Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/62

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THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

sequence of this is the intensification of their struggle against the fighting organizations of the laborers, both political and economic, which stand in the way of such exploitation.

Here also we find not a softening but a sharpening of class antagonism.

A third force working in the same direction is the increasing amalgamation of industrial capital with money capital, or "high finance." The industrial capitalist is a manager that possesses an industry in the sphere of production, taking this word in its widest sense (including transportation) in which he exploits salaried wage-workers and draws a profit from them. The money capitalist, on the contrary, is the modernized form of the ancient usurer. He draws his income from interest on the money which he loans, not only, as formerly, to indigent private individuals, but also to capitalist managers, institutions. States, etc.

Between the industrial capitalist and the money capitalist a great antagonism exists, similar to that between the first and the land owners. Interest on borrowed capital like ground rent constitutes a reduction from industrial profits. The interests of both forms of capital are here contradictory. Politically also they are in opposition. The great land owner stands to-day for a strong and preferably monarchical form of government because as a part of the nobility he can personally influence the monarch through them and through him the govern-