THE MYTH OF THE MARXIST DIALECTIC
81
into groups
whic~
have an interest in injuring one another, they
will
still be hampered bv inescapable limitations. Only from that
moment when they have become conscious of these conflicts and
have set their hands to the task of getting rid of them will they find
themselves on the road to arriving at a really human code of ethics
or political system or school of art as distinguished from those lame
and cramped ones we know. But the current of human endeavor is
always running in
this
direction. Each of the great political move–
ments that surges up across social barriers brings about a new and
broader merging of the rising aggreSsive element with the element
it assaults and absorbs. The human sp1rit is always expanding
against predatory animal pressure, to make larger and larger unit<>
of human beings, until we shall finally have realized once for all
that the human race itself is one and that it must not injure itself.
Then it will base on this realization a morality, a society and .an
art
more profound and more comprehensive than man is at present
able even to imagine.
"And though it is true that we can no longer depend on God to
give us laws that transcend human limitations, though it is true that
we cannot even pretend that any of the intellectual constructions of
man has any reality independent of the special set of earthly condi–
tions which has stimulated certain men to build it, yet we may claim
for our new science of social change, rudimentary though this still is,
that
it
may more truly be described as universal and objective than
any
previous theory of history. For Marxist science has been de–
veloped in reaction to a situation in which it has finally become ap–
parent that if society is to survive at all, it must be reorganized on
new principles of equality; so that
we
have been forced to make a
criticism of history from the point of view of the imminent necessity
of a world set free from nationalisms and classes.
If
we have com–
mitted ourselves to fight for the interests of the proletariat, it is because
we are really trying to work for the interests of humanity as a whole.
In
this
future the human spirit as represented by the proletariat
will
expand to make the larger unity of which its mind
is
already com–
passing the vision."
