Robinson only enslaved Friday that he might work for the benefit of Robinson. And how could Robinson derive benefit from the labor of Friday? Only by virtue of the fact that Friday produced more means of livelihood by his labor than Robinson had to give him to keep him able to work. Robinson has therefore, contrary to Herr Duehring"s pretty prescription, made, by the enslavement of Friday, a political organization, not just because he wanted to, but simply as a means of providing himself with food, and he ought to see how little he has in common with his lord and master Herr Duehring.
The childish example therefore which Herr Duehring has discovered in order to show that force is the "historical fundamental" proves that force is only a means to further an economic interest, and in history the economic side is likewise more fundamental than the political. The example therefore proves just the opposite of what it ought to prove.
And, as with Robinson and Friday, so it is also with all the examples of lordship and slavery up to now. Slavery, to use Duehring"s own elegant expression, always implies a means for supplying sustenance (using the term in its broadest sense) and never merely implies a political organization which has been developed by its own will. One would have to be a Herr Duehring to venture to call taxes only a secondary feature of government, or, to say that the political groupings of the dominant bourgeois of to-day and the subjugated proletariat are purely voluntary and not made to serve the material interests of the bourgeois, namely profit making and the acc.u.mulation of capital.
Let us give our attention again to our two men. Robinson "sword in hand" makes Friday his slave. But to do this Robinson uses something else besides his sword. A slave is not made by that means solely. In order to be able to keep a slave one has to be superior to him in two respects, one must first have control over the tools and objects of labor of the slave and over his means of subsistence also. Therefore, before slavery is possible, a certain point in production has to be reached and a certain degree of inequality in distribution attained.
And when slave labor becomes the dominant mode of production of an entire society a higher development of the powers of production, of trade and of wealth, acc.u.mulation occurs. In early tribal communities which had common ownership of the soil, slavery is either nonexistent or its role is very subordinate. So it was at first in Rome, as a state of farmers, but when Rome became the capital city of the world and the soil of Italy came more and more to be owned by a numerically small cla.s.s of enormously wealthy property owners, the population of farmers perished in front of the slave population. When at the time of the Persian War, the number of slaves in Corinth was 460,000, and in aegina 470,000, and there were ten slaves to every freeman in the population, the explanation must be sought in something other than force; there were a highly developed art and handicraft and foreign commerce. Slavery in the United States of America was much less due to force than to the English cotton industry; where there was not cotton grown or where slaves were not raised, as in the border states, for the cotton producing states, it perished of its own accord and without any employment of force simply because it did not pay.
When Herr Duehring therefore calls the property of the present day property resting on force and designates it as "that form of domination which does not merely signify the exclusion of one"s fellow beings from the use of the natural means of sustenance, but implies in addition that the subjection of man has lain at the foundation of human slavery" he puts the matter upside down. The subjection of humanity to slavery in all its forms means the control by the master of the means of labor by virtue of which alone he can employ his slaves upon them and the disposal of the means of livelihood by which he can keep his slaves alive. In all cases therefore it implies a certain power of possession which transcends the ordinary? How did this arise? Occasionally it is clear that it was seized and can therefore be said to rest upon force but this is by no means essential. It can be got by labor, be robbed, be obtained by trade, or taken by fraud. It must be worked for generally before it can be stolen.
Private property does not historically come into existence by any means as a rule as the product of robbery and violence. On the contrary. It arises from the limitation of certain things in the early tribal communes. It develops in the first place within the tribe and afterwards in exchange with peoples outside of the tribe in the form of wares. In proportion as the products of the tribe a.s.sume the form of commodities, i.e., the less they are produced for the use of the producer and the more for the purpose of exchange, the exchange destroys the original form of distribution in the commune itself, and the more unequal become the shares of the individual members of the community with respect to material possessions. So the old communal ownership of land becomes more and more invaded, the communal property is rapidly converted into a village of farmers, each tilling his own piece of ground. Oriental despotism and the changing government of conquering nomads had no power to alter the old form of communal ownership for a thousand years. But the continual destruction of the primitive domestic industry through the compet.i.tion of the products of the great industry is bringing about its dissolution. The thing has little to do with force as has lately appeared in the matter of the division of the communal property of the feudal societies on the Moselle and in Hochwald. The peasants are finding the subst.i.tution of individual for communal holdings to their interests. Even the growth of a primitive aristocracy as among the Celts, the Germans, and in Mesopotamia, is a result of the communal ownership of landed property, and does not depend upon force in the slightest degree but upon free will and custom. Especially where private property arises it appears as the result of a change in the methods of production and exchange in the interests of the increase of production and the development of commerce and therefore arises from economic causes. Force plays no role in this. It is clear that the inst.i.tution of private property must have already existed before the robber is able to possess himself of other people"s goods and that force may change the possession but cannot alter private property as such.
