Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/118

 Petty intrigue and cowardly unprincipleness push to the front.

In the same way the fact that statesmen and thinkers of a class or a country no longer struggle for anything great tends to develop selfish interests, and to cause the interests of individual persons to be pressed forward instead of the general interests of a class, a community or a society. The persons who are striving for power are no longer inspired by the impulse to create something great and new for the community, but only to obtain riches and power for themselves. This unscrupulous striving finds its expression in the efforts of the seekers after power, to attract, not those forces that are most capable of serving the community, but of such as can be most easily utilized to satisfy the needs and inclinations of the seekers for power.

To these general causes of the moral and intellectual collapse of all possessors of power in a conservative stage, must be added certain ones that spring peculiarly from capitalism.

Hitherto the exploiting classes have been the governing classes. They at least reserved the apexes of the governing machinery for themselves. The capitalist class, on the contrary, is so filled with the greed for business profits, that it relinquishes politics to others, who, to be sure, are at bottom but its agents. In democratic countries they are professional politicians, parliamentarians and journalists, in absolutisms the court circle, in intermediate nations, a mixture of these two elements with sometimes one, sometimes the other dominating.

So long as capitalist exploitation is small, the watchword of capital is economy, and it seeks to introduce this into the administration of government also. The small capitalists are forced, willy-nilly, to remain true to this watchword. The big capitalists, on the contrary, as the degree of exploitation rises practice ostentation and