Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/97

 it be accompanied with violence and bloodshed. There are instances in history when the ruling classes were either so exceptionally clear-sighted or so particularly weak and cowardly that they submitted to the inevitable and voluntarily abdicated. Neither is it necessary that the social revolution be decided at one blow; such probably was never the case. Revolutions prepare themselves by years or decades of economic and political struggle; they are accomplished amidst constant ups and downs sustained by the conflicting classes and parties; not infrequently they are interrupted by long periods of reaction.

Nevertheless, however manifold the forms may be which a revolution may assume, never yet was any revolution accomplished without vigorous action on the part of those who suffered most under the existing conditions.

When, furthermore, we declare that those social reforms which stop short of the overthrow of the present system of property are unable to abolish the contradictions which the present economic development has produced, we by no means imply that all struggles on the part of the exploited against their present sufferings are useless within the framework of the existing social order. Nor do we claim that they should patiently endure all the ill-treatment and all the forms of exploitation which the capitalist system may decree to them, or that so long as they are at all exploited, it matters little how. What we do mean is that the exploited classes should not overrate the social reforms, and should not imagine that through them the existing