But to explain the "subjection of men to slavery" in its modern form, in wage-labor, we can make no use of either force or property acquired by force. We have already mentioned the part which the transformation of the products of labor into commodities, their production not for use alone, but for exchange, plays in the destruction of the primitive communal property and therefore in the bringing into existence directly or indirectly the universality of private property. But Marx has proved in his "Capital"--and Herr Duehring does not venture to intrude upon the matter--that at a certain stage in economic development the production of commodities is transformed into capitalistic production and that at this point "the law of appropriation resting upon the production and circulation of commodities, the law of private property, by its own inevitable dialectic becomes changed into its opposite, the exchange of equivalents, which appeared as its original mode of operation, but has now become so twisted that there is only an appearance of exchange since. In the first place, the portion of capital exchanged for labor-force is itself only a portion of the product of another"s labor taken without an equivalent, and in the second place, it is not only supplied by its producers, the workers, but it must be supplied also with a new surplus. Originally property seemed to us to be established on labor only--property now appears (as a conclusion of the Marxian argument), on the side of the capitalist, as the right to unpaid labor and, on the side of the workingman, as an impossibility, the ownership of his own product. The difference between property and labor is the result of a law which apparently proceeded from their ident.i.ty." In other words if we exclude the possibility of force, robbery, and cheating absolutely, if we take the position that all private property originally depended upon the personal labor of its possessor and that equivalents are always exchanged we nevertheless come, in the course of the development of production and exchange, of necessity, to the modern capitalistic methods of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and livelihood in the hands of a single cla.s.s few in numbers, to the degradation of the other consisting of the immense majority of producers to the position of propertyless proletarians, to the periodical alternations of swindling operations and trade crises and to the whole of the present anarchy in production. The entire result rests on purely economic grounds without robbery, force, or any intervention of politics or the government being necessary. Property resting on force becomes a mere phrase which merely serves to obscure the understanding of the real development of things.
This course, historically expressed, is the story of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political conditions are the decisive causes of economic conditions," the modern bourgeoisie would necessarily not have progressed as the result of a fight with feudalism, but would be the darling child of its womb. Everybody knows that the opposite is the case. The bourgeoisie, originally bound to pay feudal dues to the dominant feudal n.o.bility, recruited from bond slaves and thralls, in a subject state, has, in the course of its conflict with the n.o.bility captured position after position, and finally has come into possession of the power in civilized countries. In France it directly attacked the n.o.bility, in England it made the aristocracy more and more bourgeois and finally incorporated it with itself as a sort of ornament. And how did this come about? Entirely through the transformation of economic conditions which was sooner or later followed either by the voluntary or compulsory transformation of political conditions. The fight of the bourgeoisie against the feudal n.o.bility is the fight of the city against the country, of industry against landlordism, of economy based on money against economy based on natural products. The distinctive weapons of the bourgeois in this fight were those which came into existence through the development of increasing economic force by reason of the growth at first of hand manufacture and afterwards machine-manufacture and through the extension of trade. During the whole of this conflict the political power was in the hands of the n.o.bility, with the exception of a period when the king employed the bourgeoisie against the n.o.bility in order to hold one in check by means of the other. From the very moment, however, in which the bourgeoisie still deprived of political power began to be dangerous because of the development of its economic power the monarchy again turned to the n.o.bility and thereby brought about the revolution of the bourgeois first in England and then in France.
The political conditions in France remained unaltered until the economic conditions outgrew them. In politics the n.o.ble was everything, the bourgeois nothing. As a social factor the bourgeoisie was of the highest importance while the n.o.bility had abandoned all its social functions and yet pocketed revenues, social services which it did not any longer perform. Even this is not sufficient. Bourgeois society was, as far as the whole matter of production is concerned, tied and bound in the political feudal forms of the Middle Ages, which this production, not only as regards manufacture but as regards handwork also had long transcended amid all the thousandfold gild-privileges and local and provincial tax impositions which had become mere obstacles and fetters to production. The bourgeois revolution put an end to them. But the economic condition did not, as Herr Duehring would imply, forthwith adapt itself to the political circ.u.mstances,--that the king and the n.o.bility spent a long time in trying to effect--but it threw all the mouldy old political rubbish aside and shaped new political conditions in which the new economic conditions might come into existence and develop. And it has developed splendidly in this suitable political and legal atmosphere, so splendidly that the bourgeoisie is now not very far from the position which the n.o.bility occupied in 1789. It is becoming more and more not alone a social superfluity but a social impediment. It takes an ever diminishing part in the work of production and becomes more and more, as the n.o.ble did, a mere revenue consuming cla.s.s. And this revolution in its position and the creation of a new cla.s.s, that of the proletariat, came about without any force-nonsense but by purely economic means. Further more, it has by no means accomplished it by its own willful act. On the other hand it has accomplished itself irresistibly against the wish and intentions of the bourgeoisie. Its own productive forces have taken the management of affairs and are driving modern bourgeois society to the necessity of revolution or destruction. And if the bourgeoisie now appeals to force to ward off the ruin arising from the decrepit economic condition it proves thereby that it suffers from the same error as Herr Duehring, in that it thinks that "political conditions are the distinctive causes of economic condition" and that by the use of the prime factor of mere political force it can manufacture the secondary factor of economic conditions. It thinks that it can shape economic conditions and their inevitable development, and therefore eliminate the economic effects of the steam engine, and the modern industry which has proceeded from it. It thinks that it can abolish the world commerce and the bank credit development of to-day from the universe by means of Krupp guns and Mauser rifles.
