Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/111

 alternative would have brought the revolution that stands behind the war—nearer than even behind an armed peace. It is the rising power of the proletariat which for three decades has prevented every European war, and which today causes every government to shudder at the prospect of war. But forces are driving us on to a condition where at last the weapons will be automatically released.

There is another phenomenon that is working in the same direction, and which, even more than the competitive arming, is destined to reduce the policy of expansion to an ad absurdum, and thereby to cut off from the present method of production its last possibility of further evolution.

The policy of expansion or imperialism rests upon the supposition that only peoples belonging to the European civilization are capable of independent development. The people of other races are looked upon as children, idiots, or beasts of burden who may be handled with more or less gentleness, and in any case are beings of a lower stage, which can be controlled according to our desires. Even Socialists have proceeded upon this supposition so far as to advocate colonization—to be sure, in an ethical manner. But actual events soon teach them that the fundamental principle of our party—the equality of all men—is not a mere phrase, but a very real power.

To be sure, the peoples who are outside the circle of influence of European civilization are almost incapable of any resistance during this century. This does not rest upon any natural inferiority, as the conceited ignorance of European bourgeois scholars would have us believe, whose science finds expression in the phantasies of our racial theoreticians. These people are crushed simply by the superiority of European technical development, including, to be sure, Europcan mentality, which, in the last analysis, rests upon that technical development.

With the exception of some very backward branches