Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/33

 sign of social revolution will find plenty of such revolutions in earlier ages. But those who conceive social revolution as the conquest of political power by a previously subservient class and the transformation of the juridical and political superstructure of society, particularly in the property relations, will find no social revolution there. Social development proceeded piece-meal, step by step, not through single great catastrophies but in countless little broken-up, apparently disconnected, often interrupted, ever renewing, mostly unconscious movements. The great social transformation of the times we are considering, the disapperance of slavery in Europe, came about so imperceptibly that the contemporaries of this movement took no notice of it, and one is to-day compelled to reconstruct it through hypotheses.

Things took on a wholly different aspect as soon as the capitalist method of production was developed. It would lead us too far and would be only to repeat things well known if j I were here to go into the mechanism of capitalism and its consequences. Suffice it to say that the capitalist method of production created the modern State, made en end to the political independence of communities and at the same time their economic independence ceased, each became part of a whole, and lost its special