Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/67

 The necessary result of this is a sharpening of social antagonisms. But England! it will be at once responded. Do we not find in England a perceptible softening of class antagonisms, and has not Marx said that England is the classic land of capitalist production, which to-day shows what our future will be? Is not the present condition of England the one toward which we are moving?

It is always to England that the fanatics of social peace refer us and it is significant that it is these same people who taunt us orthodox Marxians the loudest on the obstinate tenacity with which we cling to every Marxian sentence and who most frequently throw the above Marxian sentence at us.

As a matter of fact, however, conditions have greatly changed since the writing of Capital. England has ceased to be the classic land of capitalism. Its development comes more and more to a standstill, it is more and more becoming subordinate to other nations, especially Germany and America, and now the conditions begin to be reversed. England ceases to show us our future. On the contrary, our present state rather shows England's future in capitalist production. The thing which shows that the investigator of actual relations is really an orthodox Marxian is not that he thoughtlessly follows Marx, but that he applies his methods in order to understand facts.

England was the classic ground of