Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/129

 Never yet in the history of mankind has it happened that a revolutionary party was able to foresee, let alone determine, the forms of the new social order which it strove to usher in. The cause of progress gained much if it could as much as ascertain the tendencies that led to such a new social order, to the end that its political activity could be a conscious, and not merely an instinctive, one. No more can be demanded of the Socialist Party. At the same time, never yet was there a political party that looked so deeply into the social tendencies of its times, and so thoroughly understood them as the Socialist Party.

This is due, not so much to the Socialist Party's merit, as to its good fortune. It owes its superiority to the fact that it stands upon the shoulders of capitalist political economy, the first that ever undertook a scientific investigation of social relations and conditions. One result of this investigation was that the revolutionary classes which overthrew the feudal system of production had a much clearer conception of their social mission and suffered much less from self-deception than any other revolutionary class before them. But the thinkers in the ranks of the Socialist Party have carried the investigations of the social relations much further, they have gone much deeper than any capitalist economist. Capital, Karl Marx's great work, has become the lodestar of modern economic science. As far as the work of Karl Marx stands above the works of Quesnay, Adam Smith and Ricardo, just so far stand the