Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/201

 deep root at this time. It is partly because of this that until recently England has been comparatively unaffected by the socialist movement.

But no matter how wide might grow the chasm between socialism and the militant proletariat, socialist philosophy is so adequate to the needs of thinking proletarians that the best minds in the working-class, as soon as they had opportunity, willingly turned to it. Then the bourgeois socialist came under the influence of proletarian thinking. The new, proletarian socialists took little account of the capitalist class. They hated it and were fighting against it. In their hands the peaceful socialism which was to save the race through the intervention of the best elements in the upper classes was transformed into a violent revolutionary socialism which was to depend for its support upon proletarian fists.

But even this movement, though essentially proletarian in its origin, had no understanding of the labor movement; it stood in opposition to the class-struggle in its highest form, that is, the political struggle. In the nature of the case it was impossible for it to transcend the theories of the utopians. At best a proletarian can do no more than appropriate for his own purposes a part of the learning of the bourgeois world. He lacks the leisure necessary to carry independent scientific investigation beyond the point reached by bourgeois thinkers. Therefore primitive working-class socialism bore all the marks of utopianism. It had no notion of the economic evolution which is creating the material