Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/157

 this freedom is of no slight importance; it is a protection to the workingman. But even this freedom is gradually destroyed by the progress of capitalism. The increasing number of the unemployed reduces constantly the number of positions that are open and throws upon the labor market more applicants than there are places. The idle workingman is, as a rule, happy if he can secure work of any sort. Furthermore, the increased concentration of the means of production in a few hands has a steady tendency to place over the workingman the same employer or set of employers whichever way he may turn. Inquiry, therefore, shows that what is decried as the wicked and tyrannical purpose of socialism is but the natural tendency of the economic development of modern society.

Socialism will not, and cannot, check this development; but in this as in so many other respects socialism can obviate the evils that accompany the development. It cannot remove the dependence of the working-man upon the mechanism of production in which he is one of the wheels; but it substitutes for the dependence of a working-man upon a capitalist with interests hostile to him a dependence upon a society of which he is himself a member, a society of equal comrades, all of whom have the same interests.

It can be easily understood why a liberal-minded lawyer or author may consider such a dependence unbearable, but it is not unbearable to the modern proletarian, as a glance at the trade union movement will show. The organizations of labor furnish a picture of the