Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/105

 barter of commodities, of products which serve the personal or productive consumption. Here from both sides an article of consumption is given and received. The object of the exchange is clear.

That alters with the rise of an element to facilitate circulation—money. Now it is easy to sell without at once buying, just as the brain makes it possible that impressions should work on the organism without at once releasing a movement. As this renders possible a storing up of experiences and impulses, which can even be transmitted to descendants, so notoriously can a treasury be collected from gold. And as the collection of that treasury of experiences and impulses under the necessary social conditions finally renders possible the development of science and the conquest of nature by science, so does the collection of money treasure render possible, when certain social conditions are also there, the transformation of money into capital, which raises the productivity of human labour to the highest degree and revolutionises the world within a few centuries to a greater degree than formerly occurred in hundreds of thousands of years.

And so just as there are philosophers who believe that the elements, brain and language, intellectual powers and ideas which form the connection between sensation and movement are not simply means to arrange this connection more conveniently for the individual and society, and thus apparently to increase their strength, but that they are of themselves sprung from independent sources of power, starting even from the Creator of the world: so there are economists who imagine that money brings about the circulation of goods, and that as capital renders it possible to develop human production enormously, it is this which is the author of this circulation, the creator of these forces, the producer of all values which are produced over and above the product of the primitive handwork.

The theory of the productivity of capital rests on a process of thought which is very similar to that of the freedom of the will and the assumption of a moral