sacrificed for a more ultimate and more inclusive one? How certain is the attainment of the ultimate value? Is there any certainty that violence can establish equality or that an equality so established can be maintained ? These are some of the pragmatic questions which suggest themselves. The questions are important but none of them can be dealt with adequately if it is assumed that any social policy, as violence for instance, is intrinsically immoral. The assumption that violence and revolution are intrinsically immoral rests upon two errors.

The one error is the belief that violence is a natural and inevitable expression of ill-will, and non-violence of goodwill, and that violence is therefore intrinsically evil and non-violence intrinsically good. While such a proposition has a certain measure of validity, or at least of plausibility, it is certainly not universally valid. It is less valid in inter-group relations than in individual relations, if our assumption is correct that the achievement of harmony and justice between groups requires a measure of coercion, which is not necessary in the most intimate and the most imaginative individual relations. Once we admit the factor of coercion as ethically justified, though we concede that it is always morally dangerous, we cannot draw any absolute line of demarcation between violent and nonviolent coercion. We may argue that the immediate consequences of violence are such that they frustrate the ultimate purpose by which it is justified. If that is true, it is certainly not self-evident; and violence can therefore not be ruled out on a priori grounds. It is all the more difficult to do this if we consider that the immediate consequences of violence cannot be differentiated as sharply from those of non-violence, as is sometimes supposed. The difference between them is not an absolute one, even though there may be important distinctions, which must be carefully weighed. Gandhi's boycott of British cotton results in the undernourishment of children in Manchester, and the blockade of the Allies in war-time caused the death of German children. It is impossible to coerce a group without damaging both life and property and without imperiling the interests of the innocent with those of the guilty. Those are factors which are involved in the intricacies of group relations; and they make it impossible to transfer an ethic of personal relations uncritically to the field of inter-group relations.

The second error by which violence comes to be regarded as unethical in intrinsic terms is due to an uncritical identification of traditionalised instrumental values with intrinsic moral values. Only goodwill is intrinsically good. But as soon as goodwill expresses itself in specific actions, it must be determined whether the right motive has chosen the right instruments for the attainment of its goal and whether the objective is a defensible one. For reason may err in guiding the righteous will in the choice of either means or ends. But there are certain specific actions and attitudes which are generally not judged in terms of their adequacy in achieving an approved social end. Experience has established them; and their traditionalised instrumental value is regarded as an intrinsic one. Respect for the life, the opinions and the interests of another is regarded as intrinsically good and violence to the fellowman's life, opinions and interests is prohibited. It is not only assumed that they will have the right ultimate consequences but that they are the natural and inevitable expression of goodwill. In purely personal relations these assumptions are quite generally justified. The moral will expresses itself unconsciously in terms of consideration for the life, the interests and the rights of others; and the consequences of such consideration may be presumed to be good. It is good to trust the neighbor, for it will prompt him to trustworthy action; it is good to respect his life because this respect helps to establish and preserve that general reverence for life upon which all morality rests; it is good not to coerce the opinions of the other because coercion does not change opinion or because it may give an undue advantage to the wrong opinion; it is good to tell the truth because truth-telling facilitates the sharing of experience which is basic to all social life. Such judgments as these may not be universally accepted, but they are the working capital of personal morality.

