Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/66

 to the stock system they control half of this capital, upon which in turn the entire economic wealth of the Union depends.

As has always been the case, so again when the inevitable crisis comes in America, the little stockholders will be expropriated and the positions of the great ones enlarged and strengthened.

The greater the power of the financier in industry, the greater the tendency of industrial capital to adopt the methods of finance. For the private business man who lives by the side of his laborers, these are still men to whose welfare he cannot be wholly indifferent unless he has become utterly callous. For the stockholder, nothing exists but dividends, and the laborers are simply figures in a mathematical calculation in the result of which he is in the highest degree interested, for it can usually bring him increased well being and increased power, or retrenchment and social degradation. The remnant of consideration for the laborer which was still preserved in the private employer is here wholly lost.

Money capital is that form of capital which mostly inclines toward violence, which easiest leads to monopoly and thereby attains boundless power over the laboring class, which is most estranged from the laborer, which most threatens the capital of the private industrial capitalist, and more and more comes to rule the whole capitalist system of production.