Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/101

 As soon as it becomes evident that such changes are imperatively necessary for the proletariat if its economic elevation is to proceed further, this compels the recognition of the necessity of political struggles, transfers of power and transformations.

The proletariat must grow mightily in these struggles. It cannot win these battles, cannot reach the above mentioned goals of democracy and abolition of militarism, without itself attaining to a dominant position in the state. So it is that the acquisition of democracy and the abolition of militarism in a modern great nation have wholly different results, than rise at the present time from the old inherited militia system and the republican institutions of the Swiss.

This is all the more true in proportion as these transformations are accomplished exclusively by the proletariat. And there is no prospect of any faithful allies in the coming battles. Hitherto we have reckoned upon allies from the capitalist camp, namely, small capitalists and small farmers.

We have seen how earnestly Marx and Engels for a long time expected that the small capitalist democracy would at least start a revolution with us as they had done in 1848 and 1871. As the democratic policies and parties continued more and more to prove disappointing, we Marxians still continued to believe that great masses of the little capitalists and small farmers would be drawn to us, and interested in our revolutionary objects. In my articles of 1893 which have already been quoted, these expectations found even stronger expression than in Engels' introduction written in 1895: