Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/47

Rh proceed to work, even in that Eldorado of trade unionism, England, if the trade unions really succeeded in putting a perceptible restraint on the will of capital.

In the same way, municipal Socialism finds its limitations in the existing order of State and society, even where universal suffrage prevails in the communes. The commune is always tied down to the general economic and political conditions, and cannot extricate itself from them singly. Certainly, in municipalities, in industrial districts, the workers may get the administration into their own hands before they are strong enough to capture the political power in the State, and they are then in a position to eliminate from this administration at least the most objectionable features of hostility to labour, and to introduce reforms which cannot be expected from a bourgeois régime. But these municipalities soon find their limits, not simply in the power of the State but also in their own economic helplessness. It is for the most part poor districts, almost exclusively inhabited by the proletariat, which are first won by the Social-Democrats. From whence can they obtain the means for carrying out their greater reforms? As a rule, they are limited in the levying of rates by the laws of the State, and even where this is not the case they cannot go beyond a certain limit in the taxation of the rich and well-to-do, without driving these, the only inhabitants from whom anything is to be obtained, away. Every thorough-going reform leads, among other things, to new rates and taxes, which will be found disagreeable, not only to the upper classes but also to the wider circles of the population. Many a municipality, which was won by Socialists or reformers standing very close to them, is again snatched from them by reason of the rates question, though their administration was exemplary. Thus it was once in London, thus recently at Roubaix.

But the political field! There, these limitations are unknown, and do we not find there an uninterrupted progress of labour protection laws; does not every Parliamentary session bring us new limitations of capitalism? And does not every election increase the number of our representatives in Parliament? Does not, thereby, our power in the State, our influence with the Government, grow slowly, but steadily and continually? Does not, thereby, capital become more and more dependent on the proletariat?

Certainly, the number of factory laws grows from year to year. But if one looks closely into the matter, these laws will be found to be simply an extension of those already existing, to new sections of the proletariat—to shopmen, to barmen, to children outside the factories, to home workers, to seamen, &c. (an extension mostly of an insufficient and doubtful nature)—not an increasing strengthening of protection where it already exists. If, however, one considered how fast the capitalist mode of production extends its sphere, how fast it lays its hands on one trade after another, one country after the other, it will be found that the extension of labour protection