Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/63

 and, if the general conditions were favorable to a social revolution, use them for that purpose.

Today, in the age of railroads and telegraphs, of newspapers and public assemblages, of countless industrial centers, of magazine rifles and machine guns, it is absolutely impossible for a minority to cripple the military forces of the capital, unless they are already completely disorganized. It is also impossible to confine a political struggle to the capital. Political life has become national. here these conditions exist a great transfer of political power that shall destroy a tyrannical regime is only to be expected where all of the following conditions exist:

1. The great mass of the people must be decisively hostile to such a regime.

2. There must be a great organized party in irreconcilable opposition to such a regime.

3. This party must represent the interests of the great majority of the population and possess their confidence.

4. Confidence in the ruling regime, both in its power and in its stability, must have been destroyed by its own tools, by the bureaucracy and the army.

During the last decade, at least in Western Europe, these conditions have never existed simultaneously. For a long time the proletariat did not form a majority of the population and the Socialist Party was not the strongest party. When in previous decades we looked for the early appearance of the revolution, it was because we calculated, not alone upon the proletariat, but also upon the small capitalist democracy to help make up the mass of the revolutionary party, and upon the small capitalists and the farmers to form a party of the masses that would stand behind such a revolution. But the small capitalist democracy has completely failed in this respect. In Germany it no longer constitutes an opposition party.