Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/105

 means which arise and to use the latter purposefully to a solution of the former.

Investigation of existing facts is the foundation of any rational policy. If I have arrived at the conviction that we are entering upon a revolutionary epoch, concerning whose conclusions everything is not yet clear, I am driven thereto by the investigation of actual conditions and not by my desires. I desire nothing more than that I may be wrong and that those may be right who maintain that the greatest difficulties of the transition period from capitalism to socialism lie behind us, and that we have all the essential foundations for a peaceful advance to socialism. Unfortunately I see no possibility of accepting this view. The greatest and the most difficult of the battles for political power still lies before us. It will be decided only after a long and hard struggle that will test all our powers to the utmost.

One can do nothing worse to the proletariat than to advise him to rest upon his arms in order to encourage a favorable attitude of the bourgeoisie. Under present conditions this means nothing less than to deliver the proletariat over to the bourgeoisie and bring it into intellectual and political dependence upon the latter, to enervate and degrade it and make it incapable of fulfilling its great historical purposes.

The proof that this is not exaggerated is furnished by the English laborers. Nowhere is the proletariat more numerous, nowhere is its