Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/146

 50 laborers. We take it for granted that the larger and the more comprehensive plant is always technically the more perfect. To be sure this is not true in all cases. It is possible that a factory with 20 laborers may be technically better organized than one in the same branch of industry with 80 laborers. But on an average the former statement would hold true and we can accept it all the more readily as we use it only as an example for the purpose of illustration and not as a proposition. Let us take it for granted that the most imperfect factories are those employing less than 50 laborers. All these would be closed and the work in them transferred to those factories in which more than 50 laborers were employed. These could then be divided into two shifts working one after the other. If the hours of labor are ten to eleven a day now each shift could then have its hours reduced to eight. From that time on the industry would run daily six hours more and its machinery would be so much the better used, while at the same time the hours of labor for each laborer would be shortened by two hours. We can take it for granted that the production of each individual would not be decreased thereby as we have had countless examples showing that the advantages of the shortened labor time generally, at least, outweigh the disadvantages. Considering that a laborer in the most imperfect industry to-day produces an amount of product which represents