Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/126

 a reason why the laborers should find their own rule unnecessary. (One must be hard up for plausible arguments against a social revolution when he makes use of such anticipations.) But it might become a reason for the conquering proletariat to stop in the confiscation of the means of production.

If, however, that should happen, one could ask. What justice has the laboring class received from expropriation? It works simply to make all capital become simple money capital; and all the capital being transformed into national, state and co-operative bonds, any surplus value which the capitalists have drawn directly from the laborers will flow to them from the nations, states and co-operatives. Is this in any way to change the condition of the laborer?

This question is wholly justifiable. But even if a proletarian regime should permit the same amount of profit to flow to capital that it had formerly received, the expropriation through a continuance of proletarian rule would have brought great advantages with it, in that a further increase of exploitation from then on would be impossible. Any new application of capital as well as every increase would be excluded together with all increase in ground rent. This alone would be a significant result of proletarian transformation. Every further increase of social wealth would from then on inhere to the good of all society.