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Updated: June 12, 2025
The kernel of the working class, "the layers of the industrial proletariat which have reached political self-consciousness," provides the chief supporters of the Socialist movement, according to Kautsky, although the latter is the representative "not alone of the industrial wage workers, but of all the working and exploited layers of the community, that is, the great majority of the total population, what one ordinarily calls 'the people." While Socialism is to represent all the producing and exploited classes, the industrial proletariat is thus considered as the model to which the others must be shaped and as by some special right or virtue it is on all occasions to take the forefront in the movement.
Yet Kautsky himself contends, in the same work in which this passage occurs, that Socialists favor all measures of democracy, even when the movement at first loses by their introduction.
Thus there are three possible attitudes of Socialists towards the self-employing farmer, and all three are represented in the movement. Kautsky, Vandervelde, and many others believe that after all he is not a proletarian, and therefore should not or cannot be included in the movement.
The revolutionary reformers, if we may apply this term to Kautsky and his associates, are then only somewhat premature in their belief that the Socialist Party is now, or will very shortly become, a real menace to capitalism; whereas the political reformers are under the permanent illusion that capitalism will retreat before paper ballots.
Kautsky feels that it is often a mistake to transfer the power over industry, e.g. the ownership of the land, into the hands of the State as now constituted, since this puts a tremendous part of the national wealth at the disposal of capitalist governments, one of whose prime functions is to prevent the increase of the political and economic power of the working people.
By Marx, Engels, Bebel, Karl Kautsky, and all the celebrated leaders and interpreters of Marx's great "Bible of the working class," down to the martyred Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Birth Control has been looked upon as a subtle, Machiavellian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalist class.
Even the "syndicalists," little interested as they are in reform, seem to fear, as Kautsky does, that so long as considerable changes for the better are possible, progress towards Socialism, which in their case also implies revolution, is impossible. I have shown that Lagardelle denies that Labor and Capital have any interest whatever in common.
"The politicians of the ruling class have reached a condition where they are ready to risk everything upon a single throw of the dice," says Kautsky, on the supposition that Socialism is already a real menace in Germany. "They would rather take their chances in a civil war than endure the fear of a revolution," he continues.
Yet because direct legislation might rob the Socialists of all opportunity for claiming the credit for non-Socialist reforms, because it would put to a direct vote a program composed wholly of elements held in common with other parties, and differing only in its combination of these elements, because the Party tactics would have to be completely transformed and the Party temporarily weakened by being forced to limit itself entirely to revolutionary efforts, Kautsky turns against this keystone of democratic reform.
The great Socialist statesman laid emphasis on the essential point that capitalists are absorbing continually a greater and a greater proportion of the national income. The class struggle, says Kautsky, rests not upon the fact that the misery of the proletariat is growing greater, but on its need to annihilate a pressure that it feels more and more keenly.
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