Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/21

Rh something in itself irrational and unnatural. We, however, have no right, as has already been shown, to draw from nature direct conclusions as to the character of social processes. We consequently cannot go further and conclude on the strength of that analogy that, as every animal being must undergo a catastrophic change, in order to arrive at a higher stage of development (the act of birth or the bursting of the egg shell), therefore so can a society, too, only be raised to a higher plane of development by means of such a catastrophic change.

We can only decide whether revolution is a necessity or not by examining the facts of the devolopment of society, not from analogies taken from natural science. It is, however, only necessary to cast a glance at this development to see that the Social Revolution, in the narrower sense in which we have defined the term here, is no necessary consequence of every social development. There was a social development, and indeed, a very far-reaching one, long before the class antagonisms and the power of the State had arisen. It is, however, evident that at this period the conquest of the political power by an oppressed class, in other words the Social Revolution, was impossible.

But even when class antagonisms and a State have arisen, we are still very far from finding what fully corresponds to our idea of the Social Revolution, either in antiquity or mediæval times. Certainly, we find bitter class struggles, civil wars, political upheavals innumerable, but we do not see any of these upheavals producing a permanent and fundamental change in the property-relations, and, consequently, bringing about a new form of society.

The reasons for that, I find, are as follows: In antiquity and even in the Middle Ages, the centre of gravity of economic and political life lay in the commune or parish. Every commune formed a community, self-contained in all essentials and only bound up with the external world by a few loose ties. Great States were only conglomerates of communes, which were either held together through a dynasty or through one commune ruling and exploiting the rest. Each commune had its own particular, economic development in accordance with its own particular local conditions, and consequently its own particular class-struggles. The political revolutions of those times were, therefore, in the first instance, only communal revolutions. It was quite impossible to transform the whole social life of a larger territory by means of a political revolution.