Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/101

 stage is reached by large production, it admits of but two systems of ownership.

First, private ownership by the individual in the means of production used by co-operative labor; that means the existing system of capitalist production with its train of misery and exploitation as the portion of the workers and suffocating abundance as the portion of the capitalist.

Second, ownership by the workers in common of the instruments of production; that means a co-operative system of production and the extinction of the exploitation of the workers, who become masters of their own products and who themselves appropriate the surplus of which, under our system, they are deprived by the capitalist.

To substitute common, for private, ownership in the means of production, this it is that economic development is urging upon us with ever-increasing force.

The abolition of the present system of production means substituting production for use for production for sale.

Production for use may be of two forms:

First, individual production for the satisfaction of individual wants; and,

Second, social or co-operative production for the satisfaction of the wants of a commonwealth.

The first form of production has never been a general form of production. Man has always been a social being, as far back as we can trace