Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/6

 of capitalism necessarily and inevitably goes on, so the inevitable antithesis to this expansion, the proletarian revolution, proceeds equally inevitably and irresistibly.

It is irresistible, because it is inevitable that the growing proletariat should resist exploitation, and that it should organize industrially, co-operatively and politically to secure for itself better conditions of life and labor, and greater political influence. Everywhere the proletariat develops these phases of activity whether it is socialistically minded or not. It is the mission of the Socialist movement to bring all these various activities of the proletariat against its exploitation into one conscious and unified movement, that will find its climax in the great final battle for the conquest of political power.

This position, the fundamental principles of which were laid down in the Communist Manifesto, is today accepted by the Socialist movements of all countries. Upon it rests the whole great international Socialist movement of our time.

Meanwhile it is unable to proceed on its victorious way without finding doubters and critics within its own ranks.

To be sure, actual evolution has taken the road foretold by Marx and Engels. And the triumphant progress of Socialism is due, next to the extension of capitalism and therewith of the proletarian class struggle, above all to the keen analysis of the conditions and problems of this struggle supplied by the work of Marx and Engels.

In point they were in error.

The Communist Manifesto said at the end of 1847:

"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European