Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/51

 called social safety valves. If this expression is intended to mean that in a democracy the proletariat ceases to be revolutionary, and that it is satisfied with a public expression of its anger and its sufferings, and that it renounces the political and social revolution, then the expression is false. Democracy cannot do away with the class antagonisms of capitalist society. Neither can it avoid the final outcome of these antagonisms—the overthrow of present society. One thing it can do. It cannot abolish the revolution, but it can avert many premature, hopeless revolutionary attempts, and render superfluous many revolutionary uprisings. It creates clearness regarding the relative strength of the different parties and classes. It does not abolish their antagonisms, nor postpone their ultimate object, but it does operate to hinder the rising class from sometimes attempting the accomplishment of tasks of which it is not yet capable, and to keep the governing class from refusing concessions that it no longer possesses the strength to maintain. The direction of development is not thereby changed, but its course becomes steadier and more peaceful.

The advance of the proletariat in those nations with some democratic institutions is not marked by such striking victories as those of the bourgeoisie during its time of revolution; but it also lacks the great defeats. Since the appearance of the modern Socialist labor movement in the '60s, the European proletariat has met with but one great defeat—that of the Commune of 1871. At that time France was suffering from the victories of the German empire, that had withheld democratic institutions from its people, while the French proletariat had attained to but the dawn of class consciousness and was forced into the uprising.

The democratic-proletarian method of battle may appear more monotonous than the revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie; it is certainly less dramatic and striking,