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Updated: June 8, 2025
Frederick Engels, "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," pp. 71-72. Karl Kautsky's "Erfurter Programm," p. 129. John Martin, in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1908. Otto Bauer, "Die Nationalitaeten-frage und die Sozial-demokratie," p. 487. Social-Democratic Herald, July 31, 1909. Social-Democratic Herald, Vol. XII, No. 5. Professor Werner Sombert, "Socialism and the Socialist Movement," p. 59.
As an illustration of Kautsky's reference to the lessening of taxes through the profits of government ownership, it may be pointed out that the German Socialists fear the further nationalization of industries in Germany on account of the danger that with this increased income the State would no longer depend on the annual grants of the Reichstag and would then be in a position to govern without that body.
But if the Liberals and Radicals refuse to carry out their own pledges, the conclusion would seem to be, not Kautsky's revolutionary one, but that the Socialists, far from stopping with a mere alliance, must take up the Liberals' or the Radicals' functions, as the "reformists" desire.
Kautsky's view that capitalists cannot bend a more or less democratic government to their purposes and therefore will not institute such a government, unless forced to do so, is undoubtedly based on German conditions. He contends that the hope of the German bourgeois lies not in democracy nor even in the Reichstag, but in the strength of Prussia, which spells Absolutism and Militarism.
It is difficult to understand how it can be said that these classes have no special "class interest," unless it is meant that their interest is neither that of the capitalists nor precisely that of the industrial wage-earning class. And this, indeed, is Kautsky's meaning, for he seems to minimize their value to the Socialists, because as a class they cannot be relied upon.
Also K. Kautsky's Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, London, 1897. Few of our contemporaries realize both the extent of this movement and the means by which it was suppressed. But those who wrote immediately after the great peasant war estimated at from 100,000 to 150,000 men the number of peasants slaughtered after their defeat in Germany.
The progressive "State Socialist" program is, as a rule, a far more promising road to popularity from their standpoint than is reactionary imperialism. In Kautsky's view the bourgeoisie is driven by the fear of Socialism, in a country like Germany to reaction, and in one like England to attempt reform.
Kautsky's error in making this as a statement of general application would seem to be based on a confusion of the survivals of feudalism, as seen in some parts of Europe, with the necessary conditions of agricultural production, as seen in this country.
Kautsky's definition of the working class, for example, is: "Workers who are divorced from their power of production to the extent that they can produce nothing by their own efforts, and are therefore compelled in order to escape starvation to sell the only commodity they possess their labor power."
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