Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/15

Rh are not freely accorded, but are obtained through the pressure of the governed classes, or by the force of circumstances. On the other hand, measures of that kind constitute the outcome of a revolution if they proceed from a class which has hitherto been economically and politically oppressed, and which has now conquered the political power, in order, as it in its own interests necessarily must, to transform, more or less rapidly, the entire juridical and political superstructure of society, and so to create new forms of social activity.

It is, therefore, the conquest of the powers of the State by a hitherto oppressed class—in other words, the political revolution—which is an essential characteristic of the social revolution in its narrower sense, as opposed to social reform. Those who repudiate political revolution as means of the social transformation on grounds of principle, or who wish to confine the latter to such measures as can be obtained from the ruling classes, are social reformers, no matter how opposed their social ideal may be to the existing form of society. On the other hand, everyone is a revolutionary whose aim is that a hitherto oppressed class should conquer the power of the State. He does not cease to be such if he wishes to prepare and hasten on this conquest by means of social reforms wrested from the ruling classes. Not the striving for social reforms but the explicit confining oneself to them, distinguishes the social reformer from the social revolutionary. On the other hand, only that political revolution becomes a social revolution, which results from a hitherto socially oppressed class being forced to complete its political emancipation by its social, on account of its low position in society becoming incompatible with its political predominance. A split in the ranks of the ruling classes, be it even so great as to assume the most violent forms of a civil war, is not a social revolution.

It is only the social revolution, as thus defined, that we will discuss in the following pages.

A social reform can very well agree with the interests of the ruling classes. It certainly leaves for the moment their social position unshaken, and in certain circumstances may even enhance it. A social revolution on the contrary is quite incompatible with their interests, implying as it under all circumstances does, the destruction of their power. No wonder that the ruling classes, for the time being, always deprecated and condemned the Revolution, and when feeling themselves insecure, opposed to the idea of revolution that of social