It is well to note that even in the comparatively simple problems of individual relationships there is no moral value which may be regarded as absolute. It may, in a given instant, have to be sacrificed to some other value. Every action resolves a certain competition between values, in which one value must be subordinated to another. This is necessary in a specific instance even though there may be an ultimate harmony of all high and legitimate moral values. Thus a physician who believes that the neighbor has a right to the truth as well as a right to his life, and that there is no ultimate conflict between the two rights, may nevertheless deny his patient the truth in a given instant, because in that instant the truth might imperil his life. In the same way, though believing that reverence for life is basic to all morality, he may have to make a choice between types of life, and sacrifice an unborn infant to save the life of a mother. A reflective morality is constantly under the necessity of reanalysing moral values which are regarded as intrinsically good and of judging them in instrumental terms. The more inclusive the ends which are held in view, the more the immediate consequences of an action cease to be the authoritative criteria of moral judgment. Since society must constantly deal with these inclusive ends, it always seems to capitulate to the dangerous principle that the end justifies the means. All morality really accepts that principle, but the fact is obscured by the assumption, frequently though not universally justified, that the character of immediate consequences guarantees the character of the ultimate end. A community may believe, as it usually does, that reverence for life is a basic moral attitude, and yet rob a criminal of his life in order to deter others from taking life. It may be wrong in doing this; but if it is, the error is not in taking the life but in following a policy which does not really deter others from murder. The question cannot be resolved on a priori grounds but only by observing the social consequences of various types of punishment. Society may believe that the preservation of freedom of opinion is a social good, not because liberty of thought is an inherent or natural right but because it is a basic condition of social progress. Yet in a given instance the principle of freedom may have to yield to the necessities of social cohesion, requiring a measure of coercion. If the state usually errs in throttling freedom, its error is in using an undue measure of coercion, in applying it prematurely before efforts to achieve solidarity by a mutual accommodation of interests have been exhausted, and in exploiting the resultant social solidarity for morally unapproved ends. On the question of the relative value of freedom and solidarity no final and authoritative answer can be given. Every answer will be relative to the social experience of particular individuals and groups, who have suffered from either anarchy or autocracy and tend to embrace the evils of the one in the effort to escape. cape the perils of the other.

The differences between proletarian and middle-class morality are on the whole differences between men who regard themselves as primarily individuals and those who feel themselves primarily members of a social group. The latter will emphasise liberty, respect for individual life, the rights of property and the moral values of mutual trust and unselfishness. The former will emphasise loyalty to the group and the need of its solidarity, they will subject the rights of property to the total social welfare, will abrogate the values of freedom for the attainment of their most cherished social goal and will believe that conflicts of interest between groups can be resolved, not by accommodation but by struggle. The middle class tries to make the canons of individual morality authoritative for all social relations. It is shocked by the moral cynicism, the tendency toward violence and indifference toward individual freedom of the proletarian. Inasfar as this represents an honest effort to make the ideals of personal morality norms for the conduct of human groups, it is a legitimate moral attitude which must never be completely abandoned. Inasfar as it represents the illusions and deceptions of middle-class people, who never conform their own group conduct to their individual ideals, it deserves the cynical reaction of the proletarian. The illusory element must be admitted to be very large. The middle classes believe in freedom, but deny freedom when its exercise imperils their position in society; they profess a morality of love and unselfishness but do not achieve an unselfish group attitude toward a less privileged group; they claim to abhor violence and yet use it both in international conflict and in the social crises in which their interests are imperiled; they want mutuality of interest between classes rather than a class struggle but the mutuality must not be so complete as to destroy all their special privileges.

The proletarian on the other hand is not enough of an individual, in the attainments of his own cultural life and in the conditions of his social life, to be strongly moved by the canons of individual morality. He is most conscious of the reality of group behavior. He is not only more completely immersed in his own group than the more privileged classes, but he feels the effect of the behavior of other groups upon his life more definitely than do the members of privileged classes. His moral attitudes are determined by the moral behavior of groups rather than by the moral behavior of individuals. He discounts the latter not only because he is himself not an individual, as more privileged persons are, but because he has not found individual morality qualifying the dominant greed and lust to power of privileged groups to any appreciable degree. He has come to the conclusion that the hope of achieving a moral group life results in illusion. The conflict between proletarian and middle-class morality is thus a contest between hypocrisy and brutality, and between sentimentality and cynicism. The limitations of the one tend to accentuate the limitations of the other. The full import of that conflict is revealed in Trotsky's words: "As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the 'sacredness of human life.' We were revolutionaries in opposition and remain revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him and this problem can only be solved by blood and iron."

