Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/55

 places where it is still full of possibilities. Accordingly they seek to throw discredit on the idea of revolution, and to represent it as a useless means. They seek to separate off a social reform wing from the revolutionary proletariat, and they thereby divide and weaken the proletariat.

Up to the present time this is practically the only result of the beginnings of the conversion of the "Intellectuals" to Socialism.

At the side of this "new middle class" the old one, the small capitalist class, still vegetates. This portion of the middle class was at one time the back bone of the revolution; eager for battle and full of fight, they arose on slight provocation whenever the conditions were favorable, against every form of servitude and exploitation from above, against the tyranny of bureaucracy and militarism, against feudal and clerical privileges. They constituted the picked troops of the bourgeois democracy. At one time this class, like a portion of the "new middle class" at present, was very sympathetic towards the proletariat, co-operated with it, gave to it and received from it intellectual support and material strength. But old or new the present middle class is a very unreliable ally, and this just because of its intermediate position between the exploited and the exploiting classes. As Marx has already noted, the little capitalist is neither wholly proletarian, nor wholly