Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/68

4 disarmament. The arming of the people is a political measure, the disarmament a financial one., The first, can, under certain circumstances, cost just as much as a standing army, but it is needed for the safety of the democracy in order to deprive the Government of its most important weapon against the people. Disarmament on the other hand aims in the first place at a diminution of the military budget. It can be carried through in a manner which would still further increase the power of the Governments, if, instead of the army based on universal service, an army of unprincipled loafers is created, which for the sake of money would do anything. A proletarian government will naturally endeavour to combine the two measures, to arm the people, and at the same time to put an end to the increase of armaments, through the invention of new rifles. Cannon, battleships, fortresses, &c.

Naturally the victorious proletariat will also place the system of taxation under thorough reform. It will endeavour to abolish all taxation which burdens the working classes to-day, therefore, in the first place, the indirect taxation which raises the price of the necessaries of life; and on the other hand, to tap the big incomes and properties for the purpose of meeting the national expenses by means of a progressive income-tax or property tax. I shall return to this point later on, here it is sufficient to mention the matter.

A field of special importance for us will be that of education. Popular education has, from time immemoral, engaged the attention of proletarian parties, and played a great part even among the ancient communist sects of the middle ages. To snatch from the propertied classes their monopoly of education was always bound to be one of the aims of the thinking portion of the proletariat. It is natural that the new régime should increase and improve the schools, pay the teachers more suitably and better. It will, however, go still farther. The victorious proletariat, be it ever so radical in its convictions, cannot certainly abolish at one stroke the class distinctions, which are the result of a development lasting over many thousands of years. They and their effects cannot be effaced in the same simple way as chalk marks are effaced from a blackboard. But the school can do the preliminary work in this direction, and contribute very materially to the abolition of the class distinctions, by feeding and clothing all the children equally well, by educating them in a like fashion, and by giving them all equal opportunity for an all-round development of their intellectual and physical capacities.

The influence of the school must not be rated too high. Life is still weightier than the school, and where the latter comes into collision with reality, there it always comes to grief. If, for example, we were to make an attempt to abolish class distinctions forthwith by means of the school, we would not get very far. But the school can, so long as it works in the direction of the real social development, give a powerful stimulus to the latter, and