The Revolution Absolute

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE POLITICAL LAW OF EXPLOITATION Politics is the art and science of human mass action. To know something of politics is to know something of how and why men are moved to act together. It appears to be the first rule of politics that men act together to get things that they cannot get by acting...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE POLITICAL LAW OF EXPLOITATION Politics is the art and science of human mass action. To know something of politics is to know something of how and why men are moved to act together. It appears to be the first rule of politics that men act together to get things that they cannot get by acting separately; and that community of interest in material things is the basic fact of mass action. Man is a political animal in Aristotle's well-worn phrase ? because he is the only living thing with imaginative and forecasting desires ? desires that run far into the future. Man is political because he plans for the future. And all the uncovenanted and universal laws of politics are related to this forward-looking toward a common satisfaction. It is commonly said that political organizations are conservative when the main motive that holds them together is the desire to keep and defend what they have; and radical, when the cohesion is furnished by a common desire to get something they lack. But this distinction is superficial and misleading. The conservatives are held togetherby a common desire for things not yet achieved ? exactly as the radicals are. Politics is not a science of fixed facts, but of moving forces. No class, party, or nation can stop for a single moment. The law of the group is that it must strive for more and more, must go on and on ? or else disintegrate. The desire of the heart for a more abundant life ? whether of love or lust, of art or ravin ? is inextinguishable. Men are never satisfied en masse. If there are satisfied individuals they have no politics. Thus conservatives in politics are not satisfied people, but people who think they can get what they want out of existing social arrangements; and progressives or radicals are those who t...