Reflections on Revolution in an Age of Reaction

Abstract

There is not always, perhaps not often in history a clear demarcation between eras of progress and eras of regression; frequently the two things coincide. The 16th century in Europe was a time of technical, scientific, cultural advance, and also of scholastic hair-splitting and burning of heretics and witches. Its worse features marked the backward pull of the past, its better ones the magnetism of the future. Today capitalism as a system of production is flourishing, as science is, but the civilization it fostered in its earlier phases is rotting, while another is struggling to be born. A socialist economy cannot grow up within capitalism, as a capitalist economy did within feudal absolutism, but something like a socialist outlook or mentality can. Positive and negative, wholesome and regressive thinking are contending in every country, every class or community, often within the same mind.