Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/42

30 The necessary consequence of all this is here, too, the accentuation of the social conflict.

But England will be quoted against me. Do we not find in England an increasing toning down of the class antagonisms? And has not Marx indeed said, England is the classic land of the capitalist mode of production, which shows us our own future? Is not, therefore, the present condition of England the one to which we are coming?

It is always England which the enthusiasts for social peace point out to us, and, curious to say, it is the very same people who make us, the "orthodox" Marxists, the loudest reproaches for clinging blindly to Marx's formulas, that think of demolishing us in the most decisive manner by the above formula of Marx.

As a matter of fact, however, the circumstances since the "Capital" was written have altered enormously. England has ceased to be the classic land of capitalism. Its development approaches ever nearer and nearer its culmination; it is being overtaken by other nations, especially Germany and America, and now the relation between them begins to change. England ceases to give us a picture of our future, while our conditions begin to show England's future as regards the capitalist mode of production. This it is which an examination of the actual circumstances shows to those "orthodox" Marxists, who do not blindly repeat Marx, but apply his method in order to understand the present.

England was the classic land of capitalism, that in which individual capital first attained supremacy. It came to supremacy, overpowering economically not only the other classes of its own country, but also the foreign countries. Thus it was able to develop those peculiarities which I have described above as its own, in the freest way. It gave up the holding down of the working class by force, and applied itself far more to the task of "peaceably" dividing them, by bestowing on their stronger and better organised sections political privileges and seeking to buy and to corrupt their leaders by friendly compromise—a policy which too often succeeded. It gave up force and violence abroad, and peace and free trade became its motto. It lived peacefully with the Boers, and even finally put on the air of wishing to expiate the centuries of wrongs inflicted on Ireland by granting to it Home Rule.

But in the meantime foreign competition has become stronger, im many ways too strong, and this forces the capitalists to try to get rid of all resistance to their exploitation at home, and at the same time to secure markets by force. Hand-in-hand with this, the high finance steadily gets more and more powerful in the domain of production. England has consequently become of a different complexion. "The spirit of the time," state Mr. and Mrs. Webb in the Sozial Praxis (March 20, 1902), "has in the last ten years become adverse to the 'collective self-help' in the relations between