Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/38

 again, compels him to increase his capital; in the same manner and to an even higher degree, the competitive struggle threatens him with destruction, if he is not able continuously to increase his capital. The concentration of capital is not an automatic process, that proceeds without the will and the consciousness of the participants. It would not be possible without the energetic will of the capitalists to become rich and to drive their weaker competitors out of the field. What does lie outside their will and their consciousness is the simple fact that the result of their willing and striving is to create the necessary conditions for Socialist production. That the capitalists certainly do not wish. But this does not say that in the economic process, the volition of man, and the "gigantic role of creative personality" is excluded.

The same will to live that animates the capitalists, exists also among the workers. But it takes on different forms to correspond with the different conditions of life. It is not expressed in a struggle for profits, but for sale of labor power, for higher prices for labor power, and lower prices for the means of life; out of this springs the creation of unions and co-operatives, the seeking after legislation for the protection of labor, and finally out of this springs a second tendency, accompanying the concentration of capital, that may be designated as a growing into Socialism. Even here there is no such unintentional, unconscious process, as is customarily understood by the words "growing into."

Finally, in relation to the social process there is still another phase of the will to live which must be considered. Under certain conditions the will to live of an individual or a society can express itself only through the subjection of the will to live of other individuals. The beast of prey can live only through the destruction of other animals. Often his will to live demands the dispossession of some of his own kind who contend with him for prey, or who