Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/69

Rh hasten it on. Thus, where these circumstances tend towards the abolition of class distinctions, the school can do pioneer work in that direction, and realise, if but on a limited area, for the generations coming under it, that which is growing in the whole society, simultaneously with this generation.

Those are all aims which bourgeois Radicalism had set before itself, but which it cannot attain, because it requires strength and small consideration for capital—things which no bourgeois class has ever possessed. The schools of a type indicated here would cost, for instance in the German Empire, according to the calculations which I have made in my "Agrarfrage" one and a-half perhaps even two milliard marks (75 to 100 million pounds). Almost twice as much as the present military budget! Such sums for educational purposes can only be raised by a community in which the proletariat has the control, because then it does not respectfully come to a stop before the big incomes.

But the Revolution will naturally not be confined to these changes. It is no mere bourgeois-democratic, but a proletarian revolution. As we have just said, we will not investigate what the proletariat will do on the strength of this or the other theory, because we do not know what theories may yet arise, and under what circumstances the revolution will be accomplished. We will only inquire what the victorious proletariat will be driven to do by the force of economic circumstances, if it wants to accomplish its purpose.

There is a problem, before all others, which will engage the attention of every proletarian Government in the very first instance. It will have in any case to solve the problem of the unemployed. Unemployment is the most terrible curse of the worker. It implies for him misery, degradation, crime. The worker lives solely by the sale of his labour-power, and when he cannot find a purchaser for it, he falls a prey to starvation. Unemployment, however, haunts the worker, even when he is at work, since at no time is he certain that he may not be thrown out of employment and sink into misery. A proletarian Government will, therefore, first of all endeavour to bring this state of affairs to an end, even where the proletariat will not think as Socialists but as Liberals, as, say, in England. In what fashion the question of the unemployed will be solved, is not our duty now to enquire. There are different methods of doing it, and various proposals have been made by a number of social reformers. Even on the bourgeois side, as is well known, attempts have been made to check the evil of unemployment, and various insurance schemes have been proposed and partly carried out. But bourgeois society can in this field only do unsatisfactory patchwork, as otherwise it would cut off the branch on which it sits. Only the proletariat, the victorious proletariat, can and will devise adequate measures for combating unemployment, whether caused by illness or otherwise. A really adequate