The Road to Power

by Karl Kautsky

Overview

Friends and enemies of the Socialists agree upon one thing, and that is that they constitute a revolutionary party. But unfortunately the idea of revolution is many-sided, and consequently the conceptions of the revolutionary character of our party differ very greatly. Not a few of our opponents insist upon understanding revolution to mean nothing else but anarchy, bloodshed, murder and arson. On the other hand there are some of our comrades to whom the coming social revolution appears to be nothing more than an extremely gradual, scarcely perceptible, even though ultimately a fundamental change to social relations, much of the same character as that produces by the steam engine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781490926650
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	07/06/2013
Pages:	132
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician. Kautsky was one of the most authoritative promulgators of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER IV. ECONOMIC EVOLUTION AND'THE WILL. The revisionists meet these conclusions with the claim that there is a much greater contradiction in Marx himself. They allege that, as a thinker, he recognized no such thing as a free will, but expected everything to come from inevitable economic evolution, which moves on automatically, but that as a revolutionary fighter h sought in the strongest manner to develop wills, and to appeal to the voHtion of the proletariat. This proves Marx to be guilty of an irreconcilable contradiction between theory and practice, declare the revisionists, anarchists and liberals in closest harmony. In reality Marx is guilty of no such contradiction. It is a 'product of the confusion of his criticsa confusion that is incurable, since it recurs again and again. It rests in the first place in the making of will and free will identical. Marx has never failed to recognize the significance of the will and the "tremendous role of human personality" in society. He has only denied the freedom of the will, something very different. This has been explained so often that it scarcely seems necessary to restate it here. Furthermore, this confusion rests upon a most remarkable conception of the meaning of economics and economic development. All these learned gentlemen seem to think that because this evolution proceeds according to certain definite laws it is automatic and spontaneous without the willing human personality. For them the human will is a separate element alongside of and above economics. It adds to the force and operates upon economics, "making otherwise" the things produced by economics. Such a view is only possible in minds that have only a scholasticconception of economics, that have gathered their ideas entirely from books, and that t...

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface Introduction Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition [of 1909] Preface to the Third Edition [of 1920] 1. The Conquest of Political Power 2. The Prophecy of the Revolution 3. Growing into the State of the Future 4. Economic Development and Will 5. Neither Revolution not Legality at Any Price 6. Growth of the Revolutionary Elements 7. Moderation of Class Antagonisms 8. Intensification of Class Antagonisms 9. A New Age of Revolutions Appendices Index

Editorial Reviews

"In The Road to Power, the foremost theorist of German Social Democracy sought to show how a Marxist party could come to power non-violently in a decades-long revolutionary political process. [This] excellent new translation…is a valuable service to scholarship.”—Professor Emeritus Robert C. Tucker, Princeton University

From the Publisher