_III. Force Theory (Continued)._
Let us look at this omnipotent "force" of Herr Duehring a little more closely. Robinson enslaved Friday "sword in hand." How did he get the sword? Robinson"s imaginary island never grew swords on trees and some answer to this question is due from Herr Duehring. We might just as well a.s.sume that as Robinson became possessed of a sword so, one fine morning, Friday appeared with a loaded revolver in his hand. Thereupon the "force" is entirely reversed. Friday takes command and Robinson must submit. We beg pardon of the reader for returning to the story of Robinson Crusoe, which is more appropriate to the nursery than to an economic discussion, but what can we do about it? We are compelled to pursue Herr Duehring"s axiomatic scientific methods and it is not our fault if we always find ourselves in the realms of childishness. The revolver then triumphs over the sword and it should be apparent even to the maker of childish axioms that superior force is no mere act of the will but requires very real preliminary conditions for the carrying out of its purposes, especially mechanical instruments, the more highly developed of which have the superiority over the less highly developed. Furthermore these tools must be produced, whence it appears that the producer of the more highly developed tool of force, commonly called weapon, triumphs over the producer of the less highly developed tool. In a word, the triumph of force depends upon the production of weapons, therefore upon economic power, on economic conditions, on the ability to organize actual material instruments.
Force at the present day implies the army and the navy, and the two of them cost, to our sorrow, a heap of money. But force cannot make money, on the contrary it gets away very fast with what is made, and it does not make good use of it as we have just discovered painfully with respect to the French indemnity. Money must therefore finally be provided by means of economic production, force is thus again limited by the economic conditions which shape the means of making and maintaining the instruments of production. But that is not all by any means. Nothing is more dependent upon economic conditions than armies and fleets. Arming, concentration, organization, tactics, strategy, depend before anything else upon the degree of development in production and transportation. In the trade of war the free inventiveness of liberal-minded generals has never worked a revolution, but the discovery of better weapons and the change in military equipment have never failed to do so. The inventiveness of the general under the most favorable conditions finds its limitations in the adaptation of methods of warfare to the new weapons and the new soldiers.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century gunpowder was brought from the Arabs to Western Europe and, as every schoolboy knows, entirely revolutionized warfare. The introduction of gunpowder and firearms was however by no means an act of force but an industrial and therefore economic advance. Industry is still industry whether its object in the creation or the destruction of material things. The introduction of firearms not only produced a revolution in the methods of warfare but also in the relations of master and subject. Trade and money are concomitants of gunpowder and firearms and these former imply the bourgeoisie. Firearms from the first were bourgeois instruments of warfare employed on behalf of the rising monarchy against the feudal n.o.bility. The hitherto una.s.sailable stone castles of the n.o.bles submitted to the cannon of the burghers, the fire of their guns pierced the mail armor of the knights. The supremacy of the n.o.bility fell with the heavily armed cavalry of the n.o.bility. With the development of the bourgeoisie, infantry and artillery became more and more the important arms of the service and because of artillery the trade of war had to create another industrial subdivision, to-wit, engineering.
The development of firearms proceeded very slowly. Shooting remained clumsy and small arms were ineffective in spite of many individual inventions. Three hundred years elapsed before a musket was produced which sufficed for the arming of a complete infantry. First at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a musket with a bayonet attached, which discharged a stone superseded the pike as an infantry weapon.
The infantry of that day was exceedingly unreliable, only kept together by physical force, composed of the basest elements of society, frequently made up of men picked up by the press gang and prisoners of war intermingled with soldiers recruited by the various princes. The only fighting formation in which these soldiers could be made to use the new weapon was the linear tactic, which reached its highest development under Frederick II. The whole infantry of an army was drawn up in a very long hollow square three files deep and advanced in battle array en ma.s.se. It was usually permitted to one of the two wings to be a little in advance or a little in the rear. This helpless body could only advance and keep its formation on perfectly level ground and then only at a slow marching time (seventy-five steps to the minute) a change of formation during the fight was impossible and victory or defeat was determined rapidly at a stroke as soon as the infantry came under fire.
These helpless lines in the American Revolutionary War came into collision with the rebel troops, which certainly could not drill but could shoot so much the better in that they were fighting for their own interests and therefore did not desert like the enlisted soldiers.
