Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/150

 Certainly the task appears alarming but it is very much reduced when we consider that the proletarian regime will apply the methods of the trust, and while it will expropriate all the industries at once, only the best equipped large industries will be further operated. Of the 200,000 textile industries there are only 3,000 which employ more than 50 workingmen. It is clear that the concentration of industry in these latter plants would very much simplify the task of the social regulation of production. It will be still simpler when we consider that the new regime will have closed up all plants employing less than 200 laborers. Of the 200,000 there would then only remain 800. To control and supervise this number of industries is certainly no longer an impossibility.

Here again there is another significant point of view. Our opponents and the pessimists in our own ranks measure the ripeness of our present society for social production by the number of ruins which are still strewn round it and of which it is still incapable of ridding itself. Over and over again the great number of little industries that still exist is triumphantly pointed out. But the ripeness for Socialism does not depend on the number of little industries that yet remain, but upon the number of great industries which already exist. Without a developed great industry socialism is impossible. Where, however, a great industry exists to a considerable degree it is easy for a socialist