Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/75

 lacked were not important enough to make them willing to take the risk of a revolution.

There remains but one revolutionary class in present European society, the, and, above all, the city proletariat. In it the revolutionary impulse still lives.

Although the carrying out of these transformations fundamentally altered the political situation, expectations were still widely cherished that were based upon the experiences of the years from 1789 to 1871. Reasoning upon the experiences of centuries, the conclusion was drawn that there would soon be another revolution. To be sure, it was not a purely proletarian revolution that was expected, but a combination of a small bourgeois and proletarian revolution, but in which the proletariat, in accordance with its increased importance, would take the lead. This was the expectation, not alone of a few "dogma-believing Marxists," but of practical politicians who were wholly untouched by Marxism—such, for instance, as Bismarck. When, in 1878, he considered it necessary to call for special legislation against the Socialists, although they had at that time not drawn to themselves a half million votes, which was less than ten per cent of the number of voters and less than six per cent of the total number of those entitled to vote, and if he was even then considering the desperate remedy of trying to provoke the Socialists to street fighting before they became irresistible, such views can be explained only on the theory that he thought the proletarian-little bourgeois revolution at the very door.

And, in fact, there was a series of events that favored this view, and this wholly aside from the remembrance of the events of the previous century.

During the '70s an economic crisis broke over Europe, more lasting and extensive than had ever been known; it continued until the second half of the '80s. The misery in proletarian and small capitalist circles and the