These did not, like the English, deploy in ma.s.sed bodies on the open field, but in rapidly moving bodies of sharpshooters in the thick woods. The organised lines were here powerless and had to contend against invisible and unapproachable foes. The sharpshooters thereupon were brought into existence as a part of the army organization--a new method of fighting arising from a change in the military material.
What the American Revolution began the French completed in the military realm. To the drilled troops of the Coalition the French Revolution opposed soldiers who were badly drilled but who const.i.tuted large ma.s.ses, the product of the whole nation. Some means had to be discovered of protecting Paris with these ma.s.ses. That could not be done without victory in the open field. A mere musketry engagement would not suffice, a form would have to be discovered by which the ma.s.ses could be utilized and this was found in the column. The column formation allowed slightly drilled troops to keep better order and by means of a better marching speed (one hundred steps to the minute) allowed it to break through the stiff old-fashioned line arrangement.
It was possible by this formation to fight in country unsuitable to the line formation, to ma.s.s troops in places suitable, to a.s.sociate scattered sharpshooters with the columns, to keep back, occupy and wear the lines of the enemy, until the decisive movement came when a charge could be made by the troops held in reserve. This new method of combining riflemen and columns and making a complete army corps consisting of all arms, which was fully developed on its tactical and strategic side by Napoleon, was only rendered possible by the change in military material brought about by the French Revolution. There were still two very important technical preliminaries, first the making of light carriages for field pieces which were constructed by Gribevaul by means of which alone the required quick advance was rendered possible, and making the army rifle a more precise weapon by adapting to it some of the features of the hunting rifle. Without these improvements military sharpshooting would have been impossible.
The revolutionary method of arming the entire population was subjected to certain limitations and chiefly as regards the excusing of the well to do, and in this form became common to most of the great continental countries. Prussia alone sought by its militia system to make the entire force of its people available for military purposes. Prussia was the first state to provide its entire infantry with the latest weapons, and to place officers in the rear, since between 1830 and 1860 trained officers leading their troops had played an unimportant part. The results of 1866 were largely due to these innovations.
In the Franco Prussian War two armies came into contact both of which had their officers in the rear and which both used substantially the same tactics as in the time of the old smooth bore flintlocks. The Prussians however by the introduction of company columns had made an attempt to discover a method of fighting more suitable to the new system of arming. But on the 18th of August at St. Privat the Prussian guard which employed the company column formation lost the most part of five regiments, over a third of its strength in two hours (176 officers and 5114 men) after which the company column form of battle order came in for no less criticism than the battalion column form and the line formation. Every attempt to oppose a solid formation to the fire of the enemy was thereafter abandoned. The battle was thereafter, on the German side, carried on by dense swarms of riflemen into which the columns dissolved under the fire of the enemy spontaneously, without orders from the superior officers, and this was, in fact, the only possible method of advance under fire. The private soldier was again cleverer than his officer; he had discovered the only form of fighting formation, and set himself to follow it in spite of the resistance of his leaders.
In the Franco-German war there is a point of departure of entirely different significance from all preceding wars. In the first place the weapons are now so complete that a new revolutionary departure in this respect is no longer possible. When you have cannon with which you can decimate a battalion as far as your eye can make it out, and when you have rifles by which you can aim at individuals, and which take less time to load than to aim, all further advances as far as battle in the field goes are immaterial. The era of progress on this side is substantially closed. In the second place, however, this war has induced all the great states of the continent to adopt the highly developed Prussian militia system and thus to take up a military burden which will ruin them in a few years. The army has become the main object of the state, it has become an object in itself. The people only exist to furnish and maintain soldiers. Militarism dominates and devours Europe. But this militarism has in it the seeds of its own destruction. The compet.i.tion of the various states with each other necessitates the spending of more money every year on the army, the fleet, weapons of destruction, etc., and thus accelerates financial breakdown. On the other hand, with the increasingly rigid military service, the whole people becomes familiar with the use of military weapons. It therefore becomes able at some time to impose its will upon the dominating military authority. And this time arrives as soon as the ma.s.s of the people--country and city workers and farmers--has the will. At this point the army of the cla.s.ses becomes the army of the ma.s.ses, the machine refuses to do the work, militarism goes under in the dialectic of its own development. What the bourgeois democrats of 1848 could not accomplish, just because they were bourgeois and not proletarian, namely the endowment of the laboring ma.s.ses with a will, the content of which corresponded with their cla.s.s condition, socialism will certainly accomplish. And that means the destruction of militarism and with it of all standing armies absolutely and entirely.
That is the moral of our history of modern infantry. The second moral which brings us back to Herr Duehring is that the entire organization and methods of warfare of modern armies and, with them, victory and defeat, are dependent upon material things, that is upon economic conditions, upon soldier material and upon weapon material and therefore upon the quality of a population and upon technique. Only a hunting people like the Americans could rediscover the sharpshooter.
