Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/106

 organization better developed, nowhere is its political freedom greater than in England, and nowhere is the proletariat politically more helpless. It has not simply lost all independence in the higher politics. It no longer knows how to even preserve its immediate interests.

Here also we may again refer to the previously cited article of Webb, which certainly cannot be suspected of being consciously revolutionary. "During the upward movement of the last ten years," he says, in the previously mentioned article, "the participation of the English laborers in labor politics has gradually decreased. The eight-hour law and the constructive Socialism of the Fabians to which the unions turned so eagerly in the period of '90 and '93 ceases more and more to occupy their thoughts. The number of labor representatives in the Lower House does not increase."

Even the latest scourgings of their opponents have not served to rouse the proletariat of England. They remain dumb, even when their hands are rendered powerless, dumb when their bread is made more costly. The English laborers to-day stand lower as a political factor than the laborers of the most economically backward country in Europe—Russia. It is the real revolutionary consciousness in these latter that gives them their great political power. It is the renunciation of revolution, the narrowing of interest to the interests of the moment, to