Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/67

Rh the victorious proletariat under assumptions which will never occur in their absolute purity, namely, on the supposition that it will to-morrow at one stroke, attain to absolute power, and the means which will be at its disposal for the solution of its problems are those which are to-day at hand. By this we may arrive at results which are as different from the real course of the coming change as the law of falling bodies from the real fall of the different bodies. But despite these deviations, the laws of falling bodies do exist and rule the fall of all particular bodies, and the latter can only be understood when those laws are grasped.

Of a like reality ate the prospects and the drawbacks for the victorious proletariat which we shall find in the way indicated, assuming, of course, that we do not commit any methodical mistakes, and they will play a decisive part in the struggle of and before the social revolution, even if the reality should be somewhat different to that assumed here. And only by these means is it at all possible to arrive at definite scientific opinions regarding the prospects of the social revolution. Those to whom this method appears too uncertain to offer any prognostication, must keep their peace and be silent when the question of the revolution is brought up, and simply declare that those who will live through it will know what it looks like—which is undoubtedly the safest method.

Only such problems of the social revolution are open to discussion, which can be discerned in the way indicated here. Regarding all others, we cannot allow ourselves any opinion either one way or the other.

Let us assume then that the fine day has come which gives the proletariat at one stroke all the supreme power. How will it set to work? Not how it will wish to work on the ground of this or that theory, or opinion, but how it will have to work under the pressure of its class interests and the force of economic necessity.

In the first place, it is evident that it will have to make up what the bourgeoisie has neglected. It will sweep away all the remnants of feudalism, and make the democratic programme, which the bourgeoisie too had at one time represented, a living reality. In the capacity of the lowest class, it is necessarily also the most democratic of all classes. It will introduce universal suffrage for all elective bodies, confer full liberty of the press and of combination; it will separate the State and the Church, and abolish all hereditary privileges. It will confer on the communes complete self-government and abolish militarism. This last can be effected in two ways, through arming the people, and through