Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/64

 On the other hand, however, the uncertainty as to conditions which prevailed in 1870 has disappeared in the great cities of Europe outside of Russia. The governments have entrenched themselves and grown in strength and security. They have learned how to gain the confidence of the mass of the nation and to convince it that they stand for its interest.

So it was that in the first decade of the rise of a permanent and independent labor movement, during the '60s of the last century, the possibilities of revolution were constantly less. At the same time the proletariat was ever in more and more need of such a revolution, and, because of the example of the decades just passed, believed such a revolution near.

But gradually conditions changed to favor its coming. The organization of the proletariat grew. Perhaps this was most striking in Germany. During the last dozen years this growth has been especially rapid. We have seen the organization of the Social Democrats reach a half million members. Closely united to it in spirit is a trade union movement with two million members. Simultaneously has grown its press as a work of the organization and not of private enterprise. The political daily press now has a circulation of nearly a million, and the trade union press, composed mostly of weekly papers, reaches an even greater number.

That is an organized power of the laboring subject masses such as the world has never seen before.

The domination of the ruling class over the subject class has hitherto rested in no small degree on its control of the organized means of governmental power, while the subject class was almost wholly without organization, at least of any organization extending over the field of the entire state. The working class has never been wholly without organization. Through antiquity and the middle ages and up to recent times these organizations, however,