Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/44

 of the ruling class. Then the subject class suddenly becomes conscious of its strength and a revolution follows.

The proletariat is affected in this manner by the feeling of its original weakness and a belief in the invincibility of the capitalists.

The capitalist system of production arose in a period during which the mass of the proletariat had been thrown upon the street to a parasitic, socially useless existence. The capitalist who took them into his service was their savior, their "giver of bread," or, as we say today, "giver of work," a phrase that does not sound much better. Their will to live drove them to sell themselves. They saw no possibility of existence besides this, and much less any possibility of resisting the capitalist.

But gradually relations changed. From a troublesome beggar, employed out of pity, the proletarian became the working class from which society lives. The personality of the capitalist, on the contrary, became more and more superfluous in the progress of production, something which the corporation and the trust made plainly evident. Because of economic necessity the wage relation became more and more a relation of power, maintained by the power of the state. But the proletariat grew to become the most numerous class in the state, and also in the army, upon which the power of the state rests. In a highly developed industrial state like Germany or England it already possesses the strength to capture the power of the state, and if the economic conditions now existed it could use the power of the state for the substitution of social industry for the present capitalist industry.

But what the proletariat lacks is a consciousness of its own strength. Only a few sections possess this consciousness. For the great mass it is still lacking. The Socialist movement does what it can to develop this consciousness. Here again it makes use of theoretical