Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/92



First of all this table shows us how much of a basis there is for the so-called "improvement through reform" of the proletariat. The last seventeen years were uncommonly favorable ones for the working class. They were years of such tempestuous upward leaping in America as perhaps may never come again. No working class enjoys greater liberties than the American. None is so "practical" in its politics, freer from all revolutionary theories that might attract its attention from the detail work of improving its condition. Nevertheless, in the year of prosperity, 1907, when the money wage rose an average of 4 per cent above that of the previous year, actual wages were only a trifle higher than in 1890, when business was by no means exceptionally good. To be sure, unemployment and the uncertainty of existence make an enormous difference between a time of prosperity and a crisis; but the purchasing power of the weekly wages of the fully