Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/25

Rh the modern State must also endeavour to become a national State and to add to the other uniformities the uniformity of language.

The influence of the power of the State on social life becomes now quite a different thing to what it was in ancient times or in the Middle Ages. Every important political change in a modern great State influences at the same time, and in the same way, and at one blow, an enormous field of social life. The conquest of political power by a hitherto oppressed class must, therefore, have now quite different social effects than it had formerly.

To this must be added the fact that the means of power at the disposal of the modern State have enormously increased. The technical revolution produced by capitalism extends also to the technical development of the weapons of war. Since the time of the Reformation the weapons of war have steadily grown more perfect, but at the same time also more expensive; they have now become a privilege of the State. By this alone the army has become separated from the people, even where universal service exists, so long as it is not supplemented by the arming of the people, which is nowhere as yet the case in any great State. And everywhere are the leaders of the army professional soldiers, separated from the people, and confronting it as a privileged caste.

But the economic power of a modern centralised State is enormous, too, in comparision with the former States. It keeps in its hands the wealth of an enormous field, where even the technical appliances leave the highest civilisations of antiquity a long way behind.

And, in addition, the modern State has at its disposal a centralised bureaucracy such as was possessed by no State before. So enormously have the duties of a modern State grown that it is impossible to discharge them without far-reaching division of labour and highly-developed specialisation. The capitalist method of production deprives the ruling classes of the leisure which they at one time had. Even if they do not produce themselves, but live by the exploitation of the producing classes, they nevertheless are no idle exploiters. Thanks to competition, this mainspring of the economic life of to-day, the exploiters are compelled to carry on with each other, and without intermission, the most exhausting fights, which threaten the vanquished with total annihilation.

The capitalists, therefore, have neither the time, nor the zest, nor the education necessary for artistic and scientific activity. They even lack the conditions for regular participation in the administration of the State. Like art and science has the administration of State affairs, too, ceased to be the occupation of the ruling clashes. That they leave to wage-workers to bureaucrats. The capitalist class rules but does not govern. It contents itself with ruling the government, just as its predecessor did the, decaying feudal nobility, which assumed the form of a court nobility. But that