Karl Kautsky

“ And so shocking are the conditions in modern society that no one who wishes to be taken seriously in politics or science dares any longer to deny the truth of the charges preferred by socialism against the present social order. On the contrary the clearest thinkers in all the capitalist political parties admit that there is "some truth" in those charges; some even declare that the final triumph of socialism is inevitable unless society suddenly turns about and reforms—a thing these gentlemen imagine can be done off-hand, provided the demands of this or that party be promptly granted. ”

“ Indeed, even among the cultured the idea prevails that the object of socialism is to divide the whole wealth of the nation among the people.
That this view still prevails, despite all protests and proofs on the part of socialists, is to be ascribed not only to the malice of our opponents, but also, and perhaps to a greater extent, to their inability to understand the social conditions that have been created by the development of large production. Their horizon is still, to a great extent, bounded by the conceptions that belong only to small production. ”

“ Never yet in the history of mankind has it happened that a revolutionary party was able to foresee, let alone determine, the forms of the new social order which it strove to usher in. The cause of progress gained much if it could as much as ascertain the tendencies that led to such a new social order, to the end that its political activity could be a conscious, and not merely an instinctive, one. No more can be demanded of the Socialist Party. ”

“ There was a time when the capitalist class, in its self-confidence, imagined it could free itself from the economic activities of the state; the state should only watch over their safety at home and abroad, keep the proletarians and foreign competitors in check, but keep its hands off the whole economic life. The capitalist class had good reasons for desiring this. However great the power of the capitalists, the power of the state had not always shown itself as subservient as they wished. ”

“ There is another and very extensive domain in which the capitalist system of large production tends to turn the population into proletarians—the domain of commerce. The large stores are already bearing heavily upon the smaller ones. The number of small stores does not, for that reason, diminish. On the contrary, it increases. The small store is the last refuge of the bankrupt small producer. Were the small stores actually crowded out, the ground would be wholly taken from under the feet of the small traders; they would then be thrust forthwith below the class of the proletariat—into the slums ”

“ If the socialists demand any advance in civilization, whether that advance be a direct benefit to proletarian class interests or not, the reactionary democracy is driven by its whole being to oppose it, even if it does not directly threaten the interests of the small property owner. Just as the Socialist party is the most progressive party, so the reactionary democracy is the most retrograde party, in that to the hatred of progress which they share with other reactionary parties they add the most gross ignorance of everything that takes place outside their narrow circle of thought. ”

“ Formerly he was indifferent to the struggle between the industrial capitalist and his laborer and indeed he often followed them with malignant rejoicings at the predicament of the capitalists with which indeed there was often a certain sympathy for the proletariat. It was not the latter that then stood in his road, but rather the capitalist who demanded protection while he needed free trade, and who on the other hand saw in ground rents an invasion of his profits and who sought to take away from the land owners the monopoly of the higher places in the army and bureaucracy. ”

“ Karl Kautsky, who is regarded by many as the official interpreter of Socialism, has also laid down laws for the guidance of Socialists in ethical matters. He advances the theory that the moral law prevails only when we have intercourse with members of our own class, or social organization. ”

“ Germany had, indeed, in 1871, committed the great mistake of tearing Alsace and Lorraine against their will from France, and thus driving France into the arms of Russia. The French passion for revanche, for reunion with their disruptured and enslaved brethren, began, in the course of time, to take a milder form; all the more as the prospects of the French in a war with Germany grew ever worse; for the population of France remained almost stationary, while that of Germany rapidly increased, and on this account alone the latter gained a constantly growing superiority over France. ”

“ In any case the Russian Revolution is not by any means at an end—it cannot close so long as the peasants are not appeased. The longer it lasts so much the greater will be the disturbance in the ranks of the West European proletariat, so much the nearer financial catastrophes, so much the more probable that, even in West Europe, there should set in a period of class struggle.
This is not a time which calls for the theoretical labours of revolutionary writers. But this drawback for our theoretical labours, which will be probably felt in the next few years, we need not lament. ”

“ Vorwärts contrived also to add insult to the statement by using the word Pfaffen for preachers, a word having a contemptuous implication in this sense throughout Northern Germany.
Karl Kautsky, for years one of the intellectual leaders of the Socialist movement in Germany and one of its ablest and most representative publicists, said: [12]
"The one-sided battle against the congregations, as it is being carried on today in France, is merely a pruning of the boughs of the tree, which then merely flourishes all the more strongly. ”

“ Thus pleasure is not to be a maxim which can serve as a principle of universal legislation, and that because it can call forth social disharmonies. The moral law has thus to create a harmonious society, and such must be possible, otherwise it would be absurd to wish to create it.
The Kantian moral law assumes thus in the first place a harmonious society as desirable and possible. But it also assumes that the moral law is the means to create such a society, that this result can be achieved through a rule which the individual sets to himself. ”

“ But it was clear to these socialists that the capitalist system was not the perfect thing which the eighteenth century expected. Accordingly this system appeared to them as still falling short of the true one; the philosophers of the eighteenth century must have made a mistake somewhere. The early socialists addressed themselves to the task of finding the mistake, and, in their turn, finding the true social system, that is, the one that would perfectly suit human nature. ”