Now the Yankees of the old States have, from purely economic causes, become transformed into farmers, industrialists, sailors and merchants, who no longer shoot in the primeval forests and on that account have become all the more successful in the field of speculation where they have developed into colossal appropriators.
Only a Revolution like the French which emanc.i.p.ated the burghers and still more the peasants could discover the simultaneously ma.s.sed armies and free advance by which they overcame the stiff old line formation, the military product of the absolutism against which they fought. And as for the advances in technique as soon as they were applicable and were applied, forthwith changes, nay revolutions, in the methods of warfare were at once made, often against the will of the military leaders as we have seen over and over again to be the case. A diligent subaltern could explain to Herr Duehring how at the present day the making of war is dependent upon the productivity and means of communication of the back country as well as of the theatre of war. In short, economic conditions and means of power are always the things which help "force" to victory, and without them "force"
comes to an end. So that he who would reform the art of war according to the axioms of Herr Duehring would only get a flogging for his pains.
If we go from the land to the sea we shall discover a complete revolution, even within the last twenty years. The warship of the Crimean War was the wooden three decker, with from sixty to a hundred guns, which depended upon its sailing power and had only a weak auxiliary steam engine. It carried in general thirty-two pounders of about sixty hundred weight and only a few sixty-eight pounders of ninety-five hundred weight. At the end of the war ironclad floating batteries were used, clumsy and slow but impregnable to the artillery of that time. Very soon iron plates were placed on the warships, at first thin, four inches thickness of iron was then considered to const.i.tute a remarkably great thickness. But the progress in artillery soon discounted the thickness of armour, for every addition to the armour there was a new and more powerful artillery which pierced it with the greatest ease. So now we have warships with ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty-four inches of armour plate (the Italians are going to build a warship with armourplate three feet thick) on the one hand and on the other hand guns which reach to a hundred tons and which hurl projectiles amounting to two thousand pounds in weight to unheard of distances. The modern war vessel is a rapid travelling armoured screw steamer of eight to ten thousand tons and of from six to eight thousand horse power provided with turrets and four or six very powerful big guns, together with a ram at the bow below the water line for the purpose of destroying the ship of the enemy. It is a colossal machine in which steam not only furnishes the driving power but also steers, raises the anchor, moves the towers, aims and loads the guns, works the pumps, takes in and lowers the boats, which are frequently steamers, and so forth. And the contest between the armour plate and the projectile is so far from having been settled that a ship is to-day practically obsolete as soon as it has left the ways. The modern warship is not only a product of modern industry but a masterpiece, a product of the dissipation of wealth. The country in which the greater industry has developed the most completely has a monopoly of shipbuilding. All the Turkish, almost all the Russian and the greater part of the German warships are built in England. Armour plate of the best type is made almost exclusively in Germany. Of the three iron foundries which are alone in the position to turn out the heaviest artillery, two of them, Woolwich and Elswick, are in England, the third Krupp"s is in Germany. Here it may be seen that the pure political power which Herr Duehring maintains to be the original reason for economic conditions is on the contrary inseparable from economic conditions and that not only the existence but the very management of the tool of force on the sea, the warship, is in itself a branch of modern industry. And that this is so gives n.o.body more trouble than just that force, the state, which has now to pay more for one ship than it had formerly for a small fleet and sees that these expensive ships are obsolete as soon as they are launched. And the state is just as much upset as Herr Duehring would be over the fact that the controller of the economic force of the ship, the engineer, is a much more important person than the man of pure force, the captain. On the other hand we have no further grounds for annoyance when we see that how as a result of this contest between armour plate and projectile the battle ship has arrived at the point when it is as expensive as it is unfit for fighting and that this contest shows the dialectic law of progress at work in naval warfare according to which militarism like every other historical phenomenon must come to an end as a result of its own development.
We can thus see as plain as noonday that it is not true that "the original reason must be sought in pure political force and not in indirect economic force." Quite the contrary. Economic force is the control of the power of the great industry. Political force in naval matters which is dependent upon modern ships of war is by no means "pure force" but is involved in economic force, in the advanced development of metallurgy, in the mastery of historical technique and the possession of rich coal-fields.
_IV. Force Theory (Conclusion)._
(Herr Duehring makes an argument which is briefly summarised by Engels as follows and which may be said to involve the notion that the monopolization of land is the cause of human slavery and is the product of force. Engels proceeds):
Thesis--The domination of nature by man is the reason of the domination of man by man.
Proof--The existence of landlordism on a large scale cannot be carried on anywhere except by means of slavery.
Proof of proof--Landlordism on a large scale cannot exist without slavery because the great landlord with his own family without the help of slaves can only cultivate a small piece of his property.
Therefore, in order to show that man cannot subdue nature without the subjugation of his fellowman, Herr Duehring transforms "nature"
forthwith into "private ownership of large tracts of land" and this indefinite private ownership into the ownership exercised by a great landlord, who naturally cannot cultivate his land without slaves.
