Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/65

 were confined either to single, narrow or to single, narrow —either guild or municipal corporations.

Under certain circumstances these could exercise a strong restraint over municipalities. There can be no greater mistake than to confuse state and community without distinguishing between them, and to designate one and the other as organizations of the same class domination. A community be, and often is, the same as the state. A community, within the state, may also represent the subject class, if this constitutes a majority and asserts itself. During the last century it performed this function in the most striking manner in the municipality of Paris. This municipality came to be the organization of the lowest classes of society.

But in no great state of today is it possible for a single municipality to maintain its independence in opposition to the power of the state. It is therefore all the more necessary that the subject classes should be organized in great organizations extending over the entire scope of the state and embracing all branches of industry.

This has been most successfully accomplished in Germany. Not only in France, but also in England with its old trade unions, is the economic as well as the political movement very much divided. But however much the proletarian organizations may grow, they will never in normal, non-revolutionary times include the whole of the laboring class within the state, but only an elite, that through either trade, local or individual peculiarities are raised above the mass of the population. On the other hand, the attractive power of a class organization in revolutionary times, in which even the weakest feel themselves capable of and willing to fight, depends upon the numerical strength of the classes whose interests it represents.

It is therefore noteworthy that the wage workers