The communist's reaction to middle-class morality is directed not only against the hypocrisy of the men of power, who profess individual moral ideals but are governed in their group behavior by motives of greed and use the instruments of coercion and violence to gain their ends, but also against middle-class intellectual and religious moralists who hope to insinuate the ideal of personal morality into the behavior of groups. The proletarian is as certain that the hopes of the latter represent a futile sentimentality as he is that the protestations of the former are hypocritical. He is going to build an ideal world, not by trusting in the moral resources of individuals but by remaining on the level of the men of power and using their own instruments against them. Since it is obvious that most middle-class idealists overestimate the available moral resources for radical social change, the proletarian is manifestly not completely mistaken in the moral cynicism which informs his political strategy. But since he is too completely immersed in the social group and too much the victim of group brutalities, he may not have the whole truth about the moral resources of human life. The brutality of his political strategy can be justified only if the moral cynicism which inspires it is true to all the facts. On the other hand the middle-class idealist may, and probably does, live under illusions. He is too completely an individual to be conscious of the most significant behavior of groups. He does not suffer enough, in his comfortable position, from the brutality of collective man, fully to understand his dominant impulses. He may have separated himself from those impulses and detached himself psychologically. But he is not detached economically and therefore does not feel the full force and the real meaning of the impulses of dominant groups. He sees moral forces working efficaciously within the confines of his group, and erroneously imagines that they can be extended until they resolve all group conflict.

The differences in moral outlook between the proletarian and middle-class world can therefore not be judged by any purely a priori criteria. The question between them can be solved only by a study of history. And some of the history which must be studied has not yet been made. Wherefore every analysis trenches inevitably to a certain degree into the field of prophecy. Meanwhile it is important to recognise, that revolutionary strategy is not wanting in either the motives or the objectives which give it a solid moral basis. Neither do its motives or objectives guarantee the validity of its methods or means. These must be judged in the light of all the facts and possibilities in regard to collective human behavior.

If a season of violence can establish a just social system and can create the possibilities of its preservation, there is no purely ethical ground upon which violence and revolution can be ruled out. This could be done only upon the basis of purely anarchistic ethical and political presuppositions. Once we have made the fateful concession of ethics to politics, and accepted coercion as a necessary instrument of social cohesion, we can make no absolute distinctions between non-violent and violent types of coercion or between coercion used by governments and that which is

If a revolution can destroy social injustice and preserve equal justice, much might be forgiven it in the methods which it employs. This is the more obvious if it is considered that the whole of society is constantly involved in both coercion and violence and that the moral advantages of the more traditional and more covert forms of coercion over the less traditional and more overt forms are not as absolute as moralists usually assume. But it would be tragic indeed if the immediate consequences of revolutionary chaos, naturally greater in an industrial civilisation than in an agrarian one, should fail to issue in the final consequence of a lasting justice.

The fear that they will fail is associated with a suspicion that communists, in spite of their realism, become hopeless romantics when they estimate the social consequences of a new economic society. They seem to believe that it will be easy to create perfect social mutuality by destroying inequality of power. But can they destroy economic power without creating strong centres of political power? And how may they be certain that this political power will be either ethically or socially restrained? We have seen that it is difficult to prevent the centralisation of economic power without giving the political state tremendous authority. A powerful state necessitates dangerous concentrations of political power in the hands of a few individuals and a small group. There is no certainty that this new power can be brought under either perfect ethical or social restraint. Ethical restraint is provided, for the moment, in Russia by the moral idealism of revolutionaries who espoused the cause of revolution before it offered the rewards of power. Even that idealism is no guarantee against the abuse of power. The abuse of power by communistic bureaucrats is very considerable, and is bound to grow as the purer revolutionary idealists are supplanted by men who have consciously sought for the possession of power. Though the equalitarian traditions of the revolutionary movement prevent them from using their positions for private economic gain, the abuse of power is a fact for which economic equalitarianism only partially compensates. An officious bureaucrat may cause intolerable injustices, even if he eats the same food and wears the same clothes as his victim.( For a realistic analysis of the growth rather than diminution of political terrorism in Russia, see Waldemar Gurian, Bolshevism: Theory and Practice, Chap. 2. The possibilities of petty chicane and capricious tyranny on the part of all-powerful Soviet officials is implicitly acknowledged in a recent decree of the Kremlin in which general rules of "revolutionary legality" are laid down to restrain the officiousness and caprice of officials. See news dispatch, New York Herald Tribune, August 21, 1932.

