Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/125

 actively functioning as a capitalist. We know that when a man has saved a mark to-day he can put it out at interest without thereby becoming a capitalist. As is well known, this phenomenon has been widely utilized by the optimistic representatives of the existing order. They conclude that this gives an easy way for the expropriation of the capitalist by the laborers depositing their total of saved pennies in the saving banks or purchasing shares in the corporations with them, and thereby becoming partners in capital. At other times these optimists say that if we were to confiscate capital to-day we must confiscate not alone the capital of the rich, but that of the laborers also, in which case we would be taking away the scanty savings of the poor, the widows and the orphans. In this manner we would arouse great discontent among the laborers themselves, another reason which would tend to provoke them to the overthrow of their own domination, a result which these glorifiers of the existing order await with greatest certainty.

The first assumption I do not need to discuss further. It is too foolish. The people who expect to see capital expropriated by the increase of savings are blind to a much more rapid increase of large private capitals. On the other hand, it is not wholly unjustifiable to say that a proletarian regime pledged to universal confiscation would also confiscate the savings of small traders. That would not be