time: the refreshing river 



action the victory of one alternative . and the defeat of another alter- 

 native. Every revolutionary worth his salt acts in every stage of the 

 fight as if the whole future of the revolution depended on his action. 

 And in presenting the issues of the present day to the masses, we 

 present them not as placid inevitabilities to contemplate like the 

 movement of the stars, but as a gigantic issue with the whole future 

 of humanity at stake, calling for the utmost determination, courage, 

 sacrifice, and will to conquer. This is the essence of the revolutionary 

 marxist understanding of inevitability." 



From this passage two principal thoughts emerge. In the first 

 place, the marxist writer speaks of inevitability only because he is 

 confident that he understands die nature of human beings and their 

 reactions to external conditions. Their knowledge of good and evil, 

 pleasure and pain, will have its ultimate effect and that effect is 

 inevitable. 



We can take our stand upon the simple, natural, healthy, human 

 desires of the mass of mankind, for love, for children, for socially 

 useful work, for fundamental decency and dignity. This is the mean- 

 ing of the ancient Confucian advice to rulers, in the Ta-Shioh (Great 

 Learning) — Min chih so hao^ hao chih; min chih so o, 6 chih; "Love 

 what the people love, and hate what the people hate." 



If we explore more closely the mechanism of this inevitability 

 we see that it is connected with the contradictions which arise in 

 each successive stage of human history. Thus modern nationalist 

 states must arm their workers in their struggles with foreign imperial- 

 isms, yet at the same time this is to arm their destroyers. They must 

 engage in colonial development, but this gives rise to native m.ove- 

 ments of liberation. In the last resort fascist theory is brought in to 

 save the decaying structure, and this essays to substitute for Reason 

 a fantastic irrational mythology, but on the other hand modern 

 capitalism cannot get on without effective control over nature, and 

 this necessitates scientific rationality. 



Secondly, inevitability once admitted, the time-scale remains only 

 too obscure. It is true that we might envisage a long period of stag- 

 nation as the outcome of our present civilisation. China is sometimes 

 thought (without much justice) to present a century-long spectacle of 

 such stagnation. But whereas this might be compatible with an 

 agricultural, bureaucratic, isolated community lacking good com- 

 munications and so able to sterilise revolutionary movements within 

 itself, it is much more difficult to imagine such a state of affairs existing 



268 



