Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/109

 Even this kind of war has a strengthening effect on the social instincts so long as the property in the tribe is in the main communal. On the other hand, war seems to strengthen the social instincts the more classes are formed in the community, and becomes more and more a simple affair of the ruling classes, whose endeavours are aimed towards an increase in their sphere of exploitation, or to put themselves in the place of another ruling class on a neighbouring land. For the subject classes in such wars it is often enough not a question of their existence, and, occasionally, not even a question of a better or worse standard of life for them, but only who is to be their lord. The army becomes either an aristocratic army, in which, the mass of the people have no part, or when they co-operate it becomes a paid or compulsory army, which is commanded by the ruling classes, and they must put their lives at stake not for their own property, their own wives and children, but to champion the interests of others, often hostile interests. The bond which holds such armies together is no longer that of social interests, but solely fright of a remorselessly cruel penal code. They are divided by the hate of the mass against the leaders, by the indifference, even the mistrust of the latter against their subordinates.

At this stage war ceases to be for the mass of the people a school of social feelings. In the ruling, warrior classes it becomes a school of haughty, overbearing demeanour towards the governed classes, because it teaches the ruling classes to treat the former just as they do the common soldiers in the army, to degrade them to blind subordination to an absolute commander, and to dispose of their forces, nay, even their lives, without any scruples.

This development of war is, as we have already said, a consequence of the development of property, which again arises from the technical development.

Every object which is produced in society, or by means of which production is carried on in it, must be at the disposal of someone, and either a group or a