p Doctor Stockmann fulminates at the fatal public meeting, at which he shows that he has a great deal of good-will and very little knowledge:

p “The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who make up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in terrible, overwhelming majority all the wide world over."

p These words of his, as we know, greatly pleased the anarchists, who saw them as a justification of the rebellious activity of the "conscious revolutionary minority”. But the anarchists were mistaken. These words of Doctor Stockmann’s justified something quite different. See what practical conclusion he draws from them himself: "But how in the devil’s name can it ever be right for the fools to rule over the wise men? (Uproar and yells.) Yes, yes, you can shout me down, but you cannot gainsay me. The majority has might—unhappily—but right it has not. It is I, and the few, the individuals, that are in the right. The minority is always right."  [596•* 

p Would the anarchists agree that the majority has might, "but right it has not"! I think not. Further. Would the anarchists agree that the minority is “always” right? I think they would not. Otherwise they would have to accept that capitalists are “always” right in their clashes with workers. But if the anarchists do not 597 agree with this—at least they should not agree, if they want to be logical—the people who will and should agree are, firstly, all those who belong to the privileged minority, and, secondly, all those who seek with the help of theory to justify the existence of such a minority. Finally, we already know that Ivar Kareno, who dreams of “destroying” the workers, is in full agreement with this. But here the question arises as to why he agrees with it.

p That people who belong to the privileged minority are ready to applaud all who seek to justify their privileged position is clear without any further explanation. But Ivar Kareno does not belong to the privileged minority. Not only is lie not a rich man; he is poor and deep in debt. The play At the Gates of the Realm ends with a scene in which Kareno receives the bailiff who has come to distrain him. And he is ruined not because he wanted to get rich at someone else’s expense through some kind of speculating, but because, being totally absorbed in his writing, he lacked the practical possibility of earning his daily bread. He is not an “acquirer”, but a most unselfish man with an idea. Why then did he embrace an idea hostile to the working class? He is not a capitalist, but a proletarian who works with his brain, as people were fond of putting it in Russia at one time. Why then does the brain of this proletarian work in a direction opposed to the interests of proletarians who work with their hands? This deserves careful thought.

p We know nothing of Ivar Kareno’s earlier life. There is no reference to it in the play At the Gates of the Realm. All that we learn from it is that "the blood of a small, unruly people flows" in Kareno’s veins, for one of his ancestors was a Finn. But that is not enough, of course. It is a question not of race, but of the conditions of social and private life that led our hero to his misanthropy. We do not know what these conditions were. Kareno appears before us as a full-fledged misanthrope. But here is a real person, the Polish poet Jan Kasprowicz, who, incidentally, is himself from the people. Like Ivar Kareno, Kasprowicz despises the popular masses and pays it the following compliments, for example:

p “A king in rags, seated on a throne stripped of its beads and gilt! Your eyes shine with the fire of envy, lust distorts your mouth into vile jaws. You goggle your terrible basilisk eyes or veil them cunningly with pretence, enticing the beast that is stained with blood under your nails, under your skinny hand!"

p And here is some more: "You are the enemy of the spirit] With your tin feet you have trampled the flowers sown by the hand of the divine Sower! On the withered wasteland you put the body’s hulk fearful to the spirit. Where you have destroyed the foundations of earlier sanctuaries, a new temple arises for you. Oh, immense, divine, sacred one, oh, monarch, king, high priest! 598 Here is the great altar, all covered with gold! Your thick carrion will lie bloating on it, first among the first divinities, nursing" Debauchery on its knee! Will you reign for long, you bloody, savage Moloch that has devoured my heart?..."  [598•* 

p When Pushkin and Lermontov attacked the “rabble”, they more often than not had in mind the high society rabble of the rich salons, that was attired in gold uniforms and received rich incomes. For them the word “rabble” was more often than not a synonym for the term "high society”. Whereas Kasprowicz, like Kareno, has in mind not "high society" but the “people”, whose labours buy the luxury and pleasures of "high society”. If Kasprowicz’s “mob” has a “skinny” hand, this is obviously the result of privation. And it is precisely this mob, which endures all manner of privation, that Kasprowicz hates; and precisely its triumph will, according to him, bring with it debauchery and all manner of vileness. But his attitude towards it earlier was quite difierent. "Once you were my divinity, mob,” he says in one of his poems. As a youth he did not lack certain, very vague, it is true, socialist sympathies. Why did he lose these sympathies? "Your stomach destroyed my faith,” he exclaims, addressing the “rabble”, "and now my love can no longer bend over the steps of your altars without divinity. Now, with the remains of my strength, I have begun to blaspheme, and my weak hand hacks at your idol, bloody Moloch, who has gnawed at my heart and sucked out the precious marrow of my soul, like a vampire!"  [598•** 

