Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/40

 28 to bear on the monarch and thereby on the Government; just as they, further, are enthusiastic for militarism, which provides their progeny with an officer's career, for which the bourgeois youth is less fitted, and always therefore advocate a policy of brute force at home and abroad, so in the same way is the high finance enamoured of militarism and a strong spirited policy both home and foreign. The lords of the money capital need not fear a strong State power, independent of the people and Parliament, since they can always dominate it as creditors, and often, too, through personal court influences. They have, moreover, an interest in militarism, in wars and national debts, both as creditors and Government contractors, because the sphere of their influence, their power and wealth, is thereby enhanced.

It is different with the industrial capitalist. Militarism, wars, national debts imply increased taxation, in which it has to bear a considerable share, or which increase for it the costs of production. War implies over and above this a slump in the production and sale of goods, business difficulties, often bankruptcy. If the financier is rash, extravagant, and a supporter of brute force, the industrial capitalist is, on the contrary, economical, prudent, and peaceful. A strong Government arouses his suspicions, all the more as he cannot directly influence it. Not a strong Government but a strong Parliament answers to his interests. In opposition to the big land-owners and the high finance he is inclined to Liberalism. Its half-and-balfness is his too. Do ground rents, interest, taxes, limit his profit on one hand, then the rise of the proletariat threatens on the other the whole profit system. But even in his relations to the proletariat, where the latter does not appear to him too menacing, he prefers the peaceful methods of "divide and rule," of corruption and attraction by means of philanthropic institutions, &c., to violent means of suppression. Where the proletariat has not yet struck out a line of political action of its own, there the industrial capital is only too ready to use it as a battering-ram and as a voting machine to increase its own political power. To the petty bourgeois the opposition between the industrial capitalist and the worker appears of less moment than that between the employer's profit on the one hand and the ground rent as well as the interest on capital on the other. The abolition of interest and the ground rent he looks upon as the solution of the social question.

The opposition, however, between finance and industry ceases now more and more, since with the advance in the concentration of capital finance gets an ever-increasing hold of industry, An important means thereto is the increasing supersession of the private employer by the joint stock companies. Well-meaning optimists see in this a means to "democratise" capital, and thus gradually, and in a peaceful manner, without exciting attention, to change it into national property. As a matter of fact, it is a means to transform all the money of the middle and lower classes,