Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/59

Rh independent Polish national State has, for the same reason, completely died out.

But these embers of a crisis are not extinguished, they may any day burst out afresh, like the Mount Pelée on Martinique, and blaze out in tremendous wars. The economic development, itself, creates new centres and causes of crisis, new conditions of friction, and new opportunities for international complications, in that it awakes in the ruling classes the greed for the monopolisation of the markets for the conquest of transmarine territories, and sets up in the place of the peacefully-inclined mind of the industrial capitalist the lust for violence of the financier.

The sole guarantee for peace lies to-day in the fear of the revolutionary proletariat. It remains to be seen how long yet this will keep down the ever-growing number of causes making for war and prevent them from bursting out. Besides there are a number of States who still have no independent revolutionary proletariat to fear, and many of them are completely ruled by an unscrupulous, brutal clique of men of the high finance. These States, hitherto unimportant in the domain of international politics, or peacefully inclined, come more and more to the front as disturbers of the peace. Thus, in the first place, the United States, and then England and Japan. Russia figured formerly first in the list of the disturbers of the peace; her heroic proletariat has for the moment set it down. But just as an insolent Government, wielding absolute power within its dominions, afraid of no revolutionary class at its back, so may a tottering régime, driven to desperation, pick up a war, as was the case with Napoleon III. in 1870, and may still be the case with Nicholas II. It is by these powers and their antagonisms, and not by those between France and Germany, or Austria and Italy, that the world's peace is most seriously threatened to-day. We must reckon with the possibility of a war in the near future; consequently, also with the possibility of political convulsions which may either directly result in insurrection on the part of the proletariat, or lead the way to such.

I must not be misunderstood. I examine, I do not prophesy, and still less do I express my wishes. I inquire what may come, I do not say what will come, nor have I the slightest wish to say what ought to come. If I speak here of war as a means of revolution, that does not mean I wish for war. Its horrors are so terrible that only military fanatics can nowadays find the melancholy courage to ask for war in cold blood. But even if a revolution were not a means to an end, but an ultimate end in itself which could not be bought at too dear a price, be it ever so much blood, one could not desire war as a means to let loose the revolution. For it is the most irrational means to this end. It brings with it such terrible destruction, puts such tremendous demands on the people, that a revolution which arises from it is heavily overloaded with tasks which are not its own and which for the time being absorb all its means and strength.