p Kasprowicz’s faith was destroyed, as he himself says, "by the mob’s stomach”. What does this mean? It means that he found the latter’s demands too coarse, too materialistic, as the philistines of the world put it. Kasprowicz would like people to have noble ideals. But he does not understand that a noble ideal may be closely linked with definite economic demands. For him economics is one thing, and the ideal another; the ideal is separated from economics by a whole abyss, and there is not and cannot be a bridge joining the edge of the abyss on which the ideal stands with the edge on which economics is. This is a naive, almost childish view, lacking in any scientific understanding of social life and social psychology. Arguments based on such a view are quite unconvincing, of course. But they are extremely characteristic indications of the present mood of a whole social stratum, of the "proletarians who work with their brains”, to whom, as we have seen, our hero Ivar Kareno also belongs. This stratum occupies in capitalist society an intermediate position between the proletariat in the true sense of the word and the bourgeoisie. 599 Although it has produced many people who have rendered indispensable services to the proletariat, on the whole it vacillates constantly between the two belligerent parties. Today it sympathises more with the workers; tomorrow it inclines more to the side of the bourgeoisie. But however great its sympathy with the workers, it is never able to get rid of its bourgeois prejudices entirely. The aspirations and views that prevail among the bourgeoisie always have a tremendous influence on it. This is why even its socialist sympathies are of a bourgeois nature. This stratum extremely rarely goes any further than bourgeois or pettybourgeois socialism. And since both bourgeois and petty bourgeois socialism are incapable of adopting a materialist basis, the people infected by them always look down contemptuously on the “stomach” demands of the proletariat. These demands seem to them to be engendered by “envy”. And when these people begin to lose their, albeit petty-bourgeois, socialist sympathies, they think that this psychological change, which, as we already know, is so natural in their intermediate position, is taking place only because the coarse “stomach” of the proletariat offends their delicate “faith”. And then they cannot find enough words to express their hatred of the proletariat; and they begin to thirst for the advent of a superhuman “despot”, etc. Here one has to agree with Nekrasov that great is the eagle’s ire, if he happens to singe his wings in the fire.^^188^^

p When people of this kind deign to take part in the workingclass movement, they make the most impractical and absurd demands of it as a consequence of the Utopian nature of their ideal aspirations. And the more impractical and absurd these demands, the sooner these gentlemen become disillusioned with modern socialism. Przybyszewski’s Erik Falk says:

p “I do not believe in Social-Democratic prosperity. Nor do I believe that a party which has money in abundance and founds hospital funds and savings banks can achieve anything.... I do not believe that a party which thinks about a peaceful, rational solution of the social question can do anything at all. As little as the drawing-room anarchist Mr. John Henry Mackay.... They all preach peaceful revolution, the changing of the broken wheel while the cart is in motion. Their whole dogmatic structure is idiotically stupid just because it is so logical, for it is based on almighty reason. But up to now everything has taken place by virtue not of reason, but of foolishness, of meaningless chance."

There is no need to examine here whether Falk understands "Social-Democratic prosperity" properly and whether he portrays Social-Democratic tactics correctly. For my purpose it is enough to point out that the "dogmatic structure" of modern SocialDemocracy angers this hero precisely because of its logic. He proclaims il Lo be "idiotically stupid" precisely because "it is based 600 on almighty reason”, and assures us that up to now everything has taken place by virtue "of foolishness, of meaningless chance”. It is very easy to imagine that his tactics, based on “meaningless” considerations, would not merit the slightest accusation of being “reasonable” or “logical”. And it is equally easy to imagine that after joining the working-class party, Messrs. Falks, in spite, of the bourgeois nature of their socialism, will always incline to the wing which they regard as the "most extreme": for they so detest everything that bears the slightest resemblance to "peaceful revolution".  [600•*  But since “extreme” aspirations, based only on “foolishness” and "meaningless chance”, are more than likely to remain unrealised, Messrs. Falks for this reason also are bound to become “disillusioned” at their very first encounter with life. Having become “disillusioned”, they will begin to pay the “mob” compliments like those illustrated by the passages from Kasprowicz’s poems quoted above. They despise the “majority” no less than Doctor Stockmann does. However, in their attacks on it there is not and cannot be the naivete characteristic of Doctor Stockmann’s attacks. They have had the chance to find out what Stockmann did not know, and they have realised that no one can remain indifferent to the present-day working-class movement, and one must either go over firmly to its side or oppose it equally firmly. It goes without saying that as people who have become disillusioned they can make only the latter choice.