Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/10

iv. to form the backbone of a Socialist Party; and a Socialist movement has only thus succeeded in striking firm root where it includes the mass of the trade unionists. To win these, despite all the machinations of a Conservative or a corrupt trade union bureaucracy; and to see that no occasional friction with this bureaucracy ever becomes antagonism to the trade union movement itself, is, in my opinion, one of the most important, in Anglo-Saxon countries certainly, one of the most difficult problems for a Socialist.

If my criticism of the present day spirit of the English labour movement in no way arises from contempt, but rather from a great admiration for the English trade unionism, so does it neither arise from contempt, but a high admiration for the English people in general. Just because we on the Continent are accustomed to expect the highest from the English people, whose proletariat Marx in his "Capital" described as the prize fighters of the European working-classes, and which gave us Thomas More and Robert Owen—for that very reason we feel the more disappointed to-day when the labour movement there exhibits of late years far less vigour and courage than that of any other country of capitalist civilisation.

But our conception of history teaches us that the roots of this are to be found in passing economic conditions, not in any natural characteristics of the English people. We have every reason to expect that the present lethargy of the English labour world will at no too distant time yield to a period of activity similar to that which Socialism shows to-day in America, where, too, for many years the most self-sacrificing and hardest propaganda appeared fruitless. Like the English, the American Socialists too, had to fight for years and years against a foe which for us is far worse than police tricks, than prison and exile, than knouts and bayonets, namely the apathy of the workers, who despise their best friends and sneer at them. To bid defiance to this foe for so long a period requires the greatest courage, the greatest tenacity, the firmest conviction of the necessity of one's own cause.

May my English comrades, who have to fight this great fight, soon reap the same reward as our American comrades have. Then the last link in the chain will be closed, which twines itself ever tighter and tighter round the neck of capitalist exploitation till it finally will strangle it.

K. KAUTSKY.

Berlin, February, 1903.