Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/50

38 and more is a majority only possible in the forms of temporary coalitions between the most divergent political parties—coalitions which rest on very insecure foundations, because not inner ties, but merely considerations of external efficiency, form the motive—coalitions which from the outset are doomed to fruitlessness, because their elements are so varied that they can only hold together by each one giving up all thought of carrying into effect its own ideas. It is a peculiar misconception of the essential nature of these coalitions, arising as they do from the decay of Parliamentarism, and implying its political and social helplessness, for people to see in the participation of them the means for a slow and gradual growth of the proletariat into political power.

But the social development does not only lead to the break up of the big homogenous Parliamentary parties into numerous fractions of a different, nay, antagonistic nature; it leads also to the fact that the Parliamentary majorities are often more reactionary and hostile to Labour than the Governments. Though the latter are but the servants of the ruling classes, they nevertheless still possess a better insight into the totality of political and social relations, and though the bureaucracy may be an obedient servant of the Government, nevertheless it develops its own life and tendencies, which, in their turn, react on the Government. The bureaucracy is recruited from the Intellectuals, in which, as we have seen, an understanding of the importance of the proletariat, be it ever so faint-hearted, is, after all, still on the increase.

From all this it results that not infrequently the Governments, with all their reactionary views and their hostility to labour, proceed not half so blindly as the ruling classes, who stand behind them with their following of petty bourgeois and peasant proprietors. Parliaments, which used to be a weapon to force the Government forward on the path of progress, becomes more and more a means of nullifying the small progress, which the Governments are having forced on them by circumstances. In proportion as the classes ruling through Parliamentarism become superfluous, nay, obnoxious, the Parliamentary machine itself loses in importance.

If, on the other hand, with an eye to the proletarian electors, a representative body here and there goes in for labour protection and democracy out-bids the Government, the latter finds always sufficient means whereby to circumvent the Parliament.

In the United States the attack on the trade unions is carried on less by the legislature than by the law courts; in the same way it was the decision of the House of Lords, and not the legislation of the House of Commons, dependent on the electors, through which the attack on trade unionism was delivered in England; and that the spirit of the rejected anti-revolutionary Bill is again active in