Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/58

 apparent impossibility of overthrowing the political domination of capital by political methods. The laborers of Austria did not possess the suffrage and had little hopes of obtaining it through legal methods in any conceivable time. In America the laborers were disheartened by the political corruption.

Even in other countries beside these two there was a pessimistic wave during the '80s.

Since then things have changed everywhere for the better.

In Austria there was still another condition favoring the rise of anarchy—faith in the Socialists had been almost destroyed among the masses. When the political and economic weapons—the organization and the press—of the German proletariat were destroyed by the anti-Socialist laws, the just arising anarchists in Austria took advantage of this situation to accuse the party which had thus been rendered momentarily dumb, of having thrown away its weapons and renounced its revolutionary principles. The Austrian Socialists who defended their German comrades not only failed to rehabilitate the latter in the eyes of the majority of the Austrian laborers, but only succeeded in discrediting themselves. A government official, Count Lamezan, gave his assistance to the anarchists, who were naturally very much beloved by him, and sneeringly declared that the Socialists were only "revolutionists in dressing gowns."

Even today the anarchists devote most of their activities to showing that the Socialists are only "revolutionists in dressing gowns."

Up to the present time they have had little success. But if it should ever be possible for an anarchist movement to gain a foothold in Germany, it would not be because of the agitation of the "independents," but either through such action of the ruling class as would destroy all hope among the laborers and inspire them with an attitude of