ABSTRACT
Is it surprising that in Russia they revolt against our ‘bourgeois’ methods, our ideas and values, and that their prejudice against everything ‘bourgeois’ seems to have become almost an obsession? The Communists seem to me to be making a prodigious effort to abolish the middle-class perspective, and to put first things first. That in this they also make very great mistakes goes without saying, but in some points they seem to me to succeed far better than we do. The really first thing to them is life in itself. This is the ultimate value. From this starting-point they seek to build society afresh. Every child who is born into their State, so far as human arrangements can secure it, must have an equal chance of life: life in all its possible fullness, freedom and beauty, for body, mind, and soul. Whatever obstructs this purpose must go, and therefore, first and foremost, the private holding of capital. They have exposed and condemned our habit of thinking of human ‘good’ in different terms according to which class is in question. To them, the bourgeois shows muddle-headed self-deception when he maintains that what is ‘good’ for the sons of his poorer neighbours is not ‘good’ for his own. Such distinctions cannot possibly be reconciled with their conception 48of the value of life in itself. That any individual, because he was born in degraded circumstances, should be further punished by society and condemned to a position of inferiority, is similarly irreconcilable with their reading of ‘good.’ They have revolted against the injustice and cruelty inherent in the conception of ‘inferior’ classes.
