Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/40

 the industrial life of Germany and France in the years immediately following.

Under our former system of production on a small scale the income of the worker was in proportion to his industry. Laziness ruined him and finally threw him out of work. Today, on the contrary, unemployment becomes greater the harder and the longer the workman toils; he brings enforced idleness upon himself through his own labor. Among the many maxims from the world of small production which capitalist large production has reversed is: "A man's industry is his fortune."

Labor-power is no more a shield against want and misery than is property. As the specter of bankruptcy hovers always over the small farmer and the craftsman, so the specter of unemployment hovers always over the wage-earner. Of all the ills which attend the present system of production the most trying, that which harrows men's souls deepest and pulls up by the roots every instinct of conservatism, is the permanent uncertainty of a livelihood. This constant uncertainty as to one's own condition undermines one's belief in the permanence of the existing order and one's interest in its preservation. Whoever is kept in eternal fear by the existing order loses all fear of a new one.

Excessive work, lack of work, the destruction of the family—these are the gifts that the capitalist system of production brings to the proletariat, and at the same time it forces more and more of the population into proletarian conditions of living.