Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/149

 of property in the instruments of production. All forms of modern wage-payment-fixed salaries, piece wages, time wages, bonuses—all of them are reconcilable with the spirit of a socialist society; and there is not one of them that may not play a role in socialist society, as the wants and customs of its members, together with the requirements of production, may demand.

It does not, however, follow from this that the principle of equality of incomes—not necessarily identical with their uniformity—will play no part in socialist society. What is certain is that it will do so not as the aim of a movement for leveling things generally, forcibly, artificially, but as the result of a natural development, a social tendency.

In the capitalist system of production there exist two tendencies, one to increase and the other to decrease the differences in incomes; one to increase, one to diminish inequality. By dissolving the middle classes of society and swelling constantly the size of individual fortunes the capitalist system broadens and deepens the chasm that exists between the masses of the population and those who are at its head, the latter tower higher and higher above the former. Together with this tendency, is noticed another, which, operating within the circle of the masses themselves, steadily equalizes their incomes. It flings the small producers, farmers and manufacturers, into the class of the proletariat, or at least, pushes their incomes down to the proletarian level, and wipes out existing differences among the proletarians themselves. The machine tends steadily