Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/112

 Just as in natural philosophy the laws of falling bodies are investigated in a vacuum and not in moving air so here we investigate the situation of the conquering proletariat under presumptions which cannot occur in their complete purity; that is under the postulate that some morning we shall at a single blow come into complete domination while the means which will be at hand for the solution of our task will be those that exist to-day. We can by this means attain results that will be differentiated from the actual course of coming events in exactly the same way as the laws of falling bodies differ from the actual fall of various substances. But in spite of these variations the laws of falling bodies actually exist and govern the fall of every single substance and the rate of fall of these can only be determined when we have first understood these laws.

So it is that the outlooks and obstacles for the conquering proletariat actually will be discovered in the road we shall take (taking it for granted that we apply our method correctly) and they will undoubtedly play an important role in the social revolution and its resultants, even if the actuality is something wholly different from that we here consider it. And it is only in this way that one can come to scientific- ally definite judgments concerning the outcome of the revolution. Those to whom this road appears too uncertain to form a basis for