The theory of communism is, that the dictatorship is only a transitory state and that it will become unnecessary as soon as the whole community has accepted the equalitarian ideals of communism and no one challenges the regime. This theory fails to do justice to the facts of human nature, revealed not only in the men of power but in ordinary men. If the Russian oligarchy strips itself of its own power, it will be the first oligarchy of history to do so. It cannot, of course, transmit its power by inheritance; but the inheritance of power is not the only cause of its abuse or basis of its perpetuation. The American business oligarchy is not as hereditary as European landed aristocracies, but is for that reason neither more virtuous nor less tenacious in clinging to its power and privilege. Since, according to the tenets of communism, the dictatorship is necessary until all the enemies of the proletarian state are "liquidated," and since external enemies will remain for many decades or centuries, even if all internal enemies should be destroyed, the power of dictatorship could be perpetuated indefinitely without any conscious dishonesties.

The hope that the internal enemies will all be destroyed and that the new society will create only men who will be in perfect accord with the collective will of society, and will not seek personal advantage in the social process, is romantic in its interpretation of the possibilities of human nature and in its mystical glorification of the anticipated automatic mutuality in the communist society. The symbol of this romanticism in communist thought is the virtual anarchism which crowns the structure of communist theory. The state will gradually wither away because it is merely the instrument of domination, which will not be needed in a completely mutual society. Lenin, the brutal realist, when dealing with the realities of today, thus turns sentimentalist when envisaging the possibilities of tomorrow: "When people have become accustomed to observe the fundamental principles of social life and their labor is so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their abilities . . . there will be no need of any exact calculation of the quantity of products to be distributed to each of its members; each will take freely 'according to his needs.' " This perfect mutuality is achieved partly by destroying the disproportion of power and privilege, thus equalising the interests of all and establishing an identity of interest. "Theirs (the masses')," declares William Z. Foster, "will be an individuality growing out of an harmonising with the interests of all." (W. Z. Foseer, Toward Soviet America, p. 333.) The communist is right in assuming that the initial equalisation of power and privilege enhances the possibilities of mutuality in society. If there is no insecurity to compel, and no power to tempt, men to think of themselves before they think of the total needs of society, it is manifestly possible to reduce individual self-seeking. The hope that it can be destroyed to such a degree as not to become the basis of future inequality in society, unless the iron will of society, operating through a potent state, suppresses such tendencies, is as romantic as Rousseauistic interpretations of human problems. The Rousseauistic element in communist thought is, in fact, very clearly expressed in Bukharin's identification of the individual will and the general will: "In such a society (a fully developed communist one) all relations between men will be obvious to each and the social volition will be the organisation of all their wills. It will not be a resultant, obtained by elemental accident, independent of the will of the individual, but a consciously organised social decision.... It will be impossible to observe social phenomena whose effect on the majority of the population will be harmful and ruinous.''(N. Bukharm, Historical Materialism, p. 41.) In all these prophesies pure sentimentality obscures the fact, that there can never be a perfect mutuality of interest between individuals who perform different functions in society. There must, for instance, always be, as there is now in Russia, a certain degree of tension between the peasant who wants as many manufactured articles as possible for the food which he delivers to urban workers, and these workers, who want more food from the peasant than he is inclined to give them for their manufactured goods. The hope that there will ever be an ideal society, in which every one can take without restraint from the common social process "according to his need," completely disregards the limitations of human nature. Man will always be imaginative enough to enlarge his needs beyond minimum requirements and selfish enough to feel the pressure of his needs more than the needs of others. Every society will have to maintain methods of arbitrating conflicting needs to the end of history; and in that process those who are shrewder will gain some advantage over the simple, even if they should lack special instruments of power. Bukharin's idea, that a social policy harmful or ruinous to the population would be unthinkable in a communist society, is buttressed by the further prediction that the "abolition of the educational monopoly" would equalise intelligence sufficiently to arm every citizen with the power to defend his interests in society. But the idea that intelligence can be equalised by equal educational opportunities, is just as unrealistic as to suppose that present inequalities of intelligence are purely innate and could not be partially eliminated by equal educational advantages for all.

