Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/174

 these trades acquire the qualities of the industrial wage-working class.

However numerous the class of menials may be, it has not, as a rule, been able to absorb the whole number of those left propertyless. The unemployable, children, old people, sick and cripples have been from the beginning unable to earn a living by entering into service. To these were added at the beginning of modern times a large number who could work but found nothing to do. For them there was nothing but to beg, steal, or prostitute themselves. They were compelled either to perish or to throw overboard all sense of shame, honor and self-respect. They prolong their existence only by giving precedence to their immediate wants over their regard for their reputations. That such a condition cannot but exercise the most demoralizing and corrupting influence is self-evident.

Furthermore, the effect of this influence is intensified by the fact that the unemployed poor are utterly superfluous to the existing order; their extinction would relieve it of an undesirable burden, A class that has become superfluous, that has no necessary function to fulfil, must degenerate.

And beggars cannot even raise themselves in their own estimation by indulging in the self-deception that they are necessary to the social system; they have no recollection of a time when their class performed any useful services; they have no way of forcing society to support them