Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/117

 a victorious proletariat, if it is to advance purposefully, will be compelled to do by the pressure of economic conditions.

There is one problem above all others with which the proletarian regime must primarily occupy itself. It will in all cases be compelled to solve the question of the relief of the unemployed. Enforced idleness is the greatest curse of the laborer. For him it signifies misery, humiliation, crime. The laborer lives only from the sale of his labor power and when he can find no purchaser for this he is delivered up to hunger. And even when the laborer has found his labor the unemployed still torture him, for he is never secure from the loss of his labor and consequent misery. A proletarian regime would in every case make an end to this condition even if the proletarians were not Socialists but simply Liberals as in England. In just what manner the problem of the unemployed would be solved we shall not here attempt to investigate. There are many different methods, and many plans to this end have been made by sociologists. For example it has been sought from the bourgeois point of view to insure against the necessity of unemployment by taxation, and in part this has been done. But a bourgeois society can only create the most insufficient patchwork in this field because it is itself the bough from which unemployment hangs. Only the proletariat and the victorious proletariat can and will enact the measures which are capable