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Updated: August 12, 2024
Kautsky has explained, in a series of articles written with his characteristic pedantry, the interrelation existing between the Social-Revolutionary problems of the proletariat and the regime of political democracy. He tries to prove that for the working class it is always expedient, in the long run, to preserve the essential elements of the democratic order.
At first Kautsky and others were inclined to expect that nothing would be done in this direction until the working classes themselves achieved political power, but it has always been seen from the days of Marx that the industrial capitalists had no particular reason for wishing to be burdened with a parasitic class of landlords that weighed on their shoulders as much as on those of the rest of the people.
The reader might understand this somewhat vacillating position on the whole to favor democracy, but only a few pages further on Kautsky explains his reasons for opposing the initiative and referendum, and we see that when the point of action arrives, his democratic idealism is abandoned:
This prediction may ultimately prove true, but time is the most vital element in any calculation, and Kautsky himself acknowledges that the industrial proletariat "had existed a long time before giving any indication of its independence," and that during all this long period "no militant proletariat was in existence."
Far from being disturbed at this unjust and unequal system, Kautsky prefers that it should not be reformed, unless the town population are in a majority. "Direct legislation by the people works against these tendencies of parliamentarism.
The second argument seems to prove too much. Kautsky reasons that neither the Radical not the Liberal parties can be relied upon even to carry out their own platforms:
Kautsky says that either the small farmer is not really independent, and pieces out his income by hiring himself out occasionally to some larger landowner or other employer, or else, if entirely occupied with his own work, that he manages to compete with large-scale cultivation only "by overwork and underconsumption, by barbarism, as Marx says."
"Democracy cannot do away with the class antagonisms of capitalist society," says Kautsky, referring to the "State Socialist" reforms of semidemocratic governments like those of Australia and Great Britain. "Neither can we avoid the final outcome of these antagonisms the overthrow of present society. One thing it can do.
The inevitable logic of Kautsky's own position is that, even if the liberals in Germany and elsewhere do undertake a broad program of reform, including all those Kautsky mentions as improbable, no sufficient ground for an alliance is at hand.
It is undoubtedly true, as Kautsky says, that small investors are not obtaining any direct control over capital, and that their funds are used in the way he points out, constituting one of the striking and momentous tendencies of the time.
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