Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/92

 of employers before which even monarchs bow, and whose power will be strengthened by the governmental powers of bureaucracy and militarism, which the modern great nations have inherited from absolutism.

One of the peculiarities of the present situation consists in the fact that, as we have already pointed out, it is no longer the governments which offer us the harshest resistance. Under absolutism, against which former revolutions were turned, the government was supreme and class antagonisms could not clearly develop. The government hindered not alone the exploited but also the exploiting classes from freely defending their interests. On the side of government there stood only a portion of the exploiting class; another and a very considerable part of the exploiters, namely, the industrial capitalists, were in the camp of the opposition, together with the whole mass of the laboring class—not simply proletarians, but also the small bourgeois and the peasants—except in some backward localities. Government was also isolated from the people. It had no hold on the broad masses of the populace; it represented the most highly favored strength of the oppression and the exploitation of the people. A coup d'etat could under certain circumstances suffice to overthrow it.

In a democracy not alone the exploited but the exploiting class can more freely develop their organization, and it is necessary that they