Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/99

 of technical progress does not disappear, we have no decay and death of human society to expect. This, with the development of technique, must ever more and more advance, and is in this sense immortal.

Every society is modelled by the technical apparatus at its command and the people who set it going, for which purpose they enter into the complicated social relations. So long as this technical apparatus keeps on improving, and the people who move it neither diminish in number nor in mental nor physical strength, there can be no talk of a dying out of society.

That state of things has never occurred as a permanent condition in any society as yet. Temporarily, certainly, it occurs, in consequence of peculiarities with which we will make acquaintance later on, that the social relations which sprang from social needs, get petrified and hinder the technical apparatus and the growth of the members of society in number and in intellectual and physical force, nay even give rise to a reactionary movement. That can, however, historically speaking, never last long; sooner or later these fetters of society are burst, either by internal movements, revolutions, or—and that is oftener the case—by impulse from without, by wars. Again, society changes from time to time a part of its members, its boundaries or its names, and it looks to the observer as if the society had shown traces of old age, and was now dead. In reality, however, if we want to take a simile from the animal organism, it has only been suffering from a disease from which it has emerged with renewed strength. Thus, for instance, the society of the Roman Imperial times did not die, but, rejuvenated through German blood, it began, after the migrations of the peoples, with partially new people to improve and build up their technical apparatus.