Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/153

 they cannot earn enough by wage labor and seek a supplementary occupation.

Of the almost two million people who are occupied to-day in the German Empire in trade and commerce (exclusive of the post office and railroads) and hotel keeping perhaps a million would, with a sufficiently high wage in industry and sufficient demand for labor powers, be transferred from parasitic to productive activity.

These are the two methods for increasing the productive powers of the laboring class: The abolition of parasitic industry and the concentration of industries in the most perfect plants. By the application of these two means a proletarian regime can raise production at once to so high a level that it would be possible to considerably increase wages and simultaneously reduce the hours of labor. Every increase in wages and reduction of hours must again increase the attractiveness of labor and draw new laborers to production who were formerly parasitic, such for example as servants, small merchants, etc. The higher the wages the more laborers. But in a socialist society one can transform this saying into "the more workers the fewer the illdoers in society, the more produced and the greater the wages." This law would be absurd in a society of free competition where the greater the supply of laborers, under otherwise equal conditions, the lower the