Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/40

 work. Political revolutions are less frequent, but more comprehensive and their social results more extensive.

The transition from the civil wars of antiquity and the Middle Ages to social revolutions in the previously used sense of the word was made by the Reformation, which belonged half to the Middle Ages and half to modern times. On a still higher stage was the English revolution of the middle of the seventeenth century, and finally the great French revolution becomes the classical type of social revolution, of which the uprisings of 1830 and 1848 were only faint echoes.

Social revolution in the sense here meant is peculiar to the stage of social development of capitalist society and the capitalist state. It does not exist previous to capitalism, because the political boundaries were too narrow and social consciousness too undeveloped. It will disappear with capitalism because this can only be overthrown by the proletariat, which as the lowest of all social classes can use its domination only to abolish all class domination and classes and therewith also the essential conditions of social revolution.

There now arises a great question, a question that to-day affects us profoundly, because it has the greatest influence upon our political relations to the present: Is the time of social revolution past or not? Have we already the political conditions which can bring about a