Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/20

8 and the same time, too, since they all are bound up in the most intimate fashion with one another. It is impossible to nationalise these functions gradually, one by one—say, now the functions of the engine-driver and stoker, then a few years hence those of the guards, again, after a lapse of some years the functions of clerks and bookkeepers, &c., &c. That, in the case of a railway, is perfectly evident; but no less absurd than the gradual Socialisation of the different functions of a railway is that of a Ministry in a centralised State. The latter, too, is a homogeneous organism, whose organs must work together, and the functions of the one cannot change without those of all changing at the same time. The idea of the gradual conquest of the various departments of a ministry by Social-Democracy, is not less absurd than the attempt would be to divide the act of birth into a number of consecutive monthly acts, in each of which one organ only would be transformed from the condition of the fœtus to that of an independent child, leaving all the whole child itself on the navel cord till it learns to speak and to walk.

But if a railway or a Ministry cannot be transformed from working on capitalist lines to a Socialist institution gradually, step by step, but only at one blow, and with all their organs at the same time, that is nevertheless only possible at a certain stage of the development of all the social organs—though certainly in the case of society it is not possible, as it is in the case of the maternal organism, to scientifically determine when the necessary stage of maturity is reached.

On the other hand, however, the act of birth marks, not the close of the development of the human organs, but the commencement of a new epoch of development. The child comes into new conditions of life, in which new organs form themselves and those already existing develop farther in their proper directions. The teeth grow, the eyes learn to see, the hands to grasp, the legs to walk, the mouth to speak, &c. In the same way a social revolution cannot mark the close of the social development but, on the contrary, must denote the beginning of a new. A Socialist revolution can at one blow transform a factory from capitalist into social property. But only gradually, in the course of a slowly proceeding development, is it possible to alter a factory from a place of monotonous, repulsive, and forced labour into an attractive home of pleasurable activity of happy human beings. A Socialist revolution could also change at one blow the existing large estates into Socialist property. Where, however, small agricultural holdings prevail, there the organs of social or Socialist production in agriculture have first to be created, and that can only be the result of a slow development.

We see, then, that the analogy between birth and revolution is pretty close. But that naturally only proves that it is a mistake to refer to nature and on the strength of that to describe revolution as