Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Socialism and Politics (1903).djvu/8

8 "authorised version" pamphlets, in which the guessings which Fourierists, Owenites, and Saint- Simonians used to make sixty years ago concerning the concentration of capital, the coming self-annihilation of capitalism, and like naive predictions—retold in a far less comprehensible language by Engels and Marx—are represented as so many great scientific discoveries of the German mind. Only, alas, owing to these would-be discoveries, the teaching which formerly, by its Communistic aspirations, inspired the masses and attracted the best minds of the nineteenth century, has become nothing but a mitigated middle-class State capitalism.

To speak now of the Social Revolution is considered by the "scientific" Socialist a crime. Vote and wait! Don't trouble about the revolution; revolutions are mere inventions of idle spirits! Only criminal Anarchists talk of them now. Be quiet, and vote as you are told to. Don't believe these criminals who tell you that owing to the facilities of exploitation of the backward races all over the world, the numbers of capitalists who climb on the necks of the European working man are steadily growing. Trust to the Neo-Socialists, who have proved that the middle-classes are going to destroy themselves, in virtue of a "Law of self-annihilation," discovered by their great thinkers. Vote! Greater men than you will tell you the moment when the self-annihilation of capital has been accomplished. They will then expropriate the few usurpers left, who will own everything, and you will be freed without ever having taken any more trouble than that of writing on a bit of paper the name of the man whom the heads of your fraction of the party told you to vote for!

To such shameful nonsense the politician Socialists have tried to reduce the Great Revolution which calls for the energies of all the lovers of freedom and equality.

And in the meantime reaction tries to take the fullest advantage of these suicidal preachings. It concentrates its forces all over the world. Why should it not? Where is the revolutionary party which might be capable of appealing to the people against its oppressors? And so it takes hold of all the