Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/61

Rh the bourgeoisie, to unnerve it, degrade it and make it incapable of fulfilling its great historical mission.

That this is no exaggeration is best proved by the example of the English working class. Nowhere is the; proletariat more numerous, nowhere its economic organisation better developed, nowhere its political freedom more complete than in England. But nowhere is the proletariat more politically helpless. It has not only lost all independence in the domains of high politics, it cannot even defend the interests which lay nearest to them.

Here, too, the already more than once quoted Mr. and Mrs. Webb, who surely cannot be suspected of revolutionary sympathies, will bear out our statement. "During the last period of prosperity, that is within the last decade," they say in the article already referred to, "the participation of the English working man in Labour politics gradually decreased. The question of an eight hours day, and the constructive Socialism after the Fabian fashion, to which the trade unions so eagerly turned in the period 1890–93, gradually ceased to engage their attention. The number of Labour members in the House has not increased."

Even the recent lashes from the whips of their opponents cannot wake the English proletariat from its slumber. They remain dumb while their trade unions are attacked, dumb when their bread is made dearer. The English workers stand to-day as a political factor lower than the workers of the economically most backward and politically most enslaved State in Europe—Russia. It is its active revolutionary consciousness which lends the proletariat of the latter its great practical strength; it is the repudiation of the revolution, the exclusive predominance of the interests of the moment, the so-called practical politics, which make the former of no account in actual politics.

Hand in hand, however, with the loss of political power there goes, in the case of these practical politics, moral and intellectual degradation.

I have spoken before of the moral restoration of the proletariat, who have become, from the barbarians of modern society, the most important factor in the maintenance and progress of our civilisation. But they have raised themselves to such a height only in those countries where they have remained in the sharpest antagonism to the bourgeoisie, where the struggle for political power has kept alive in them the consciousness that they are called upon to uplift with themselves the whole society to a higher plane. There, again, England shows us where a working class will land which repudiates the revolution, and only deals in practical politics, brushing aside its ideals with a contemptuous laugh, and sweeping out from its struggle every aim which cannot be expressed in the terms of £ s. d. Even from bourgeois sources there come laments over the moral and intellectual decadence of the pick of the English working class who share in the decay of the bourgeoisie, and are to-day