Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/115

 weaken European capitalism and its governments and introduce an element of political unrest into the entire world.

We have seen how in Europe a period of constant political unrest continued from 1789 to 1871, until the industrial bourgeoisie had conquered everywhere the political positions which their rapid development made possible. Since the Russo-Japanese war, since 1905, a similar period of constant political unrest has existed in the Orient. The people of Eastern Asia and the Mohammedan world, together with those of Russia, have just entered upon a position in many ways similar to that of the West European bourgeoisie at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Naturally the conditions are not wholly the same. One thing that makes them different is that the world is a hundred years older. The political development of a country does not depend entirely upon its own social conditions, but upon the conditions of the whole surrounding world, which affect that country. The different classes of Russia, Japan, India, China, Turkey, Egypt, etc., may stand in a similar relation to one another as did the classes of France before the great Revolution. But they will be influenced by the experiences of the class struggles that have taken place since then in England, France, and Germany. On the other hand, their struggle for favorable conditions for a national capitalist system of production, is at the same time a struggle against foreign capital and its foreign domination—a struggle which the people of Western Europe did not have to conduct during their revolutionary period from 1789–1871.

But however great these differences which tend to prevent the East from simply repeating the events of the West of a century ago, the similarity is still great enough to make it certain that the East is now entering upon a revolutionary period of a similar character—a period of