Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/68

 constantly larger. The sum which fifty years ago was a considerable fortune is today an insignificant pittance.

The decline of profit and interest does not bring on the downfall, but the narrowing of the capitalist class. Every year small capitalists are expelled from it and consigned to the same death-struggle in which the small dealer, the small producer, the small farmer, the small concerns generally, are engaged—a death-struggle that may be more or less protracted, but which will finally end for them, or for their children, with downfall into the proletariat. Their efforts to escape their fate only hasten their ruin.

One often wonders at the large number of simpletons whom any knave can allure to intrust him with their money upon the promise of high interest. Those people are, as a rule, not the fools they seem; fraudulent undertakings are the last straws at which sinking capitalists grasp, in the desperate hope of making their small capital remunerative. It is not so much greed as the fear of poverty that blinds them.

Side by side with the competitive struggle between individual and capitalist production rages the competitive struggle between large and small capitalists. Every day brings forth a new invention or a new discovery which increases the productivity of labor. Each of these renders useless, to a smaller or greater extent, former machines, and compels the introduction of new ones,