Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/135

 accompaniments under the capitalist system of production. While, on the one hand, under the capitalist system of production the economic development is steadily snapping, one after another, the family bonds and destroying family life, under the socialist system of production, on the other hand, whatever existing family form may disappear, can be replaced only by a higher.

Our opponents, who know better than we what we want and can picture with greater accuracy the future state, also declare that socialism can never come into power except through a wholesale confiscation of property, confiscation without compensation not only of house and farm, but of superfluous furniture and savings bank deposits. Next to the charge of intending to forcibly dissolve all family ties, this is the trump card played against us.

The program of the Socialist Party has nothing to say about confiscation. It does not mention it. not from fear of giving offense, but because it is a subject upon which nothing can be said with certainty. The only thing that can be declared with certainty is that the tendency of economic development renders imperative the social ownership and operation of the means of large production. In what way this transfer from private and individual into collective ownership will be effected, whether this inevitable transfer will take the form of confiscation, whether it will be a peaceable or a forcible one—these are questions no man can answer. Past