Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/171

 of this may become active. Artistic hand work may accordingly receive a new impulse. However, we need not expect the realization of the picture of the future that William Morris has painted for us in his beautiful Utopia, in which the machine plays no role whatever. The machine will remain the ruler of the productive process. It will never give up this position again to hand labor. This, however, does not exclude the possibility that hand work in many artistic branches will again flourish and that it will even conquer many new fields. Meanwhile it to-day too often maintains its existence only as the product of extreme misery. As a house industry hand work in a socialist society can only exist as an expensive luxury which may in a universal well being find an extensive distribution. The foundation of the productive process will still remain the machine-driven great industry. The problematical small industries will at the most be maintained as islands in the ocean of the great social businesses.

These little industries, again, can take on the most various forms in regard to the ownership of their means of production and the disposal of their products. They may be dependent upon a great national or municipal industry, from which they receive their raw material and tools and to which they dispose of their products. They can produce for private customers, or for the open market, etc. As to-day, so then, a laborer can occupy himself in the most