INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



wrote,^ Engels said that "the seizure of the means of production 

 by society puts an end to commodity production and hence to the 

 domination of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social 

 production is replaced by conscious organisation on a planned 

 basis. The struggle for individual existence comes to an end. And 

 at this point, in a certain sense, man finally cuts himself off from 

 the animal world, leaves the conditions of animal existence behind 

 him, and enters conditions which are really human. ... It is 

 humanity's leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of 

 freedom." 



Lastly, it must be emphasised that our present civilisation is mani- 

 festly not a state of stable equilibrium. Tlie enormous advances in 

 scientific knowledge and practical technique, due themselves in a 

 large degree to the middle-class economic system of which Spencer 

 was the representative, have made that system an anachronism. 

 Nothing short of the absolute abolition of private ownership of 

 resources and machines, the abolition of national sovereignties, and 

 the government of the world by a power proceeding from the class 

 which must aboHsh classes, will suit the technical situation of the 

 t^^entieth century. 



After all, within single human lifetimes it has sometimes been 

 possible to discern the advance of human society to ever more complex 

 unities and higher levels of organisation. To^-ards the end of his 

 noble autobiography,^ that great American, Henry Adams, noted 

 the two outstanding instances of the victory of the larger unit in his 

 own experience, first, the triumph of the North in the American Civil 

 War, secondly, the failure of the "trust-busting" period of legislation. 

 "All one's life one had struggled for unity, and unity had always 

 won." It may be illuminating to regard the present World War 

 (1942) as a movement of secessionism just as surely as the Civil War 

 which Adams lived through — not indeed from a World State already 

 in being, but from the idea of the World State for which humanity 

 is obviously ready. All dominating racialisms, at this stage of world 



could be content with nothing which did not include mention of "progress," "order," 

 "living for others," justice, love, etc. But these things are not something superadded 

 to nature, they arise within it and grow out of it. Comradeship is precisely one of the 

 essential conditions for high social organisation, and like all the other highest human 

 qualities a natural product. After Bacon's time, said Marx (in tlie Holy Family) materialism 

 became misanthropic and ascetic. It was rescued by the French and by Marx himself. 



1 F. Engels, Anti-Diihring (London, n.d.), p. 318. 



^ The Education of Henry Adams (first published by the Massachusetts Historical 

 Society, 1907, also London, 1928), pp. 398, 402, 500. 



