Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/220

 secure the protection of the wage-earner. But the majority are concerned with interests which the proletariat and the other groups of the laboring population have in common. These include demands for such reforms as an income tax, the initiative and referendum, freedom of press and speech, election of judges, etc.

Some of these demands are included in the platforms of bourgeois parties; others can, in the nature of the case, be formulated only by an anti-capitalistic organization. And no bourgeois party will fight for them with the same energy as the Socialist Party. For this is the only party that really has an interest in relieving non-capitalist classes of their burdens, educating their children, and elevating their lives in general.

Only measures of the sort proposed by the Socialist Party are calculated to improve the position of the small producers so far as it is possible to improve it under existing conditions. To assist them as producers by fortifying them in the retention of their outlived method of production, is impossible, for it is opposed to the course of economic development. It is equally impossible to make capitalists out of any considerable number of them. It is only as consumers that the mass of them can be helped at all. But it is precisely the parties most friendly to the small producers that cast upon them, as consumers, the heaviest burdens. These burdens are real, but the elevation of small production which is supposed to accompany them, is nothing more than empty pretense.

To assist the small producer in his character of