Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/41

Rh which they do not require for immediate consumption, into money capital, and to place it as such at the disposal of the big financial money capitalists in order to buy out the industrial capitalists. It thus increases the means whereby finance can concentrate industry in the hands of a few money lords. Without the joint-stock company system the big financiers could only control those businesses which they had bought with their own money. Thanks to the company system they can make numerous businesses dependent on themselves and thus acquire such of them which they would not otherwise be able to purchase for lack of cash. The whole fabulous power of Pierpont Morgan and Co., who, within the space of a few years, have concentrated railways, mines, the greater part of the ironworks, in one hand, and have already monopolised the most important ocean lines of steamers—this sudden capture of supremacy in industry and transport of the most important civilised nations would have been impossible without the joint-stock company system.

According to the London Economist, five men, J. D. Rockefeller, E. H. Harriman, J. Pierpont Morgan, W. R. Vanderbilt and G. D. Gould possess together over £150,000,000. They, however, control more than £1,500,000,000, while the entire capital which is deposited in the banks, railways, and industrial companies of the United States amounts to but £3,500,000,000. Thus, thanks to the company system, they control nearly one-half of this capital on which the entire economic life of the United States depends.

Now, as always, moreover, the crisis which will not fail to reach America will expropriate the small holders, and increase and strengthen the property of the bigger ones.

The more, however, money capital gains control over industry, the more does the industrial capital, too, take on the methods of the money capital. To the private employer, who lives side by side with his workers, the latter are still human beings, whose welfare or the reverse can hardly remain quite a matter of indifference to him, if he is not totally hardened. But to the shareholder there only exists the dividend. The workers are to him nothing but so many figures in a computation, in whose result, only, he is interested to the highest degree, since it can bring him increased comfort, increased power, or a diminution of them and social degradation. The rest of the consideration for the worker, which the private employers could,still preserve, is in his case non-existent.

Money capital is that species of capital which is the most favourably inclined towards the use of violent means; that which easiest combines into monopolies, and thereby acquires unlimited power over the working class; that which is farthest removed from the workers: it is that which drives out the capital of the private industrial employer and gains an ever-increasing control over the entire capitalist production.