Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/144

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138
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

tarian regime could proceed in the same manner. It could do this even easier because it would not be hindered by private property. Where individual industries are private property, the culling out of the inefficient by way of free competition is a very slow process. The trusts can only displace the less productive industries through the fact that they have destroyed private property in them by uniting all under one head. The method which the trusts can only apply to a relatively small sphere of production may be extended by a proletarian regime to the whole sphere of social production, since it will have totally abolished capitalistic private property. This method of increasing productivity by the culling out of inefficient industries will not be distinguished from the similar operation by the trusts of to-day simply by the extent of the operation but also in that it will include other methods and other purposes. The new regime will carry out this change principally in order to increase wages. The Trust on the other hand goes its way without regard to the laborers. Those laborers who are rendered superfluous by reduction of surplus industries it simply discharges. It utilizes them mainly as a means of pressing down the wages of the laborers who are at work and in increasing their dependence. Very naturally a victorious laboring class would proceed differently. It would transfer the laborers rendered superfluous by the closing of industries to other