Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/155

 have become anarchists. They have as great a horror of communism as of production for sale, and they attempt to escape both by seeking both. They want to have communism and production for sale together. Theoretically, this is absurd; in practice, it could amount to nothing more than the establishment of voluntary co-operative societies for mutual aid.

It is true that socialist production is irreconcilable with the full freedom of labor, that is, with the freedom of the laborer to work when, where and how he wills. But this freedom of the laborer is irreconcilable with any systematic, co-operative form of labor, whether the form be capitalist or socialist. Freedom of labor is possible only in small production, and even there only up to a certain point. Even where small production is freed from all restrictive regulations, the individual worker still remains a dependent on natural or social conditions; the farmer, for example, on the weather, the artisan on the state of the market. Nevertheless, small production offers the possibility of a certain degree of freedom; this is its ideal, the most revolutionary ideal of which the small bourgeois is capable. A hundred years ago at the time of the French Revolution this ideal was based on industrial conditions. Today it has no economic basis and can persist only in the heads of people who are unable to perceive that an economic revolution has taken place. It is not the socialist who destroy this "freedom of labor," but the resistless progress of large production. The very ones from whom is heard most frequently