Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/54

 As no one knows what prices and money values will be in the future, there is a preference for cash payments. Credit is the most potent means to vivify the mass of capital which exists in society. Without credit the scope of a given mass of capital is notably restricted. The effect is especially paralysing at a period when the mass of capital is greatly reduced by the ravages of war.

Another circumstance is not less harmful. Under existing conditions there is little incentive to invest capital in undertakings which do not turn over their capital rapidly. Consequently there is the strongest motive to employ capital in money speculations and usury instead of in industry. So long as a capitalist mode of production exists, it is in the interests not only of the whole of society, but also of the workers, that the available capital be embarked upon productive industrial undertakings giving employment to workers and increasing the sum of commodities. It should not parasitically be employed in speculations and usury, which employs no workers, yield no products, and only increases prices.

The system of paper money not only threatens the State with complete bankruptcy, and with absolute worthlessness of the money which it issues; it has brought growing confusion and paralysis into the whole economic machinery.

This condition can only be dealt with by placing the State finances upon a sound basis, by balancing income and expenditure, so that the activities of the printing press may be stopped. But how is the State to obtain the revenue it needs so long as trade and commerce are suspended? Thus we find ourselves in a vicious circle, out of which there seems to be no way; economy cannot become healthy without sound finances, and these cannot become sound unless economy becomes healthy.

A considerable improvement could be effected if normal peaceful conditions were established among Georgia's neighbours, if the civil war and campaign of conquest ceased in Russia, Aserbaijan, Armenia, and