Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/27



Any definite conclusion as to whether revolution is a necessity or not can be drawn only from an investigation of the facts of social development, and not through analogies with natural science. It is only necessary to glance at these earlier stages of development in order to see that social revolution, in the narrow sense in which we are here using it, is no necessary accompaniment of social development. There was a social development and a very far-reaching one before the rise of class antagonisms and political power. In these stages the conquest of political power by an oppressed class, and consequently a social revolution, was as a matter of course impossible.

Even after class antagonisms and political power have arisen it is a long time before we find, either in antiquity or the Middle Ages, anything which corresponds to our idea of revolution. We find plenty of examples of bitter class struggles, civil wars and political catastrophies, but none of these brought about a fundamental and permanent renovation of the conditions of property and therewith a new social form.

To my mind the reasons for this are as follows: In antiquity and also in the Middle Ages the center of gravity of the economic and also of the political life lay in the community.