Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/138

 co-operative or social ownership in the means of production is irreconcilable with small production. This requires, as we have seen, private ownership in the means of production. he aim of socialism is to place the worker in possession of the necessary means of production. The expropriation of the means of production in small industry would mean merely the senseless proceeding of taking them from their present owner and returning them again to him.

Accordingly, the transition to the socialist society does not at all require the expropriation of the small artisan and the small farmer. This transition not only will deprive them of nothing, but it will bring them many advantages. Since the tendency of socialist society is to substitute production for use for production for sale, it must be its endeavor to transform all social dues (taxes, interest upon mortgages on property that has been nationalized, etc., so far as these may have been not wholly abolished) from money payments into payments in products. But this means the raising of a tremendous burden from the farmer. In many ways that is what he is striving for today, but it is impossible under the supremacy of production for sale. Only the socialist society can bring it, and with it remove the main cause of the ruin of the farming industry.

It is the capitalists who expropriate the farmers and artisans. Socialist society puts an end to this expropriation.

Certainly, socialism will not put an end to economic development. On the contrary, it is