Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/64

 careful and intelligent the conduct of the business must be, the morel the employer must endeavour to make use of the most productive appliances and methods, the more of the extracted surplus value must be accumulated by the capitalist to permit the introduction of improvements.

In this way each step of progress made by the proletariat against capital, which is inspired by economic foresight, and therefore docs not aim at the destruction of machinery and similar things, results in creating a strong-incentive to increase the productive power of labour, which also involves the tendency to the growth of surplus value and exploitation.

However paradoxical it may appear, the growth of the power of the working class over capital does not at the same time exclude the progression of the exploitation of that class, but may even provoke it.

This explains why such growth does not impede the progress and development of production, but promotes it. So long as capitalistic production subsists, capital must extract a profit from industry, or else mark time, which harms the worker even more than the capitalist, as the former is dependent on the uninterrupted sale of his labour power. Crises and unemployment are the worst enemies of the worker, and nothing is greater than the folly of those "revolutionaries" who seek to save the proletariat by clogging the wheels of production, and increasing the gravity of the crisis. The workers' councils will become effective and make themselves a definite power in the process of production, when they succeed, in the same way as labour protection and Trade Unions have succeeded, in raising the productivity of labour. If they should aim at decreasing it and permanently impeding the process of production, they would be soon played out. The necessities of production are the most irresistible of the needs of society. They show themselves to be more potent than the bloodiest terrorism.

As long as capitalist production lasts, it will involve