Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/55

 function not only to buy and sell goods, but to store them, and often to carry them to far distant markets. He had to assort his goods, display them, and render them accessible to the individual purchaser. Today there is a division of labor not between wholesale and retail trade only; we find also large undertakings for the transportation and the storing of goods. In those large central markets called exchanges, buying and selling have to such an extent become separate pursuits and freed themselves from the other functions commonly pertaining to the merchant, that not only are goods located in distant regions, or even not yet produced, bought and sold there, but that goods are bought without the purchaser intending to take possession of them, and others are sold without the seller ever having had them in his possession.

In former days a capitalist could not be conceived without the thought of a large safe into which money was collected and out of which he took the funds which he needed to make payments. Today the treasury of the capitalist has become the subject of a separate occupation in all industrially advanced countries, especially England and America. The bank has sprung up. Payments are no longer made to a capitalist, but to his bank, and from his bank, not from him, are his debts collected. And so it happens that a few central concerns perform today the functions of treasury for the whole capitalist class of the country.

But although the several functions of the capitalist thus become the functions of separate