Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/591

 of the amount of invested capital to the amount of human labor becomes larger; so then, if in that factory of the Pioneers sixteen hundred stockholders were necessary to raise the capital to employ five hundred workmen, a proportion of one to three, the proportion among other workmen in other branches and in larger establishments—and also in consideration of the daily advance of civilization—will be one to four, one to five, six, eight, ten, twenty, etc. However, let us keep this proportion of one to three. To establish a factory in which five hundred workmen find employment, I need sixteen hundred workingmen stockholders in order to have the necessary capital. Very well: as long as I try to establish one, two, three, etc., factories, there is no difficulty in theory (always in theory, Gentlemen—in imagination), I call to aid (always in theory) the three, four, etc., times the number of workingmen stockholders. But if I extend this association to the whole working class—and their cause, not that of individuals who wish to improve their position, is in question here—if in course of time I wish to establish factories enough to occupy the whole working class, where shall I get the three, five, ten, twenty-fold number of the whole working class who, as workingmen stockholders, must stand behind the workmen occupied in the factories in order to establish these factories?

You see then that it is a mathematical impossibility to free the working class in this way—by the exertions of its members as merely single individuals; that only very confused, uncritical imaginations can lend themselves to these illusions, and that the only way to this end, the only way for the abolition of that cruel law of wages to which the working class is bound as to a martyr's stake, is the encouragement and development of free, individual, coöperative associations of workingmen through the helping hand of the State. The movement for workingmen's associations founded upon the purely atomistic, isolated power of individual workingmen had only the value—and this, to be