In the first place the domination of nature and the cultivation of private landed property do not imply the same thing. The domination of nature in industrial affairs is displayed in a manner altogether different from that in agricultural affairs, for these latter are always at the mercy of the climate instead of being supreme over the climate.
In the second place if we limit ourselves to the exploitation of private property in land in large amounts we come to the question as to whom the land belongs. We find that in the beginnings of civilised peoples the land was not owned by great landlords but was held in common by tribal and village communities. From India to Ireland the exploitation of land property in large tracts has proceeded from the tribal and village communal ownership which was the original form.
Sometimes the land was cultivated in common for the benefit of the common members, sometimes in separate pieces, parcelled by the community to separate families from time to time with wood and willow land retained for communal use.
It is pure imagination on the part of Herr Duehring to declare that the exploitation of landed property is responsible for the existence of master and servant. Who is the owner of private landed property in the entire Orient where the land is possessed by the community or the State and the word landlord is not to be found in the language? The Turks first introduced a species of feudalism into the lands which they conquered. The Greeks in heroic times had a cla.s.sified system of rank which itself bore witness to a long unknown preceding history, but the land was then cultivated by an independent peasantry. The large possessions of the n.o.bles and leaders of the tribes were the exception and had no permanence. Italy was originally cultivated by small peasant farmers; when in the latter days of the Roman Republic the great holdings, the _latifundia_ destroyed the small farmer-holdings, cattle raising was subst.i.tuted for agriculture, and as Pliny points out Italy was ruined (_latifundia Italiam perdidere_).
In the whole of Europe during the Middle Ages small farming was the rule and it is very appropriate to the above discussion to note what tasks these peasants were obliged to perform for the feudal lords. The Frisians, lower Saxons, Flemings and people from the lower Rhine who invaded the lands of the Slavs to the east of the Elbe and cultivated them did so under very favorable terms of rent but by no means under a species of slavery. In North America, by far the greatest amount of the land is cultivated by the labor of free small farmers, while the great landed proprietors of the South with their slaves and extravagant farming methods destroyed the soil until the land ceased to be productive and the cultivation of cotton travelled ever Westward. In Australia and New Zealand the attempts to artificially establish an agrarian aristocracy by the British government have failed. In short, if we except the tropical and sub-tropical colonies, in which the climate is prohibitive of agriculture by Europeans, it seems that the idea of a great land holding cla.s.s originally dominating nature by means of the employment of slaves and serfs is a pure product of the imagination. Things are quite otherwise. If one goes to the older countries like Italy the land was not waste originally but the transformation of the agricultural land cultivated by the small farmers into cattle-land utterly ruined the country.
Latterly, for the first time since the growth in the intensity of the population has increased the value of land and especially since the progress in agriculture has made possible the reclamation of poor lands, the greater landlordism has begun to obtain possession of waste and pasture lands and has stolen the old communal lands of the peasants in this country, as well in England as in Germany. And this has not happened without a counter-poise. For every acre of common land which the great landlords in England converted into arable land they have made at least three acres of arable land in Scotland into shooting preserves and mere places for the hunting of wild animals.
We have to consider the declaration of Herr Duehring to the effect that the cultivation of large parcels of land has not come into existence otherwise than through great landlords and their slaves, a declaration which we have seen implies an entire ignorance of history.
We have now to see how far at different epochs the cultivation of the soil has been carried on by means of slaves, as in the palmy days of Greece, or by means of tenants, like the socage tenure, since the Middle Ages, and then what has been the social function of the greater landlordism at different periods of history.
If Herr Duehring means that the mastery of man by men as a preliminary to the mastery of nature by man is a universal law, that our present economic condition, the stage attained to-day in agriculture and industry, is the result of a society which has developed itself in cla.s.s antagonisms, in mastership on the one hand and in slavery on the other hand, he says something which is a mere commonplace since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. We have thus to explain the existence of these cla.s.ses and when Herr Duehring has no further explanation to give than "force" we are right back at the beginning again. The mere fact that the subject and the plundered have always been more numerous and that therefore the actual force has rested with them is enough to show the stupidity of the entire force theory. We have therefore still to explain the origin of master and subject cla.s.ses. They have come into being in two ways.
