Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/38

26 but a stage of transition from the old parties, viz., the Centre (Clerical) Party to the Social-Democratic Party, were just as mistaken as those who expected the same from anti-Semitism in the towns. The middle and large peasant proprietors hate the Social-Democracy, if but for the reason that it champions shorter hours and higher wages for the worker, and constitutes thereby an important factor which draws the labourer from the land and leaves the peasant in the lurch.

Thus, in the country districts, too, the class antagonisms between the propertied class and the proletariat grow ever more acute.

But even more than the antagonism between peasant and wage worker does this hold good of the antagonism between the cotter and the large landed proprietor.

In the system of farming on a large scale the wage labourer plays a far more important part than m the small peasant economy. At the same time high prices of the necessaries of life are, too, of quite a different value to the former system than to the peasant who consumes the greater part of his produce himself. Of course, the opposition between the producer and the consumer of the necessaries of life is not that between the worker and his exploiter, but between town and country. But in town the proletariat forms the most numerous, the best organised, and the most militant class; and so the seller of the necessaries of life comes here again into direct conflict with the proletariat as his most energetic opponent.

No wonder the big ground landlord thinks of the industrial worker nowadays differently to what he did formerly. In former times the struggle between the industrial capitalist and his workers left him indifferent—nay, he watched often with an unconcealed malicious pleasure, even with a certain sympathy for the proletariat. It was not the latter who then stood in his way, but the capitalist, who demanded protective tariffs where he, the ground landlord, wanted free trade, and, vice versa, looked on ground rent as reducing his profits, and wished to snatch from him the monopoly of the better-class positions in the army and bureaucracy.

To-day, all that has changed. The times when there were friends of labour among the Tories and the Junkers, the Disraelis, Rodbertus, Vogelsangs, are long gone. Like the petty bourgeoisie and the class of the middle and larger peasant proprietors, the big ground landlords, too, have become more and more hostile to the labour movement.

But the capitalist class? This is to-day the paramount class. Does not it at least become more friendly to labour, like the Intellectuals?

I am sorry to say I have not noticed anything of the sort.

Certainly, even the capitalist class changes; it does not remain always the same. But what are the most important of its changes within the last decades?