Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/46

34 proletariat new strength and power. But in that they are completely dependent on the state of legislation and on the attitude taken up by the State. So long as the proletariat has not gained political power, the importance of the co-operative store for the proletarian class wax is invariably limited within very narrow bounds.

Far more important than the co-operative stores for the proletariat are the trade unions. They are so only, however, as militant organisations, not as organisations for social peace. Even where they enter into agreements with the employers—single or organised—they can only do so and insist on the agreements being carried through by virtue of their ability to fight.

Important, however, and indispensable as the trade union is for the proletariat, it must reckon nevertheless sooner or later with its counterpart, the association of employers, which, when it assumes the form of a closer corporation, of a pool or a trust, may only too easily prove irresistible for the trade union.

However, it is not only the employers' associations which threaten the trade unions, but also the State. We in Germany know that too well. That, however, even in democratic England the trade unions are not yet entirely out of danger, is shown by the recent judicial decisions which threaten to fully paralyse them.

To this, too, testimony is born by the already quoted article of Mr and Mrs. Webb in the Sozial Praxis, which throws a singular light on the future of the trade unions. It points out how unequally the trade unions in England have developed. "Generally speaking, the strong are grown stronger, while those who were already previously weak, are now weaker than ever." The trade unions which have grown are those of the miners, cotton spinners, the building trades, the iron trade. Those which have grown smaller are those of agricultural labourers, of seamen, in clothing and unskilled trades. The whole trade union world is, however, threatened by the growing opposition of the propertied, classes. The English law is admirably adapted to the suppression of inconvenient organisations, and the danger that it will be now used against the trade unions "is increased, and the cause for anxiety has grown, with the dislike to trade unionism and strikes which judges and juries share with the remainder of the middle and upper classes." The existing laws are in a position "to hand over the worker, bound hand and foot, to the masters," so that the authors reckon with the possibility of a time coming when "collective bargaining, together with its necessary accompaniment—the collective withholding of labour and the occasional stoppage of the industry—will be made impossible, or at least costly and difficulty by the judicial interpretation of the law."

We must not forget that the trade unions have up till now proved themselves, at the most, only a nuisance to the employers, and of any real limitation of exploitation by the trade unions there can be no question. One can easily imagine how the State would