Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/4



Friends and enemies of the Socialists agree upon one thing, and that is that they constitute a party. But unfortunately the idea of revolution is many-sided, and consequently the conceptions of the revolutionary character of our party differ very greatly. Not a few of our opponents insist upon understanding revolution to mean nothing else but anarchy, bloodshed, murder and arson. On the other hand there are some of our comrades to whom the coming social revolution appears to be nothing more than an extremely gradual, scarcely perceptible, even though ultimately a fundamental change in social relations, much of the same character as that produced by the steam engine.

So much is certain: that the Socialists, as the champions of the class interests of the proletariat, constitute a revolutionary party, because it is impossible to raise this class to a satisfactory existence within capitalist society; and because the liberation of the working class is only possible through the overthrow of private property in the means of production and rulership, and the substitution of social production for production for profit. The proletariat can attain to satisfaction of its wants only in a society whose institutions shall differ fundamentally from the present one.

In still another way the Socialists are revolutionary. They recognize that the power of the state is an instrument of class domination, and indeed the most powerful