Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/11

 class. The possessing class will always demand, and its interests will force it to demand, that the power of the state shall be used to hold the proletariat down. On the other hand the proletariat will always demand that any government in which their own party possesses power, shall use the power of the state to assist it in its battle against capital, Consequently every government based upon a coalition of capitalist and working class parties is foredoomed to disruption.

A proletarian party which shares power with a capitalist party in any government must share the blame for any acts of subjection of the working class. It thereby invites the hostility of its own supporters, and this in turn causes its capitalist allies to lose confidence and makes any progressive action impossible. No such arrangement can bring any strength to the working class. No capitalist party will permit it do so. It can only compromise a proletarian party and confuse and split the working class.

It was just such a condition that constantly postponed the revolution of 1848 and brought about the political collapse of the bourgeois democracy, and excluded any co-operation with it for the purpose of winning and utilizing political power.

However willing Marx and Engels were to utilize the differences between capitalist parties for the furtherance of proletarian purposes, and however much they were opposed to the expression "reactionary mass," they have, nevertheless, coined the phrase "dictation of the proletariat," which Engels defended shortly before his death in 1891, as expressing the fact that only through purely proletarian political domination can the working class exercise its political power.

Even if an alliance between capitalist and working-class political parties is incapable of contributing to the development of proletarian power, and even if the progress of social reform and economic organization must be limited