Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Programme of the World Revolution (1920).djvu/11



In all countries, except in Russia, Capital is predominant. Whatever State one takes, whether semi-despotic Prussia, or Republican France, or so-called democratic America, everywhere power is wholly concentrated in the hands of big capital. A small group of people, landowners, manufacturers and the richest bankers, hold millions and hundreds of millions of town workers and rural poor in slavery and bondage, compelling them to toil, sweating them and throwing them on the street as soon as they become useless and worn out and incapable of being a source of further profit to Lord Capital.

This terrible power of the bankers and manufacturers over millions of toilers is given to them by wealth. Why does a poor man who is thrown on the streets have to starve to death? Because he possesses nothing but a pair of hands which he can sell to the capitalist should the capitalist want them. How is it that a rich banker or business man can do nothing, and yet lead an easy life free of care, getting a solid income, and raking in profits daily, hourly, and even by the minute? Because he possesses not only a pair of hands, but also those means of production without which work is impossible nowadays: factories, land, machines, railroads, mines, ships and steamers, and all kinds of apparatus and instruments. All over the world, except in present day Russia, this wealth accumulated by man belongs only to capitalists and landowners who have also become