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 spiritual life. 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 conceptions of 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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