ABSTRACT
From the point of view of morals, there seems, indeed, little to be said for our Western social ideals. And yet we are so satisfied with ourselves that we do not even take the trouble to find out what it is 27that the Bolsheviks criticize in us, and what it is they really want to do. Now in Russia we may study a country where for ten years prodigious efforts have been directed to the working out of -a quite different social ideal—the ‘proletarian’ ideal, to which we referred at the beginning of this treatise. In contrast to the strictly self-regarding ideal of our ‘bourgeois’ civilizations, the proletarian ideal exalts the Community as a whole, and therefore also the labour and the abstinence on the part of individuals on which the welfare of the Community must ultimately rest. All possible stress is laid on the dignity of labour rather than on the dignity of possession. The Communists do not exalt those who heap up wealth. He who ‘strikes oil’ will never be rewarded by a peerage, but by the loss of his civic rights. It is not those who gain but those who give who receive honour. Every manual worker, from the charwoman upward, who gives his or her humble best is to be treated with as much respect as the skilled brainworker. It is no doubt right that talent and skill in any occupation should be honoured, and so it always will be; but it is also right, and this we Westerners have overlooked, that the will to give should be recognized as even more worthy of honour than the power to give. In the emphasis they place on the spirit of service, the Communists have taken to heart some of the most important maxims of the New Testament, clothed them in a fresh garb, which 28renders them, apparently, unrecognizable to us; associated them with the Red Flag and the name of Lenin; and when all this is accompanied by wordy denunciation of all ‘religion,’ the deception for us is complete. (It is curious that almost the only point on which we are prepared to believe exactly what the Communists say is just the one which is entirely untrue, i.e., as regards their own essential ‘irreligiousness’ !) In their social ideal there is no doubt that the Communists have introduced ethics where we have been content with snobbery.
