Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/95

 with property, have proved vain, and must continue so to prove as often as attempted.

For the last hundred years thinkers and statesmen among the possessing classes have been trying to prevent the threatened downfall of the system of private property in the instruments of production, that is to say, to prevent revolution. Social reform is the name they give to their perpetual tinkerings with the industrial mechanism for the sake of removing this or that ill effect of private property in the means of production, at least of softening its edge, without touching private property itself. During the last hundred years manifold cures have been recommended and tried; it is now hardly possible to imagine any new receipe in this line. All the so-called "latest" panaceas of our social quacks which are to heal the old social evils quickly, without pain and without expense, are, upon closer inspection, discovered to be but a revival of old devices, all of which have been tried before in other places and found worthless. We pronounce these reforms inoperative in so far as they propose to remove the growing contradictions between the powers of production and the existing system of property and at the same time strive to uphold and confirm the latter. But we do not mean that the social revolution—the abolition of private property in the means of production—will be accomplished of itself, that the irresistible, inevitable course of evolution will do the work without the assistance of man; nor yet that all social reforms are worthless and that nothing is left to those who suffer from the