“Free thinking” in the sense of materialistic monism, laicism and pragmatic acceptance of the world this side of the grave follow from this not indeed by logical necessity but nevertheless very naturally. Thus it reshapes not only our methods of attaining our ends but also these ultimate ends themselves. The capitalist process rationalizes behavior and ideas and by so doing chases from our minds, along with metaphysical belief, mystic and romantic ideas of all sorts.
I have pointed out before that social legislation or, more generally, institutional change for the benefit of the masses is not simply something which has been forced upon capitalist society by an ineluctable necessity to alleviate the ever-deepening misery of the poor but that, besides raising the standard of living of the masses by virtue of its automatic effects, the capitalist process also provided for that legislation the means “and the will.” The words in quotes require further explanation that is to be found in the principle of spreading rationality. “Two points in particular must be mentioned. If class struggle was the subject matter of history and also the means of bringing about the socialist dawn, and if there had to be just those two classes, then their relation had to be antagonistic on principle or else the force in his system of social dynamics would have been lost.” Again, however, he had no choice, not because he wanted to arrive at revolutionary results-these he could have derived just as well from dozens of other possible schemata-but because of the requirements of his own analysis. But I am almost tempted to say that there was, if anything, less of absolute nonsense in the old harmonistic view-full of nonsense though that was too-than in the Marxian construction of the impassable gulf between tool owners and tool users.
In social life, antagonism and synagogism are of course both ubiquitous and in fact inseparable except in the rarest of cases.
To any mind not warped by the habit of fingering the Marxian rosary it should be obvious that their relation is, in normal times, primarily one of cooperation and that any theory to the contrary must draw largely on pathological cases for verification. “The exaggeration of the definiteness and importance of the dividing line between the capitalist class in that sense and the proletariat was surpassed only by the exaggeration of the antagonism between them.
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