Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/75

 outlined would be as preposterous as it would be impossible. It will not, and cannot, come to that. The mere approach to such conditions would increase to such an extent the sufferings, antagonisms and contradictions in society, that they would become unbearable and society would fall to pieces, even if a different turn were not previously given to the development. But although such a condition of things will never be completely reached, we are rapidly steering in that direction. At the same time that, on the one hand, the concentration of separate capitalist undertakings in few hands is progressing rapidly, on the other hand, the interdependence of seemingly independent concerns increases as the inevitable result of the division of labor. This mutual dependence becomes, however, constantly more one-sided, for the small capitalists grow ever more dependent on the big ones. Just as most of those workers who are now engaged in home industries and who seem to be independent are in fact wage-workers under some capitalist, so also is many a small capitalist who apparently enjoys independence tributary to other capitalists, and many a seemingly independent capitalist concern is, in fact, but an appendage of some gigantic capitalist establishment.

At the same time that the economic dependence of the bulk of our population upon the capitalist class is on the increase, there is also an increasing dependence within the capitalist class itself of a majority of its members upon a small set whose numbers become smaller, but whose power, because of their wealth, becomes greater.