Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/89

Rh Certainly the problem is no light one. It is the most difficult of all which the proletarian government will have to deal with, and it will certainly give it many a hard nut to crack. Still the difficulties must not be exaggerated.

In the first place it must be pointed out that it can be no question here of creating, over night, an entirely new organisation of production and circulation. Some sort of organisation already exists to-day, otherwise the existence of our present society would be impossible. The problem simply is, how to transform this organisation—which hitherto has been unconscious, working its way through by the agency of the law of value, behind the backs of those concerned, with the utmost difficulty, with frictions, bankruptcies, and crises—into a conscious organisation, in which calculation in advance of all the principal factors is substituted in the place of the posterior emendations by means of supply and demand. The proportionality of the various branches of labour exists already, if incomplete and unsteady; it is not necessary to create it quite afresh, but only to make it more complete and steady. As in the case of money and prices, it is a question here of starting from what has been handed over by history, not of making a radical change all round. We have simply to develop some points, limit others, and draw tighter together where it is loose.

But in that case the problem is materially narrowed down by the fact already discussed—viz., that the concentration of production in the best organised factories will considerably reduce the number of industrial concerns. Of the 2,146,972 factories and workshops which the industry of the German Empire had to show in 1895, there were only 17,943 large ones with more than 50 hands, employing, however, altogether 3,000,000 workers out of a total of 8,000,000 industrial workers. I do not say, of course, that only those factories will be working. To try to give exact figures of the future conditions would be absurd. All these figures which we have given are only intended to illustrate the problems that arise, not to present more or less exactly how the things will look in reality. The proportion of the 2,000,000 industrial concerns to the 18,000 large factories, is only meant to show that the number of industrial concerns under a proletarian government will considerably diminish.

But the difficulty of the organisation of production and circulation can yet be reduced in other ways than by the reduction of the number of concerns.

Production can be classified under two great heads: production for consumption and production for production. The production of the means of production has, thanks to the division of labour, become to-day the most important part of production, and is continually extending. Scarcely any article of consumption comes straight from the hand of one single producer; it passes through a number of workshops, so that the one who makes an article ready for our use is only the last in a long series of producers. The