Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/71

Rh only the helplessness of the bourgeois world in the race of capitalism which prevents it from attacking them. A proletarian revolution will naturally lead to the abolition of private property in these monopolies, and as they, even to-day, are spread already all over the world, and control to a very large and ever- increasing extent the whole economic life, their nationalisation and municipalisation will alone imply the control of the whole field of production by Society and its organs, the State and municipality.

The undertakings most adapted for nationalisation are the national means of transport—railways, steamships, and the production of raw materials and stores—such as mines, forests, ironworks, engineering works, &c. These are also the domains where industry on a large scale and trustification have developed most. The working-up of raw material, and of half-manufactured articles for personal consumption, as well as petty commerce, have often a local character, and are yet strongly decentralised. In these domains, the municipalities and co-operative societies will come to the forefront, and the State will play but a secondary part. But with the increasing division of labour the production for immediate personal consumption recedes more and more before the production of the means of production. This extends the field of production by the State. On the other hand, this field is also continually being enlarged by the development of transit and of industry on a large scale, which abolish the local limits of the markets for one branch of production after the other, and turn them from local into national ones. Thus, e.g., gas lighting is obviously a municipal affair. On the contrary, the development of electric lighting and power transmission makes the nationalisation of water-power in mountain regions an absolute necessity. This has the effect of transforming even lighting from a mere communal into a national concern. On the other hand, the shoemaking trade was formerly bound by the local market. The shoe factory to-day provides, not only the locality, but also the whole country, with its products, and is therefore ready, not for municipalisation, but for nationalisation. Just the same with sugar refineries, breweries, etc.

Thus the economic development has the tendency of making production and distribution by the State the principal form of production and distribution under a proletarian régime.

So much about the property in the means of production of the large industry, to which agriculture also belongs. But what about money capital and landed property? The money capital is that portion of capital which assumes the form of money lent on interest. The money capitalist has no personal function to perform in economic life, he is superfluous, and can be expropriated by the stroke of the pen. This will the more readily be done, as this very class, the superfluous portion of the capitalist class, the high finance, obtains an ever increasing control over the whole economic life. It controls the great private monopolies, the trusts,