Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/114

 to take into its own hands more and more functions or industries.

During the Middle Ages the rulers derived their main income from their property in land; later, during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their treasuries derived large accessions from the plundering of church and other estates. On the other hand, the need of money frequently compelled the rulers to sell their land to the capitalists. In most European countries even now, however, very considerable survivals of the former state ownership of land can be found in the domains of the crown and the state mines. Furthermore, the development of the military system added arsenals and wharves; the development of commerce added post-offices, railroads, and telegraphs; finally, the increasing demand for money on the part of the state has given birth, in European countries, to all manner of state monopolies.

While the economic functions and the economic power of the state are thus steadily increased, the whole economic mechanism becomes more and more complicated, more and more sensitive, and the separate capitalist undertakings become, as we have seen, proportionately more interdependent upon one another. Along with all this grows the dependence of the capitalist class upon the greatest of all their establishments,—the state or government. This increased dependence and interrelation increases also the disturbances and disorders which afflict the economic mechanism, for relief from all of which, the largest of existing economic powers, the state or