And so collapses the Marxian
remedy for class conflicts. That remedy assumes that if all property
could be held in common, class differences would disappear. The
assumption is false. Property might well be held in common, and yet
not be conceived as a whole. The moment any group of people failed to
see communism in a communist manner, they would divide into classes on
the basis of what they saw.
In respect to the existing social order Marxian socialism emphasizes
property conflict as the maker of opinion, in respect to the loosely
defined working class it ignores property conflict as the basis of
agitation, in respect to the future it imagines a society without
property conflict, and, therefore, without conflict of opinion. Now in
the existing social order there may be more instances where one man
must lose if another is to gain, than there would be under socialism,
but for every case where one must lose for another to gain, there are
endless cases where men simply imagine the conflict because they are
uneducated. And under socialism, though you removed every instance of
absolute conflict, the partial access of each man to the whole range
of facts would nevertheless create conflict. A socialist state will
not be able to dispense with education, morality, or liberal science,
though on strict materialistic grounds the communal ownership of
properties ought to make them superfluous.
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