Significantly the communist does not completely trust the automatic identity of interest to establish perfect mutuality. He believes in moral education for the creation of attitudes of mutuality. With Lenin, he wants people to "become accustomed to observe the fundamental principles of social life." And he is right in assuming that a society in which the whole power of social approval is behind the co-operative attitude rather than the motive of self-seeking, will have a tremendous effect upon moral attitudes, as it has today in Russia. And when a co-operative society adds the precept of the school to the potent example set by the practice of society itself, there is no reason why it should not be able to minimise individual self-seeking and maximise social co-operation. But it is sentimental and romantic to assume that any education or any example will ever completely destroy the inclination of human nature to seek special advantages at the expense of, or in indifference to, the needs and interests of others. It is significant that the Russians have been forced to compromise with this force in human nature by establishing wage differentials in both industry and agriculture, in order to augment the socialised motive forces with the motive of seeking personal rewards for labor. They have tried to hide the fact that this is a concession to, and compromise with, an inevitable weakness in human nature by insisting that it is merely a concession to a vestigial remnant of capitalist psychology. They hope that the next generation will be entirely emancipated from it. Waldo Frank reports the following interesting conversation with a communist factory director: " 'Is there then no danger,' I said at last, 'to your communist ideal?' 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' has always seemed to me to be the golden rule of socialism.... Yet here you are, remunerating inventions with money, paying superior sums of money to the more capable men. Here you are, planning your new hierarchy of merit by the old hated symbol of money.... It almost seems to me as if you were fighting the old order by infecting yourselves with the disease which rotted it.' The communist answers him....'To meet the temporary emergency, we must induce the men we have, men brought up in the capitalist world, men still open to capitalist ideas, to speed up production. We must do this by any means that will convince them.... But meantime, our children are being brought up on pure communist values.' 'You mean that the standard by which your young people are being taught to live will be stronger than the example they see before them? . . . When has education been according to an ideal superior to the practised way of life? And when has an ideal prevailed against the reality which belied it?'''(Waldo Frank, Dawn in Russia, p. 142)

Inequality of reward need not of course, even if it represents a permanent concession to the weaknesses of human nature, as is probably the case, result in the old inequalities of power which breed inequalities of privilege, which are either disproportionate or totally irrelevant to the importance of function and the efficiency with which function is performed. It is possible for society to prevent accumulations of unequal rewards from being transmuted into instruments of social power. But it cannot prevent them from becoming symbols of unequal social prestige. In other words, if the desperate means which the communist uses are to be justified by the totally different and more ideal society which he creates, the justification is not as convincing as it seems to the romantic communist. If the new society does not eliminate the weaknesses of human nature, which cause injustice, as completely as he supposes, he has lost the moral advantage of his absolutism. Perhaps a society which gradually approximates the ideal will not be so very inferior morally to one which makes one desperate grasp after the ideal, only to find that the realities of history and nature dissolve it. Absolutism, in both religious and political idealism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations. In religion it permits absurdities and in politics cruelties, which fail to achieve justifying consequences because the inertia of human nature remains a nemesis to the absolute ideal. Individuals may aspire to the absolute with more justification and less peril than societies. If the price which they must pay is high, the probable futility of their effort involves only their own losses. And the sense of a noble tragedy may compensate for the defeat. But societies risk the welfare of millions when they gamble for the attainment of the absolute. And, since coercion is an invariable instrument of their policy, absolutism transmutes this instrument into unbearable tyrannies and cruelties. The fanaticism which in the individual may appear in the guise of a harmless or pathetic vagary, when expressed in political policy, shuts the gates of mercy on mankind