Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/42

 The feeling of strength is again worse than useless when it is not based upon actual knowledge of its own and its opponents' powers, but depends upon pure illusions. Strength, without a feeling of strength, is dead, and arouses no volition. A feeling of strength without strength can, under certain circumstances, lead to actions that may overwhelm or destroy an opponent, weakening or bending his will. But permanent results are not to be obtained without actual strength. Undertakings that are carried through without actual strength, but whose success depends upon deceiving an opponent as to his real strength, are doomed to failure sooner or later, and the disappointment which they will bring with them will be all the greater in proportion as their first successes were brilliant.

When we apply what has just been said to the class struggle of the proletariat it shows us what must be the nature of the work of those who would fight with and for that class and how the Socialist movement affects it. Our first and greatest task must be to increase the strength of the proletariat. Naturally we cannot increase this by wishing for it. At any definite period of capitalist society the strength of the proletariat is determined by economic conditions and cannot arbitrarily be increased. But the effect of its existing strength can be increased by preventing its waste. The unconscious processes of nature always seem extremely wasteful when looked at from the standpoint of our purposes. Nature, however, has no purposes to serve. The conscious mind of man sets purposes before him, and also shows him the way to attain these purposes without waste of strength, and with the least expenditure of purposeful energy possible.

This holds true also in the class struggle of the proletariat. To be sure, it proceeds in the beginning without the consciousness of the participants. Their