rs:
in many instances they must toil diligently in return for a meagre
existence. In Socialist society they are superfluous as merchants,
hosts, brokers and agents. In lieu of the dozens, hundreds and thousands
of stores and commercial establishments of all sorts, that to-day every
community holds in proportion to its size, large municipal stores step
in, elegant bazaars, actual exhibitions, requiring a relatively small
administrative personnel. This change in itself represents a revolution
in all previous institutions. The tangled mass of modern commerce is
transformed into a centralized and purely administrative department,
with only the simplest of functions, that can not choose but grow still
simpler through the progressive centralization of all social
institutions. Likewise does the whole system of transportation and
communication undergo a complete change.

The telegraph, railroads, Post Office, river and ocean vessels, street
railways--whatever the names of the vehicles and institutions may be
that attend to the transportation and communication of capitalist
society--now become _social_ property. Many of these institutions--Post
Offices, telegraph and railroads generally--are now State institutions
in Germany. Their transformation into social property presents no
difficulties: there no private interests are left to hurt: if the State
continues to develop in that direction, all the better. But these
institutions, administered by the State, are no Socialist institutions,
as they are mistakenly taken for. They are business plants, that are
exploited as capitalistically as if they were in private hands. Neither
the officers nor the workingmen have any special benefit from them. The
State treats them just as any private capitalist. When, for instance,
orders were issued not to engage any workingman over 40 years of age in
the railway or marine service of the Empire, the measure carries on its
brows the class stamp of the State of the exploiters, and is bound to
raise the indignation of the working class. Such and similar measures
that proceed from the State as an employer of labor are even worse than
if they proceed from private employers. As against the State, the latter
is but a small employer, and the occupation that this one denies another
might grant. The State, on the contrary, being a monopolistic employer,
can, at one stroke, cast thousands of people into misery with its
regulations. That is not Socialist, it