Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/148

 all the laborers in the great factories alone and in order to avoid the night work while shortening the labor time of a day to five hours or half of the present time. To-day the laborer in the great industry produces perhaps four times as much as the one in the small industry, or according to our previous wholly arbitrary illustration about 8,000 marks a year. By the shortening of the labor time his product would not be reduced in equal degree because the better rested laborer will produce more than the over-worked one. We may accept the hypothesis that he could produce as much in eight hours as he to-day produces in ten. We would not be reckoning things too optimistically if we went further and considered that by shortening the labor time from eight to five hours the production of the laborer would not be lowered more than 25 per cent, certainly not as much as 37 per cent. Accordingly each laborer would produce at least 5,000 perhaps 6,000 marks in each year, and all together would produce five to six billion. The total production would therefore, as compared with the present, be doubled and the wages could be correspondingly doubled and this absolutely without any reference to confiscation of capital while at the same time the labor time would be reduced one-half. Indeed under certain conditions the increase of wages on the basis of the figures here given could be still greater. Let us assume that of the present yearly product of the textile industry,