Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/22

 what we have been discussing, and yet the two are fundamentally different. In the one case we are dealing with a great mass of possibilities which may be contained in any particular situation or event, and whose possible consequences we must determine. In the other case we are dealing with a single necessary line of evolution, knowledge of which we are seeking. In the first case we are concerned with definite, concrete facts. In the other we can only point out general tendencies, without being able to say anything definite regarding the form they will take. These two forms of investigation must not be confused, even though they appear to give the same result.

When, for example, one person says that a war between France and Germany would lead to a revolution, and when another declares that the constantly increasing class antagonisms in capitalist society will lead to a revolution, it seems as if the latter prophecy of a revolution was of the same nature as the first. Yet they are fundamentally very different.

When I speak of a war between France and Germany I am not talking of an event, the appearance of which can be determined with the certainty of a law of nature. Science has not yet reached that point. Such a war is only one of very many possibilities. On the other hand, a revolution which comes from such a war must be of certain definite forms. It may happen that in the weaker of the two warring countries the effort to unite all the forces of the state against the external enemy may bring the most daring and energetic class—the proletariat—to the head of the nation. This was what Engels thought possible in 1891 in Germany when a war was expected between Germany and the then relatively more populous France, and when Russia was still unconquered and not disrupted by revolution.

Revolution as a result of war can only come from an uprising of the mass of the people. This would come