Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/28

 for their own use. They organize unions that restrict the absolute power of the employers and exercise an influence in the productive process. They elect members to the representative bodies in the municipalities and states who seek to secure reforms, to enact legislation for the protection of laborers, to make state and municipal industries model businesses and to increase the number of such industries.

These movements go on continuously, so that our reformers say we are in the midst of the social revolution, indeed some of them would say in the midst of Socialism. All that is needed is further development along these lines, with no catastrophe—indeed, anything of the kind would only disturb this gradual growth into Socialism. Therefore, away with all such ideas, let us concentrate on "positive" work.

This outlook is certainly a very alluring one, and a person would have to be a regular fiend to wish to destroy such a magnificent "gradual reformist ascension" by any sort of catastrophe. Were the wish father to our thought we Marxists would all become inspired with this idea of a gradual growth.

It has only one little defect: The growth that it describes is not the growth of a element, but of  elements, and, moreover, of two very  elements—Capital and Labor. What appears to the "reformers" as a peaceable growth into Socialism, is only the growth in power of two antagonistic classes, standing in irreconcilable enmity to each other. This phenomena means nothing more or less than that the antagonism between Capitalist and Laborer, which, in the beginning, existed only between a number of individuals, constituting together but a minority in the state, has now become a battle between gigantic, compact organizations that dominate and determine our whole social and political life.