Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/141

 within a hundred years, socialist large production will bring about within a short time, the absorption of outgrown small production. It will accomplish this without expropriation, through the attractive power of improved industrial methods. In places where agricultural production is still not production for sale, but prevailingly production for use, small farming will perhaps continue for some time under the socialist society. In the end the advantages of co-operative large production will be discerned in these districts also. The change from small to large production in agriculture will be hastened and made easy by the steadily progressing disappearance of the contrast between city and country, and by the tendency to locate industries in rural districts.

There is still a point, the most important of all, that should be touched upon. The first question which is put to a socialist is usually: How will you go about the division of wealth? Shall each have an equal share?

"Dividing up!" That sticks in the crop of the Philistine. Their whole conception of socialism begins and ends with that word. Indeed, even among the cultured the idea prevails that the object of socialism is to divide the whole wealth of the nation among the people.

That this view still prevails, despite all protests and proofs on the part of socialists, is to be ascribed not only to the malice of our opponents, but also, and perhaps to a greater extent,