Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/103

 The agrarian tariff and the employers' associations came simultaneously with the trade unions. So it was that the handicraftsmen were simultaneously pressed from all sides. The tariff and the employers' associations raised the price of the necessities of life and raw material, while the unions raised wages.

To be sure, it was only the money wages and not the real wages that were raised, since prices went up faster than wages. Nevertheless the wage struggle embittered the little bosses, and they came to look upon the employers' associations and the tariff parties as their allies against the organized workers. The latter and not the tariff and trusts were blamed not only for the high money wages, but also for the rise in prices of raw material and rents, which it was claimed were due to the rise of wages.

The little merchants, again, saw themselves squeezed by the rise in prices since the purchasing power of their customers, mostly laborers, did not increase in the same degree. They turned their anger against the laborers rather than against the tariff and the combines. They did this all the more willingly, the more the laborers sought to escape the effect of the rise in prices by trying to abolish the middle men through co-operatives.

It must not be forgotten that the laborer plays a peculiar role in the market for goods. Everyone else comes to this market, not only as buyer, but also as a seller of products. What the trader loses as buyer of goods in the universal rise of prices he gains by the rise of his own products. Only the laborer comes to the world market as a buyer alone and not as a seller of goods. His labor power is a peculiar sort of goods, with peculiar price laws, so that wages do not automatically follow general changes in price. Labor power is not something apart from men, but is inseparable from and closely bound up with the lives of human beings. Beneath its price are psychological, physiological and historical conditions, that do