Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/145

 industries where their activity would continue. The trusts rather make the laborers superfluous because it is not their intention to perceptibly increase production. The greater the increase in the amount of products the greater the supply and the lower, under otherwise equal conditions, is the price. The trusts fight against all decline in prices. They would much rather limit production than extend it. When they produce only in the most efficient plants, this is done simply to reduce the cost of production and to increase profits, with the same or even an increased price, and not for the purpose of extending production. A proletarian regime, however, would act for the purpose of extending production, for it does not desire to raise profits but rather wages. It also would increase the number of laborers in the best industrial plants and it would thereby increase production, because in each plant more classes of laborers would work together. How possible this is and how much production will be influenced thereby I can explain by an example whose figures are taken wholly from the imagination and have no equivalent in reality but that nevertheless are not simply fantastic pictures but a real representation of things which find their counterpart in the trusts. Take, for example, the German textile industry which includes to-day a round million laborers (in 1895 993,257). Of these the great majority (in 1895 587,579) were occupied in plants which employed not more than