When men originally sprang from the lower animals they came into history, still half-wild animals, elementary, with no power over the forces of nature, still unacquainted with their own powers, as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they. There prevailed a certain equality in the conditions of life and as far as the heads of families were concerned an equality of social condition--there was at least an absence of those cla.s.s distinctions which developed later in the agricultural communities. In such a social state there were certain common interests which overrode the interests of the individual in certain respects, the settlement of disputes, the repression of individuals who exceeded their rights, the looking after the water supply, particularly in hot countries, and finally under the conditions of life in the primeval forests, religious functions. We find a.n.a.logous communal duties exercised by communal officials at all periods as well in the oldest German mark communities as in India to-day. These are contemporaneous with a sort of beginning of authority and state power in a rudimentary form. The productive forces develop; a denser population produces common and then conflicting interests between members of the society, the grouping of which in accordance with a new division of labor causes the creation of new organs for the purpose of maintaining the society on the one hand and repressing the antagonistic interests on the other. These organs which act for the entire group have different forms according to the varying circ.u.mstances of the individual groups, partly through the natural growth of a hereditary leadership in a world where everything proceeds naturally and partly through a growing need owing to the development of conflicts with other groups. How these social functions which were subsidiary to society came in the course of time to triumph over society; how the original servant, under favorable conditions became transformed into the master, how, according to circ.u.mstances, this master made his appearance as Oriental despot or satrap, as Greek chieftain, as Celtic clan chief, etc., how far he relied on force for this transformation and finally how the individual leaders a.s.sociated themselves into a dominant cla.s.s we have here no opportunity to consider. We can only state that real social duties lay at the base of the political domination and that the political supremacy has only existed as long as the politically supreme fulfilled these social functions. How many despotisms have risen and fallen among the Persians and Hindoos, and everybody knows quite well that the public management of the irrigation was the prime necessity of agriculture in those places. The "educated" English were the first to observe this among the Hindoos; they let the ca.n.a.ls and locks fall into disuse and they have now discovered by the regular recurrence of famine that they have neglected the only opportunity to make their rule at least as righteous as that of their predecessors.
But there is another form of cla.s.s distinction besides the one described. The natural division of labor in the agricultural families permitted at a certain point of prosperity the introduction of foreign labor power. This was particularly the case in countries where the old common ownership of the soil had disappeared or where at least the old system of common cultivation had become supplanted by the cultivation of separate plots by individual families. Production had so far developed that the human labor force was able to produce more than was necessary for the support of the individual laborer. The time was ripe for the employment of more labor-power, labor-power had become a value. But the limitations of the communal system did not afford any attainable surplus labor power. Yet war did give such an opportunity for getting surplus labor power and war was as old as the simultaneous existence of groups of communal groups in close juxtaposition. Up to this time men did not take prisoners of war, they killed them right off, and, at a still earlier date, they ate them. But at the stage of economic development of which we speak they had a value and they were not only allowed to live but were set to work. So force instead of being the master of economic conditions was pressed into the service of those conditions. Slavery was discovered. It soon became the dominant form of production among all people who had developed beyond the tribal communal stage and as a matter of fact was at the end one of the main reasons for the break up of the communal system. Slavery first made the division of labor between agriculture and industry completely possible and brought into existence the flower of the old world, Greece. Without slavery there would have been no Grecian state, no Grecian art and science and no Roman Empire. There would have been no modern Europe without the foundation of Greece and Rome. We must not forget that our entire economic, political and intellectual development has its foundation in a state of society in which slavery was regarded universally as necessary. In this sense we may say that without the ancient slavery there would have been no modern socialism.
It is very easy to make preachments about slavery and to express our moral indignation at such a scandalous inst.i.tution. Unfortunately the whole significance of this is that it merely says that these old inst.i.tutions do not correspond with our present conditions and the sentiments engendered by these conditions. We do not however in this way explain how these inst.i.tutions came into existence, why they came into existence and the role which they have played in history. And when we enter upon this matter we are obliged to say in spite of all contradiction and accusations of heresy that the introduction of slavery under the conditions of that time was a great step forwards.
It is a fact that man sprang from the lower animals and has had to employ barbaric and really b.e.s.t.i.a.l methods in order to rid himself of barbarism. The old communal system where it persisted built up the most elementary form of the state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia. Only where it has been dissolved has the people progressed and the next economic step lay in the development of production by means of slave labor. It is evident that as long as human labor was so little productive that it afforded only a small surplus over the necessary means of life, the development of the productive forces, the inst.i.tution of commerce, the development of the State and of law and the foundation of art and science were only possible through an increase in the subdivision of labor. This implied the broad division between the ma.s.s of the workers and the directors of labor, trade, state, state-business, and later the occupation of a few privileged persons in art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this subdivision of labor was slavery. In the conditions of the ancient, and especially the Greek world, the advance to a society founded on cla.s.s distinction could only be for the slaves, the prisoners of war from whom the majority of slaves were recruited instead of being murdered as they would have been at an earlier date or instead of being eaten as they would have been at a stage still earlier.
