Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/49

 was simply unthinkable. Socialism is the result of modern capitalism—the socialist state the successor and heir of the capitalist state.

Therefore we have not set forth in our platform any misty aim floating in the air. We have stated what is and what will be. We have said society is thus; there are certain laws that we can alter as little as can the present state. They lead irresistibly to socialistic society. Therefore, since socialism is a necessity, we strive for it and summon the worker to place himself under the banner of social democracy.

We have said that this movement accomplishes itself through class struggle. This word, which was first brought by Marx from the English into the German, forms the best refutation of the opinion that the Marxian theory, scientific socialism, excludes persons from taking a part in the social evolutionary process and inclined toward a certain fatalism and passive waiting. This is false. The exact opposite is true. It was Marx himself who explained the whole development of industrial society as a series of class conflicts, that corresponded to unbroken, ever more comprehensive developing economic relation, fulfilling themselves in ever higher forms with deeper and wider meaning. And the class struggle is a struggle of living persons, an actual personally directed struggle, and no one has expressed the nature of this conflict clearer than Marx.

If we announce that we will remove the present class state, then in order to meet the objections of our opponents we must also say that the social democracy, while it contends against the class state through the removal of the present form of production, will destroy the class struggle itself. Let the means of production become the possession of the community; then the proletariat is no longer a class—as little as the bourgeoisie;