Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/69

 often also the enlargement of establishments. The capitalist, who, at such a pinch, has not the requisite capital at his command, becomes, sooner or later, unable to hold his own in the competitive struggle and goes down, or is forced, at considerable loss, to invest his capital in some smaller industry not yet seized upon by more powerful capitalists than himself. In this way competition in large industry causes over-stocking of capital in small industry, and thereby renders the competition between the small capitalists all the more fierce and their ruin all the more rapid.

The industries conducted on a large scale constantly expand. Establishments that once counted their workmen by hundreds become giant concerns that employ thousands of hands. Day by day the small business establishments disappear; the industrial development, instead of increasing, steadily decreases the number of individual enterprises.

Nor is this all. The industrial development leads steadily to the concentration of more and more capitalist undertakings into a single hand, be that the hand of a single capitalist, or of a combination of capitalists who legally constitute one person—the syndicate, the trust.

The paths that lead to this are manifold.

One of them is opened by the anxiety of the capitalist to exclude competition. Competition has been shown to be the mainspring of the modern system of production; indeed, it is the mainspring of all production of merchandise, i. e., production for sale. Nevertheless, however necessary competition is for the production of