Here we add that all the historical ant.i.theses of robbers and robbed of master and subject cla.s.ses find their explanation in the relatively undeveloped productivity of human labor. As long as the actual working people claim that they have no time left at the close of their necessary labors to attend to the common business of society--the organization of labor, the business of the government, the administration of justice, art, science, etc., just so long will distinct cla.s.ses exist which are free from actual labor to carry on these functions. Naturally these cla.s.ses do not hesitate to lean more and more and more upon the shoulders of the working cla.s.s for their own advantage. The development of the great industry with its enormous increase in the forces of production for the first time permitted of the subdivision of labor in all social grades and thus allowed of the reduction of the time necessary for labor so that enough leisure remains for all to take part in the actual public business--theoretical as well as practical. So that now for the first time the dominant and exploiting cla.s.ses have become superfluous and even an obstacle to social progress, and so now for the first time they will be unceremoniously brushed aside in spite of their "pure force."
When Herr Duehring then shows his scorn of the Greek civilisation because it was founded on slavery he might just as reasonably reproach the Greeks for not having steam engines and electric telegraphs. And when he explains that our modern wage slavery is only a somewhat transformed and ameliorated inheritance of chattel slavery and not to be explained from itself (that is from the economic laws of modern society) it only signifies that wage slavery, like chattel slavery, is a form of cla.s.s domination and cla.s.s subjection as every child knows, or it is false. So we might with the same right maintain that wage slavery is only a milder form of cannibalism, the established original method of disposing of conquered enemies.
The role which force has played in history with respect to economic development is therefore clear. In the first place, all political force rests originally on an economic social function, and developed in proportion as the old tribal communistic society was dissolved and transformed into various grades of private producers, and the administrators of the communal functions therefore became more widely separated from the rest of the community. In the second place, when political force, independent of society, has transformed itself from the position of servant to that of master, it may work in two directions. In the first place, it may work sensibly and in the direction of general economic development. In this case there is no quarrel between the two, economic development is advanced. Or it may work against it and then with few exceptions it succ.u.mbs to the economic development. These few exceptions consist of individual cases of tyranny where barbaric conquerors have overcome a country and have destroyed the economic forces which they did not know how to handle.
Thus the Christians in Spain destroyed the irrigation works upon which the highly developed agriculture and horticulture of that country depended. Every conquest by a more barbarous people interferes with economic development and destroys numerous productive forces. But in the great majority of instances of the permanent conquest of a country, the more barbaric conquerors are obliged to adopt the higher economic conditions into which their conquest has brought them. They are a.s.similated into the conquered people and are compelled to adopt their language. But where--apart from instances of conquest--the inner political forces of a country comes in conflict with its economic development, which at the present day is practically true of all political force, the battle has always ended with the destruction of the political force. Without exception and inexorably, economic development has attained its goal. The last most striking example of which we have already called attention to, the French Revolution. If, as according to Herr Duehring"s teachings, the economic development and the economic conditions of a certain country are altogether dependent upon political forces there is no explanation of the fact that Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of his army, in attaching the guilds of the Middle Ages and other romantic tomfooleries to the steam-engines, railroads and the newly developing greater industry, or why the Czar who is still much more powerful could not only not pay his debts but could not collect his forces without drawing on the credit of the economic conditions of Western Europe.
According to Herr Duehring force is the absolute evil. The first act of force is to him the first fall into sin. His whole conception is a preachment over the infection of all history up to the present time with the original sin. He talks about the disgraceful falsifying of all natural and social laws by the invention of the devil, force. That force plays another role in history, a revolutionary role, that it is in the words of Marx, the midwife of the old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the tool by the means of which social progress is forwarded, and foolish, dead political forms destroyed,--of that Herr Duehring has no word to say, only with sighs and groans does he admit the possibility that force may be necessary for the overthrow of a thievish economic system. He simply declares that every application of force demoralizes him who uses it. And this in spite of the moral and intellectual uplift which has followed every victorious revolution. He says this in Germany, too, where a powerful and necessary uprising would at least have the advantage of abolishing the slavish sn.o.bbery of the national mind which has prevailed since the humiliation of the Thirty Years War. And this foolish and senseless sort of preaching is set up in opposition to the most revolutionary party known to history.
_V. Theory of Value._
It is now about a hundred years since a book appeared in Leipsic which by the beginning of this century had gone through thirty-one editions and which was distributed throughout the towns and the country districts by officials, preachers and humanitarians, of all sorts, and which was universally adopted in the schools as a reader. This book was called, "The Children"s Friend" by Rochow. It had the object of teaching the children of the peasant and laboring cla.s.ses their vocation in life and their duties to their social and political superiors, and making them satisfied with their lot in life, with black bread and potatoes, compulsory servitude, low wages, fatherly beatings and other similar agreeable things. In pursuit of this end, the youth in town and country was informed what a wise provision of nature it was that man was obliged to get his food and enjoyment by means of his labor, and how fortunate the peasant and handworker ought to feel that they were able to spice their food with hard labor while the spendthrift and the picture suffered the pangs of indigestion or lack of appet.i.te. These commonplaces which old Rochow thought good enough for the peasant children of his day have been elevated into the "absolute fundamental" of the newest political economy by Herr Duehring.