Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/23

 Rh capital could only encourage the splitting up of old trades into numerous new ones and stimulate the further advancement oi large farming based on slave labour; whilst the usurers' capital had only the effect of disintegrating the then existing forms of production without creating any new. The struggle against the usurers' capital and farming on a large scale led from time to time to political struggles which somewhat resemble the social revolutions of our time. But their object was only the re-establishment of the previous conditions, not the renovation of society. This was the case with the measures undertaken by Solon in ancient Greece for the reduction of the indebtedness of the people (Seisachteia) and with the movements of the Roman peasants and proletarians which derived their name from the two Gracchi.

To all these causes—the slowness of the economic development, the lack of a deeper knowledge of the interdependence of social forces, the splitting up of the political life into numerous and different communities—there was added in the classic antiquity and, to a great extent, also in mediæval times, the fact that the means of power to keep down the rising classes were comparatively meagre. There was no bureaucracy, or at least there was none where political life was still at full flow, and the class struggles were fought out vigorously. In the Roman world, for example, bureaucracy first developed under the Empire. The inner as well as the mutual relations of the communes were simple and easy to survey, and did not require any special professional knowledge. The ruling classes could easily provide from their own ranks the requisite men for the administration of the State, and this all the more as at that, time domination brought with it leisure, which used to be devoted to artistic, philosophical, and political activity. The ruling classes did not simply rule, they also governed.

On the other hand, the mass of the people were not wholly bereft of arms. It was precisely at the best time of classical antiquity that the militia system prevailed, and each citizen had to bear arms. Under these circumstances, a slight shifting in the respective power of the classes often sufficed to bring a new class to the helm. The class antagonisms, therefore, could hardly become so acute as to impress the subjected classes with the firm idea of a complete overthrow of the existing order, and on the other hand, to make the oppressors obstinately and invariably cling to all their privileges. To this also contributed the circumstance that, as has already been noticed, political revolutions were only made with the object of removing certain individual abuses and individual persons; it also had, however, the effect of not infrequently preventing such political revolutions by means of compromises.

Among the modern great States England is the one which, although not economically, still by its political forms, most reminds one of the Middle Ages. Here bureaucracy and militarism has developed the least; it still possesses an aristocracy, which not