Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/9



The following addresses originated in the head of an Austrian, resident in Germany, and were delivered in Holland. Thus they are already, by their very origin, international, and hence required no alteration when my friend Askew undertook to translate them into English—the only English translation which has been revised by me. Nor do the criticisms which have been passed on them give me, as yet, the slightest reason to alter anything in them.

In various places I come to speak about English conditions, and occasionally let drop very severe remarks about the spirit which to-day prevails in a large section of the English working class. These opinions are in no way consistent with international solidarity, but rather arise out of it, since the history of the various sections of the international proletariat are now so closely bound up with one another that every mistake, as well as every progress made by the labour movement of one country reacts on the other countries as well. It is precisely from England with her highly-developed labour movement that we on the Continent have always been able to learn a great deal. We learnt from her the first forms of a rational labour movement—Chartism, trade unionism, co-operation, the movement for labour protection—in all these England showed us the way. Now, alas, we only learn from England how not to do things, how a big and strong working class becomes powerless as soon as it loses the spiritual tie which binds the various component parts of the labour movement together, and make of it an irresistible whole.

If I speak disapprovingly of the spirit prevailing in the English trade unions, it must not be supposed that I think meanly of trade unions. I regard the trade unions as an equally indispensable weapon in the proletarian class war as a Socialist Labour Party, and both are intimately dependent on one another.

Just as absurd as the opposition or indifference of many trade unions to a Socialist Party, would be opposition or indifference of the latter to the trade unions. In the trade unions we have the most capable portion of the proletariat organised, that which has