Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/142

 to their inability to understand the social conditions that have been created by the development of large production. Their horizon is still, to a great extent, bounded by the conceptions that belong only to small production. From the standpoint of small production "dividing up" is the only possible form of socialism. The notion of dividing has long been familiar to the small business man and farmer. From the beginning of production for sale in antiquity, it has happened innumerable times that as soon as a few families had heaped up great wealth and reduced farmers and artisans to a state of dependence, these latter rose in rebellion and attempted to improve their condition through the expulsion of the rich and the division of their property. They succeeded in this for the first time during the French Revolution, which laid such stress on the rights of private property. Peasants, artisans and the class that was about to develop into capitalists, divided among themselves the church estates. "Dividing up" is the socialism of small production, the socialism of the conservative ranks of society, not the socialism of the proletariat engaged in large industry.

Socialists do not propose to divide: on the contrary, their object is to concentrate in the hands of society the instruments of production that are now scattered in the hands of various owners.

But this does not dispose of the question of "dividing up." If the means of production belong to society, to it must belong also, as a matter of course, the function of disposing of the