Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/130

 of today above the revolutionary classes that appeared at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in point of clearness of vision and certainty of purpose. If the socialists decline to lay before the public a prospectus of the future commonwealth, the bourgeois writers can find in this fact no reason to mock or to conclude that we do not know what we are after. The Socialist Party has a clearer insight into the future than had the pathfinders of the present social order.

We have said that a thinker may be able to discover the tendencies of the economic development of his day, but that it is impossible for him to foresee the social forms in which that development will ultimately find expression. A glance at existing conditions will prove the correctness of this view. The tendencies of the capitalist system of production are the same in all countries where it prevails; and yet how different are the political and social forms in England from those in France, those in France from those in Germany, and those in the United States from any of these. Again, the historical tendencies of the labor movement, which has been brought on by the existing system of production, are everywhere identical, and yet we see that the forms under which this movement manifests itself are different in each country.

The tendencies of the capitalist system of production are today well known. Nevertheless, no one would venture to foretell what forms it will take in ten, twenty or thirty years—provided, of course, that it endures that long. And