Socialist Stumbling-Blocks

Ideas which take account of the realities that gave rise to the demands now agitating humanity, and are in harmony with the conditions under which it is possible for men to live together culturally, politically and economically " such ideas are drowned out by the clamor of others that are remote from life in both regards. People who long for something other than the traditional forms of life, or who have in fact already been torn out of these older forms by events, are people who until now have stood at such a remove from the forces that brought these circumstances to the surface of history that they lack any insight whatever into how they act and what they signify. Within the mass of the working classes, there is a dull consciousness that demands a change in their form of life, which they see as a result of capitalist forces dominating the economy. Yet the manner of their participation in economic life hitherto has not made them aware of the way these forces operate. Thus they are unable to conceive any fruitful way of transforming these forces. The intellectual leaders and agitators of the proletarian masses are blinded by utopian ideas and theories which derive from a social science still based on the old economic concepts that so urgently need changing. These agitators have not even the faintest idea that their notions about politics, economics and cultural life are in no way different from the “bourgeois notions” they are fighting, and that at bottom all they are striving for is to see the old notions realized by a new group. However, nothing really new ever comes about when different people do the same old thing in a slightly different way.

One of these “old ideas” is the attempt to control economics by political and legal means. It is an “old idea” because it has brought a large part of humanity into an untenable position, as the catastrophe of World War I has shown. The new idea that must replace this old one is to liberate the administration of the economy from any kind of interference by political or national power, and to conduct the management of the economy along lines that are based entirely on economic principles and economic interests.

Wikipedia: 

The proletariat (from Latin proles, "offspring") is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. Originally it was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their sons. The term was initially used in a derogatory sense, until Karl Marx used it as a sociological term to refer to the working class.

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