Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/48

 labor, to more enormous proletarization of the members of society. Therefore the social democracy demands that the cause of these conditions be seized at the root and destroyed from the foundations. We demand this, not as a whim, but as a logical necessity, since we stand on the height of a world philosophy which conceives society as an organism that with irresistible necessity ever grows and develops. We see that the present society has created conditions that will destroy themselves; we see that present society with iron logic pushes forward to a catastrophe, into its own "judgment day," which is not to be avoided. Socialism is no arbitrary device. The so-called future state with which we have been scoffed, the foundation of which, as a matter of course, we can only point out in general outlines, is the necessary, unavoidable result of the present capitalistic state, as the socialistic production is the necessary result and consequence of present capitalistic production. Thus capitalism, while it ever further increases and gathers in giant grasp its means of power, creates at the same time the enemy and the powerful agencies to which it must succumb—creates, as it says in the communist manifesto, its own grave-diggers and digs its own grave. Capitalism makes, to be its heir, the proletariat, which it creates, prepares for him his heritage, forges the weapons for him, gives him the possibility to realize that for which we strive, produces for him the material condition for the realization of our ideals. In short, the capitalistic present state is the father, contrary to its will, of the socialist future state. In a condition of small industrial undertakings, dwarf businesses, there was possible, to be sure, a so-called socialism, a sort of philanthropic Utopianism, but the scientific revolutionary socialism, that has grasped the law of evolution and looks upon itself as the last product of this