Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/223

 producers have the same interests as the proletarians. They have, therefore, every reason to protect their interests by joining the Socialist Party.

It is, of course, not to be expected that they will quickly recognize this fact. But the stampede of the farmers and small capitalists from the ranks of the bourgeois parties has already begun. And it is a stampede of most remarkable character, for it is the best and bravest who lead the way—not to desert the field of battle, but rather to escape from the petty strife for their miserable existence into the gigantic, world-moving struggle for the institution of a society which shall give to all its members opportunity to share in the great conquests of modern civilization, into the struggle for the emancipation of all civilized peoples, yes, of all humanity, from the bondage of a system which threatens to crush it.

The more unbearable the existing system of production, the more evidently it is discredited, and the more unable the ruling parties show themselves to remedy our disgraceful social ills, the more illogical and unprincipled these parties become and the more they resolve themselves into cliques of self-seeking politicians, the greater will be the numbers of those who stream from the non-proletarian classes into the Socialist Party and, hand in hand with the irresistibly advancing proletariat, follow its banner to victory and triumph.