“ That it develops at the same time the necessity of peace and the tendency toward war is only one of the contradictions which will bring about the destruction of the capitalist system.
The proletariat has not assumed the inconsistent attitude with regard to this matter that is characteristic of the other classes. The more the working-class develops and becomes independent, the clearer becomes the fact that it is influenced by only one of the opposing tendencies which we have just observed in the capitalist system. The capitalist system, by expropriating the worker, has freed him from the soil. ”

“ On the other side I am thoroughly convinced that it is not our task to invent recipes for the kitchens of the future, and when more than ten years ago the German Social democracy proposed to include in its program demands for such measures as would accelerate the transformation from a capitalist to a socialist manner of production, I opposed this because I maintained that the party could not lay out a definite road for conditions of which we can have only a dim presentiment and which may easily surprise us with much that is wholly unexpected. ”

“ But this freedom of the laborer is irreconcilable with any systematic, co-operative form of labor, whether the form be capitalist or socialist. Freedom of labor is possible only in small production, and even there only up to a certain point. Even where small production is freed from all restrictive regulations, the individual worker still remains a dependent on natural or social conditions; the farmer, for example, on the weather, the artisan on the state of the market. Nevertheless, small production offers the possibility of a certain degree of freedom ”

“ At one time this class, like a portion of the "new middle class" at present, was very sympathetic towards the proletariat, co-operated with it, gave to it and received from it intellectual support and material strength. But old or new the present middle class is a very unreliable ally, and this just because of its intermediate position between the exploited and the exploiting classes. As Marx has already noted, the little capitalist is neither wholly proletarian, nor wholly bourgeois, and considers himself, according to the occasion, first one and then the other. ”

“ Karl Kautsky summed up the entire development in the year 1908 in his work "The Road to Power", in which he proved that the whole capitalist world was moving in the direction of a frightful world crisis, that we were on the eve of the Socialist Revolution. This conviction, which became more and more rooted in the minds of the foremost ranks of the workers, faced them with this second question: What means will the workers use to defend themselves when the new situation arises, and what means will they use when they launch the attack on the fortresses of Capital? ”

“ If the socialists decline to lay before the public a prospectus of the future commonwealth, the bourgeois writers can find in this fact no reason to mock or to conclude that we do not know what we are after. The Socialist Party has a clearer insight into the future than had the pathfinders of the present social order.
We have said that a thinker may be able to discover the tendencies of the economic development of his day, but that it is impossible for him to foresee the social forms in which that development will ultimately find expression. ”

“ That he does not share it is what makes him a Socialist. He knows that if social peace is to come it will be not by a chimerical RECONCILIATION, but by the ABOLITION of classes. When he has lost faith in a revolution, however, there is nothing left for him but to await the peaceful and imperceptible disappearance of classes through economic progress—through the growth and increased power of the working class, which gradually absorbs the other classes.
That is the theory of the gradual growth into (hineinwachsen) the socialist society. ”

“ The idealists among the upper classes are the only ones whose support it is at all possible to enlist in favor of socialism. But even among these the majority are moved by the insight which they have acquired only far enough to wear themselves out in fruitless searchings for a peaceful solution of the social problem; that is to say, in searching for a solution that will reconcile the interests of the capitalist class with their more or less developed knowledge of socialism and their consciences. ”

“ All other political parties live only in the present, from hand to mouth; the Socialist party is the only one which has a definite aim in the future, the only one whose present policy is dictated by a general, consistent purpose. Because they neither can nor will see, because they stubbornly persist in star-gazing, they declare off-hand that the Socialists know not what they want except to destroy the existing order. ”

“ Since our sensual experience does not reveal to us the world as it is in itself, but only as it is for us—as it appears to us—thanks to the peculiar constitution of our faculties of knowledge, so the world as it is in itself must be different to that which appears to us. Consequently Kant distinguishes between the world of phenomena, of appearances, and the world of things in themselves, the "noumena," or the intelligible world. ”

“ Only those bourgeois idealists develop into genuine socialists who have, not only the requisite theoretical insight, but also the courage and strength to break with their class.
Accordingly, the cause of socialism has little to hope from the property-holding classes. Individual members may be won over to socialism, but only such as no longer belong by convictions and conduct to the class to which their economic position assigns them. These will ever be a very small minority, except when, during revolutionary periods, the scales incline to the side of socialism. ”

“ The bourgeoisie was itself actively engaged in all these violations of historical rights. It cannot, now, since it has become the ruling class, well condemn revolution in the name of this right to revolution, even if its legal philosophy does everything possible to reconcile natural and historical rights. It must seek more effective arguments with which to stigmatize the revolution, and these are found in the newly-arising natural science with its accompanying mental attitude. ”

“ If the English bourgeoisie no longer needed Materialism, since without it, and on religious grounds, they had got rid of the feudalistic State and its Church, the German bourgeoisie did not yet feel strong enough to take up openly the fight against the State and its Church. They, therefore, withdrew in fear from Materialism. This came in the eighteenth century to Germany, just as to Russia: not as the philosophy of the fight but of pleasure, in a form suitable to the needs of the "enlightened" despotism. ”