Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/52

 to develop faster than it otherwise would by the mere hoarding of capital in the vaults of industrial capitalists. The horror once entertained for a lender has come to an end; he now becomes a spotless character and receives a new and euphonious name, creditor.

Simultaneously with this metamorphosis, the principal current of interest-bearing capital underwent a change. The money which the lenders heaped up in their vaults flowed formerly out of those reservoirs, through a thousand channels, into the hands of the non-capitalists. Today, on the contrary, the vaults of the lenders, the institutions of credit, have become the reservoirs into which there flow, through a thousand channels, money from non-capitalists, and out of which this money is then conveyed to the capitalist. Credit is today, just as it was formerly, a means whereby to render non-capitalists—whether property holders or propertyless—subject to the payment of interest; today, however, it has, further, become a powerful instrument wherewith to convert into capital the property in the hands of the various classes of non-capitalists, from the large estates of endowed institutions and aristocrats down to the pennies saved by servant girls and day laborers. In other words, it has become an instrument for the displacing of the old propertied classes and the intensified exploitation of the wage-earners. People praise the present institutions of credit, savings banks, etc., thinking that they turn the small savings of working-men, servant girls and farmers into capital and these unfortunates themselves into "capitalists."