Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/66

2 asserted by our opponents that we would be confronted, through our victory, with insurmountable difficulties, and, on the other hand, there are in our own ranks men who cannot paint the consequences of. our victory black enough. Already, they say, the day of our victory contains in itself the day of our defeat. Thus it is of importance to see how far this is the case.

If, however, we are to arrive, in our inquiry, at definite conclusions, and not lose ourselves in endless discussions, then it is necessary that we should examine the respective problems in their simplest form, in which they will never manifest themselves in reality, and abstract from all complicating circumstances That is a common method of procedure in science, under which we remain fully aware that things in reality are not so simple, and are not so smoothly reduced to their simplest elements, as in the abstract. I have already said that the social revolution is a process of many years' duration; but if we wish to reduce it to its simplest form, we must proceed from the assumption that the prolelariat one fine day acquires, at one stroke, the entire political power without any limitation, and that it permits itself to be solely guided in the application of the same by its class interests, and intends to use it to the best advantage. The first will certainly not be the case, the last also need not be true throughout. The proletariat itself is not compact enough, not sufficiently homogeneous for that. The proletariat, as is well known, consists of different sections, different in their development, different in their traditions, different in their states of mental and economic attainments. It is besides very probable, that along with the proletariat other social groups, bordering on it, will also come to the top, portions of the petty bourgeoisie, or of the petty peasantry, whose modes of thinking are not quite identical with those of the proletariat; hence there may arise frictions and errors of the most manifold kind, and we shall not always be able to do what we want nor want what we ought. These disturbing elements, however, we must ignore here.

On the other hand we must start, in our inquiry, from well known and ascertained facts. We cannot take for its basis a set of circumstances such as they might develop in the future, since thereby we at once land into the region of the fantastic and unlimited. And yet it is self-evident that we shall not attain power under the present conditions. The revolution itself presupposes a long and all-pervading struggle, which will change our present political and social structure. After the conquest of political power by the proletariat, there will arise problems of which we know nothing to-day, and many in which we are engaged to-day will by that time be settled. There will, however, also arise means for the solution of the various problems, of which we have as yet no idea.

Just as the physicist investigates the law of falling, bodies in vacuo and not in moving air, so we investigate here the position of