Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/109



I must first of all clear away a suspicion which will be roused in many people by the title of this work. "On the Day after the Revolution!" Does not that mean that we "orthodox" Marxists are only disguised Blanquists who expect by a coup d' etat to make ourselves dictators, and is not it a return to Utopianism when I attempt to describe a movement of which we can know nothing as to the circumstances under which it will take place?

I hasten then to remark that I consider the revolution an historical process that may easily draw itself out into a decade of hard battles. On the other side I am thoroughly convinced that it is not our task to invent recipes for the kitchens of the future, and when more than ten years ago the German Social democracy proposed to include in its program demands for such measures as would accelerate the transformation from a capitalist to a socialist manner of production, I opposed this because I maintained that the party could not lay out a definite road for conditions of which we can have only a dim presentiment and which may easily surprise us with much that is wholly unexpected.

But I maintain that it is a help to political