Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/123

 The adversaries of socialism have not got beyond the standpoint occupied by the social science of a hundred years ago. The only socialists they know and can understand are, accordingly, those early Utopian socialists who started from the same premises as they themselves. The adversaries of socialism look upon the socialist commonwealth just as they would upon a capitalist enterprise, a stock company, for example, which is to be "started," and they refuse to take stock before it is shown in a prospectus that the concern will be practicable and profitable. Such a conception may have had its justification at the beginning of the nineteenth century; today, however, the socialist commonwealth no longer needs the endorsement of these gentlemen.

The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The substitution of a new social order for the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable.

Ever larger and more powerful grows today the mass of the propertyless workers for whom the existing system is unbearable; who have nothing to lose by its downfall, but everything to gain; who are bound—unless they are willing to go down with the society of which they have become the most important part—to call into being a social order that shall correspond to their interests.

These statements are not mere fancies; socialists have demonstrated them with the actual facts