Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/24

 revolutionary act of birth. This becomes inevitable when the development of the organs has attained a certain height.

We find the same thing in society. Here also the revolutions are the result of slow, gradual development (evolution). Here also it is the social organs that develop slowly. That which may be changed suddenly, at a leap, revolutionarily, is their functions. The railroad has been slowly developed. On the other hand, the railroad can suddenly be transformed from its function as the instrument to the enrichment of a number of capitalists, into a socialist enterprise having as its function the serving of the common good. And as at the birth of the child, all the functions are simultaneously revolutionized—circulation, breathing, digestion—so all the functions of the railroad must be simultaneously revolutionized at one stroke, for they are all most closely bound together. They cannot be gradually and successively socialized, one after the other, as if, for example, we would transform to-day the functions of the engineer and fireman, a few years later the ticket agents, and still later the accountants and book-keepers, and so on. This fact is perfectly clear with a railroad, but the successive socialization of the different functions of a railroad is no less absurd than that of the ministry of a centralized state. Such a ministry constitutes a single organism whose organs must co-operate. The functions of one of these organs