Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/53

Rh slightest ground to assume that capitalism will end otherwise than it began. Neither the economic nor the political development points to the period of the revolutions which have characterized capitalism having come to an end. Social reform and the growth of strength of the proletarian organizations cannot prevent them, they can at most effect that the class war against capital should, with the higher developed sections of the militant proletariat become, from a struggle for the first necessaries of life, a struggle for the possession of power.

But what are the forms under which the decisive struggles between the proletariat and the ruling classes will be fought out? When have we to expect it? What weapons will then be at the command of the proletariat?

To these questions it is difficult to give definite answers. We can, of course, to a certain extent, inquire in advance into the direction of the development, but not into its forms or pace. In analysing the direction of the development we have to deal, comparatively speaking, with very simple laws; we can here abstract from the whole of the perplexing variety of those phenomena, which we cannot recognise as law determined and necessary, and which in consequence appears to us as accidental. On the other hand the latter play a great part in determining the forms and the pace of the movement. Thus, for example, in all modern civilised countries the direction of the capitalist development has been the same, but in each one the forms and the pace were very different. Geographical peculiarities, racial qualities, the goodwill or illwill of the neighbours, the help or the hindrance offered by great personalities—all that and many other things influenced them. Much of it could never have been foreseen in advance, but even the features which could be foreseen, act and react on each other in such a variety of ways that the result turned out extremely complicated and, with the present state of knowledge, absolutely indeterminable beforehand. Thus, it came to pass that even men who, like Marx and Engels, towered high above all contemporaries in their thorough-and many-sided knowledge of the social conditions of our civilised countries, and in the consistent and fruitful method of their researches, could well determine for many decades to come the direction of the economic development in a manner which was afterwards brilliantly justified by the events, and at the same time err considerably as to the pace and forms of the development within the next few months.

Only one thing, I believe, can already be said of the coming revolution with any certainty. It will have a different shape and