Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/85

Rh labour reduced by one-half. Nay, under certain circumstances the rise of wages can on the basis of the above figures be still greater. Suppose of the present annual product of the textile industry, which we calculated at £150,000,000, £50,000,000 falls to the workers as wages, another £50,000,000 goes to the replacement of raw material, machinery, &c., and still another goes as profit on capital. Now under the new régime there will be produced £300,000,000. Of that, £100,000,000 fall to raw material, machinery, &c., and £50,000,000 go for compensation to capitalists, and for fulfilling their former social functions, £150,000,000 will remain for wages. These, therefore, could now be trebled. And all that without any new enlargements, without any new expenditure on machinery, simply by closing the smaller factories and by transferring their hands to the larger ones. We only need to carry out on a big scale what the trusts have done before us on a smaller. It is only the private property in the means of production which hinders such an expansion of the modern productive forces.

This method, however, has yet another aspect. Our critics are very fond of pointing out to us that it will yet for many years be impossible to nationalise production, the number of factories and workshops at the present day being far too large for that. It will be a long time yet before competition has extinguished the smaller concerns and created therewith the possibility of Socialist production. The number of all industrial undertakings in the German empire still amounts to two and a-half millions, those in the textile industries alone to over 200,000, How is it possible to manage such a number of concerns on a national basis?

Certainly the task seems enormous, but it reduces itself con siderably, if we assume that the proletarian régime applies the methods of the trusts, and though expropriating all the existing concerns maintains in action only those which are organised best. Of the 200,000 textile factories only 3,000 employ more than 50 hands. It is clear that the concentration of the industry in these last-named establishments will greatly simplify the work of the social regulation of production. It will be still simpler, if we assume the new régime will close all concerns which employ less than 200 workers; there will then remain of the 200,000 only 800. To control and supervise such a small number of factories will be by no means an impossibility.

This gives rise to yet another remarkable point of view. Our opponents and the pessimists in our ranks measure the ripeness of our society for Socialist production by the number of ruins which still cling to it, and which it is unable to emancipate itself from. Again and again the number of still existing small concerns is triumphantly pointed out to us. But the ripeness for Socialism is not to be measured by the number of petty concerns still existing, but by that of large concerns already existing. Without a developed large industry Socialism is impossible. Where, on the other hand,