Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/13



There are few conceptions about which so much has been debated as that of the Social Revolution. That can partly be explained by the fact that none is so opposed to all existing interests and prejudices as this, partly, however, by the circumstance that few are ambiguous to such an extent.

Occurrences, as a rule, cannot be so sharply defined as things, especially social occurrences, which are exceedingly complicated and grow the more so as society develops, that is, as the forms of associated human activity become more manifold. And to the most complicated occurrences belongs that of a Social Revolution, that is, the complete overthrow of the established forms of associated human activity.

No wonder that this word, though in everybody's mouth, is employed by everybody in a different sense, and even by the same person at different times with a different meaning. Some understand by it, barricades, conflagrations of castles, guillotines, September massacres—all sorts of hideous things thrown into one. Others, again, would deprive the word of all its sting, and use it only in the sense of a great, but imperceptible and peaceful social transformation, something like, for example, that caused by the discovery of America, or the invention of the steam engine. Between these two extremes there are yet many shades and grades.

Marx, in his preface to the "Critique of Political Economy," defines as the social revolution that more or less rapid transformation of the vast juridical and political superstructure of society which results from the transformation of its economic foundations.

If we keep to this definition, we at once eliminate from the conception of the Social Revolution "the transformation of the economic foundations," such as was caused by the steam engine or the