The deposits of every single depositor, taken separately, are too insignificant to be applied to capitalist industry; not until many deposits have been gathered together are they in a condition to fulfill the function of capital. In the measure in which capitalist undertakings pass from private into social concerns, the opportunities will be lessened for patrons of savings banks to draw interest upon their deposits; these will cease to be capital and will become merely non-interest-bearing funds. But this is a very different thing from the confiscation of savings bank deposits.
The confiscation of such property is, moreover, not only economically unnecessary but politically improbable. These small deposits come mainly from the pockets of the exploited classes, from those classes to whose efforts the introduction of socialism will be due. Only those who consider these classes to be utterly unreliable can believe that they would begin by robbing themselves of their hard-earned savings in order to regain possession of the means of production.
But not only does the introduction of socialist production not require the expropriation of non-productive wealth, it does not even require the expropriation of all property in the means of production.
That which renders the socialist society necessary is large production. Co-operative production requires also co-operative ownership in the means of production. But just as private property in the means of production is irreconcilable with co-operative work in large industry, so
