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Updated: June 12, 2025
"Our recruiting ground," says Kautsky, "to-day includes fully three fourths of the population, probably even more; the number of votes that are given to us do not equal one third of all the voters and not one fourth of all those entitled to vote. But the rate of progress increases with a leap when the revolutionary spirit is abroad.
"It may be granted," says Kautsky, "that small establishments will have a definite position in the future in many branches of industry that produce directly for human consumption, for machines manufacture essentially only products in bulk, while many purchasers desire that their personal taste shall be considered.
This view would accord with the latest opinion of Kautsky, except that he expects the new policy to be supported chiefly by the salaried and professional classes. I have proved, on the contrary, that it is to the economic interest also of all those capitalists, whether large or small, who are deeply rooted in the capitalist system and therefore want its evolution to continue.
"It has already been seen," wrote Kautsky, "that economic and political development has made necessary and inevitable the taking over of certain economic functions by the State.... It can by no means be said that every nationalization of an economic function or of an economic enterprise is a step towards Socialistic coöperation and that the latter would grow out of the general nationalization of all economic enterprises without making a fundamental change in the nature of the State."
Certainly there was only one other writer in the whole international movement who could be named as having an equal title to be considered the greatest Socialist theorist since Marx Karl Kautsky. But Plechanov like Marx himself set reality above dogma, and regarded movement as of infinitely greater importance than theory.
For example, Kautsky opposes direct legislation with the proviso that perhaps it may have a certain value in English-speaking countries and under some circumstances in France.
The influential French Socialist, Guesde, agrees with Kautsky that a peaceful solution is highly improbable, and that the revolution must be one of an overwhelming majority of the people, not artificially created, but brought about by the ruling classes themselves. Of course a peaceful revolution might be accomplished gradually and by the most orderly means.
Kautsky himself has lately given full recognition to another factor in the agricultural situation the horrors of wage slavery, which acts in the very opposite manner to these feudal conditions and prevents both small agriculturists and agricultural laborers from immigrating to the towns in greater numbers than they do, and persuades them in spite of its drudgery to prefer the life of the owner of a small farm.
Yet the present domination of the German Liberals and those of neighboring countries by a reactionary bureaucratic, military, and landlord class, persuades Kautsky that genuine capitalistic Liberalism everywhere is at an end.
The Congress of Paris in 1900 adopted a resolution introduced by Kautsky which declared that the "Social Democracy has taken to itself the task of organizing the working people into an army ready for the social war, and it must, therefore, above all else, make sure that the working classes become conscious of their interests and of their power."
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