Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/51

Rh the German courts of justice, the German workers know all too well.

Thus the candle burns at both ends. The ruling classes and the Governments condemn the Parliaments even more and more to fruitlessness. Parliamentarism becomes more and more incapable of pursuing a settled policy in any direction. It becomes more and more senile and powerless, and can only then regain its youth and vigour when the proletariat wins control over it, together with the entire machinery of the State, and makes it serve its purpose. Parliamentarism, so far from making revolution impossible or superfluous, requires itself the Revolution to become again efficient.

I must not be misunderstood in the sense that I consider democracy to be superfluous, or that I think co-operative societies, trade unions, the entry of Social-Democracy into municipalities and Parliaments, or the securing of individual reforms, to be worthless. Nothing could be further from my intention than that. On the contrary, that is all of great service to the proletariat; it only becomes of no importance as a means of staving off the Revolution—in other words, the capture of political power by the proletariat.

Democracy is of the greatest value, if only for the reason that it renders possible higher forms of the class war. The latter will no longer be, like that of 1789, or as recently as 1848, a fight of unorganised masses without political education, without any insight into the co-relation of forces of the different factors, without any deep conception of the final end of the struggle or the means of its realisation, no longer a fight of the masses who allow themselves to be led astray and put in confusion by every rumour, every accident. It will be a fight of organised, enlightened masses, steady and deliberate, who do not follow any and every impulse, do not break out in revolt at every grievance, but do not either allow themselves to be depressed by every failure.

On the other hand, the electoral struggles are a means of counting our own forces and those of the enemy; they allow a clear insight into the relative strength of classes and parties, their advance and relapse; they restrain from premature outbreaks and guard against defeats; they make it also possible for the opponents themselves to see the untenability of this or that position and thus prompt them to voluntarily abandon it, in case its maintenance is not of vital importance. In this way the struggle becomes less cruel and less gruesome, less dependent on blind chance.

But the practical achievements too, which can be won by democracy, and the exercise of its liberties and rights must not be underrated. They are much too small to limit the capitalist domination and to effect its imperceptible growth into Socialism. But the smallest reform or organisation can become of greatest importance for the physical and intellectual rebirth of the proletariat, which, without them, would be a helpless prey to capitalism,