Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/70

6 system of helping the unemployed will completely alter the relation of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; it will make the proletariat masters in the factory. If the workers sell themselves to-day to the employer, if they allow themselves to be exploited and oppressed, it is the ghost of unemployment, the whip of hunger which compels them to it. If, on the other hand, the worker is secure in his existence, even when not in work, then nothing is easier to him than to disable the capitalist. He no longer requires the capitalist, while the latter cannot conduct his business without him. When the matter has gone so far as that, every employer, wherever a dispute breaks out, will get the worst of it and be, forced to yield. The capitalists may certainly continue to be managers of the factories, but they will cease to be their masters and exploiters. But in that case the capitalists will recognise that they only carry the burdens and risks of the undertakings, without receiving any advantage, and will be the first to give up capitalist production, and insist on being bought out. We have already had such cases. In Ireland, for instance, at the time when the tenants' agitation reached its highest point and the ground landlords were no longer able to get their rents, the landlords themselves demanded to be bought out by the State. The same is what we should expect from the capitalist employers under a proletarian régime. Even if this régime were not guided by Socialist theories, and did not set out with the idea of socialising the capitalist means of production, the capitalists themselves would demand that their businesses should be bought up. The political supremacy of the proletariat and the continuation of the capitalist mode of production are mutually incompatible. Those who allow the possibility of the former must also grant the possibility of the disappearance of the latter.

Now what purchasers are at the disposal of the capitalists, to whom they could sell their factories? A portion of the factories, mines, &c., could be sold to the workers enaged in them, and thus henceforth be carried on on co-operative principles. Others could be sold to co-operative societies; others, again, to municipal authorities or the State. It is evident, however, that the capitalists will most readily turn to those purchasers who are able to offer the best terms and the best security for payment, and those are the State and the municipalities. It is therefore, for this reason alone, if for no other, that the majority of the undertakings will pass into the hands of the State or municipalities. That the Social-Democracy, it it got into power, would work from the outset for such a solution, is well known. On the other hand, even a proletariat uninfluenced by Socialist ideas will, too, from the very start direct its policy towards the nationalisation or communalisation of those concerns which by nature—e.g., mines—or by the form of organisation—e.g., trusts—have become monopolies. These private monopolies are becoming, even to-day, unbearable, not only for the wage workers but also for all classes of Society who have no share in them. It is