Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/57

 was the real author of this affair. The anarchists who were hung upon the 11th of November and their associates, who were condemned to long terms of imprisonment, were the sacrifices of a judicial murder. But the deed had corresponded to the tactics so long preached by the anarchists. It released the rage of the entire bourgeoisie of America, confused the laborers and discredited the Socialists, whom the people did not know how to distinguish from the anarchists, and whom they often did not wish to distinguish.

The struggle for the eight hour day ended with the defeat of the workers. The labor movement collapsed and the Socialist movement sank into insignificance. Not until within recent years has it once more slowly arisen in the United States.

The only great injuries suffered by the labor movement during the last twenty years have come as a result of acts for which the anarchists were directly responsible, or else which were in accord with the tactics they preach. The anti-Socialist laws of Germany, the exceptional conditions in Austria, the judicial murder in Chicago, with its results, all were thereby made possible.

The possibility that anarchy will again gain a hold upon the masses, is today much less than ever before.

The two great causes which made the people receptive to anarchy were lack of insight and hopelessness, and especially the apparent impossibility of securing the slightest improvement by means of political action.

During the first half of the '80s, during the time when the laborers of Austria and the United States were captured by anarchistic phrases, both countries showed a most remarkable growth in the labor movement—but which was also almost entirely without leaders. The battalions of labor were formed almost entirely from undrilled recruits, without knowledge, without experience and without officers. And out of this condition arose the