Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/106

 law, independent of time and space, which regulates our action in time and space.

It was just as logical when Marx combated the one process of thought as the other.

A further means besides community in work and language to strengthen the social impulses is formed by the social development through the rise of war.

We have no reason to suppose that primitive man was a warlike being. Herds of ape-men who gathered together in the branches of trees with copious sources of food may have squabbled and driven each other away. That this got so far as killing their opponents, there is no example among the living apes of to-day. Of male gorillas it is reported that they occasionally fight each other with such fury that one kills the other, but that is a fight for a wife not a fight for feeding grounds.

That changes so soon as man becomes a hunter, who has command of tools which are directed to killing, and who has grown accustomed to killing, to the shedding of strange blood. Also another factor comes into account, which Engels has already pointed out, to explain the cannibalism which often comes up at this period: the uncertainty of the sources of food. Vegetable food is in the tropical forests in abundance; on the grass plains, on the other hand, roots and fruits are not always to be found, the capture of game is, moreover, for the most part a matter of chance. The beasts of prey have thus acquired the capacity of being able to fast for incredibly long periods. The human stomach has not such powers of endurance. Thus necessity easily forces a tribe of savages to a fight for life or death with another neighbouring tribe, which has got a good hunting territory.; then the passions aroused by the fight and agonising hunger finally drive them not simply to kill the foe but also to eat him.

In this way technical progress lets loose struggles which the ape-man did not know; fights not with animals of other kinds but with the members of his