INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



here a moral and psychological problem of considerable interest, to 

 which a whole book has been devoted by Brameld.^ How do real 

 alternatives arise in the world-process, if the result is inevitable? To 

 this question the answer of a representative communist spokesman 

 would be of interest. We have it in a recent paper of R. P. Dutt, 

 arising out of a controversy with the Dutch writer de Leeuw.^ "It is 

 the very heart," he says, "of the revolutionary marxist understanding 

 of inevitability that it has nothing in common with the mechanical 

 fatalism of which our opponents incorrectly accuse us. This inevita- 

 bility is realised in practice through living human wills under given 

 social conditions, consciously reacting to those conditions, and con- 

 sciously choosing their line between alternative possibilities seen by 

 them, within the given conditions. 'Man makes his own history, but 

 not out of the whole cloth.' We are able scientifically to predict the 

 inevitable outcome, because we are able to analyse the social conditions 

 governing the consciousness, and the line of development, of those 

 social conditions. We are able to analyse the growth of contradictions, 

 and the consequent accumulation of forces generating ever greater 

 revolutionary consciousness and will in the exploited majority, till 

 they become strong enough to overcome all obstacles, and conquer. 

 We are able to lay do\^^n with scientific precision that every failure, 

 every choice of an incorrect path, can only be temporary, because 

 the outcome can in no way solve the contradictions generating the 

 revolutionary consciousness and will. These contradictions then only 

 lead to renewed and intensified struggle, up to final victory. The 

 process is inevitable. But the human consciousness of the participants 

 in this inevitable process is not the consciousness of automatic cogs 

 in a predetermined mechanism. It is the consciousness of living, 

 active, human beings, revolting against intolerable evils, deliberately 

 with thought and passion choosing a new alternative, doing and 

 daring all to achieve a new world, and ready to give their lives in 

 the fight because of their intense desire to help by such actions to 

 make possible the achievement of the goal. This fighting revolutionary 

 consciousness is by no means a bowing to an inevitable outcome, 

 but is most actively a seeking to tip the balance and make certain by 



structure. When feudalism was giving place to middle-class capitalism there v/ere the 

 "wars of religion," and the witchcraft mania, even before the English civil war and 

 the French revolution. The middle class will not consent to merge itself in the 

 comradeship of mankind without similar catastrophes. 



^ T. B. H. Brameld, Philosophic Approach to Communism (Chicago, 1933). 



^ R. P. Dutt, Communist International, 1935, 12, 604. 



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