Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/117

 aim which the Socialist Party has set before it: to call the working-class to conquer the political power to the end that, with its aid, they may change the state into a self-sufficing co-operative commonwealth.

Socialists are frequently reproached with having no fixed aims, with being able to do nothing but criticize and with not knowing what to put in place of that which they would overthrow. Nevertheless, the fact remains that none of the existing parties has so well-marked and clear an aim as the Socialist Party. It may, indeed, be questioned whether the other political parties have any aims at all. They all hold to the existing order, although they all see that it is untenable and unendurable. Their programs contain nothing except a few little patches by which they hope and promise to make the untenable, tenable and the unendurable, endurable.

The Socialist Party, on the contrary, does not build on hopes and promises, but upon the unalterable necessity of economic development. Whoever declares these aims to be false should show in what respect the teachings of Socialist political economy are false. He should show that the theory of development from small to large production is false, that production is carried on today as it was a hundred years ago, that things are today as they have always been. Only he who could prove this is justified in the belief that things will continue as they are. But whoever is not featherbrained enough to believe that social conditions remain always the same, cannot reasonably suppose that the present conditions