Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/24

12 only rules, but also governs. Accordingly, it is also the one modern great State in which the endeavours of the oppressed classes haye to the greatest extent been confined to the removal of individual evils, instead of being directed against the entire social system, and in which the practice of preventing revolutions by means of compromise has developed most.

If the universal duty of bearing arms did not favour great social revolutions it facilitated for that very reason the armed conflicts between the classes, even on the least occasion. Of violent uprisings and civil wars there is in antiquity and in the Middle Ages no lack. The passion with which they were fought out was often very great; they often led to expulsion and expropriation, nay, even to the extermination of the conquered. Those who see in violence the characteristic of asocial revolution will find numerous examples of such in ancient times. Those, however, who only recognise a social revolution where the conquest of political power, through a previously oppressed class, leads to a complete transformation of the legal and political superstructure of society, especially of the conditions of property, will find no social revolutions there.

The social development proceeds more by little leaps and jerks, not concentrated in single great catastrophes, but split up in numerous small ones apparently without any connection with each other, often intercepted, always starting afresh, and always essentially unconscious. The biggest social transformation of those times, the disappearance of slavery in Europe, took place so imperceptibly that no contemporary took notice of the process, and we to-day are forced to reconstruct it by means of hypotheses.

Things assume quite a different shape as soon as the capitalist mode of production develops. It would take us too far and would mean the repetition of what is already well known were I to explain here its mechanism and its consequences. Enough to say that the capitalist method of production creates the modern State puts an end to the- political independence of the communes and districts, while at the same time their economic independence also disappears. Each becomes a part of the whole, loses its own particular law and its particular physiognomy; they all become reduced to the same level, and subjected to the same legislation the same system of taxation, law courts and administration.