Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/94

30 holdings and work them in common, especially when they see how the co-operative working of the expropriated large farms holds its own, or it becomes clear that the latter can, with the same expenditure of labour, produce considerably more, and with the same amount of produce secure to the labourers considerably more leisure than the farming on a small scale ever could before. If farming on a small scale holds its own to-day, it owes it not the least to the mysterious art it possesses of getting more labour out of its labourers than large farming ever can. It is not to be denied that the peasant works far harder than the labourer of the big landowner. The peasant has hardly any leisure time, and even then he is constantly revolving in his mind how he could improve his business. He has nothing else in the world but his farm, and that is one of the reasons why it is so very difficult to win him over to our cause.

But that applies only to the older generation. The younger ones feel quite differently, they have a strong craving for pleasure and amusement, for joy, but also for a higher culture. And because they cannot find any satisfaction for this craving on the land, they flock into the towns and depopulate the villages. But if the peasant sees that he can stick, to agriculture, without thereby being compelled to give up all idea of leisure and culture, then he will no longer run away from agriculture, but simply pass from petty farming to farming on a large scale—and with that one of the last bulwarks of private property will disappear.

But the victorious proletariat will not think of accelerating the speed of this development by force, if but for the very good reason that it has no particular thirst for unnecessary blood. And that would be the result of any attempt to force down the throats of the peasants a new method of production. However highly we should estimate the militant spirit and the bravery of the proletariat, the war it wages is directed not against the small people, who are themselves exploited, but against the big exploiters.

Along with farming there are yet the petty concerns in industry itself to be considered. These also may not perhaps disappear fully for some time yet. Of course, the new régime, as we have seen, will try, wherever badly organised businesses came into competition with better organised, to stop the former and to concentrate their workers in the best organised concerns—a thing that will easily be done without any compulsory measures, simply by offering them better wages. Nevertheless, there are still a number of trades where machinery cannot successfully compete with hand-work or perform what the latter performs. It is, however, remarkable that on looking through the trade statistics of the German Empire I have not succeeded—apart from one insignificant exception (four trades with one worker apiece)—in finding any trade in which industry on a small scale should still exclusively prevail. A few figures, which have never to my knowledge been quoted before, will prove not without interest. In the following branches of