Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/111

 This development meant an extension of the sphere of society through the division of labour—an extension of the number of those men who thereby form a society because they work for each other, and thus are materially dependent for their existence on each other. But this extension of the social labour does not develop on the lines of an extension of work in common, but towards a separation of individuals from the common work and to making their work the private work of independent producers, who produce that which they themselves do not consume, and obtain in return the products of other branches to consume them.

Thus at this stage the common production and common property in the means of production of societies, each in the main satisfying its own wants, for example, the mark or at least the home community, was bound to give way before the individual production and property of single individuals, or married couples with children, who produced commodities, not for their own use but for the market.

With that there arose side by side with private property, which had already existed at an earlier period, even if not to so great an extent, an entirely new element in society: the competitive struggle of the different producers of the same kind, who struggle against each other for their share of the market.

War and competition are often regarded as the only forms of the struggle for existence in the entire natural world. In reality, both arise from the technical progress of mankind, and belong to its special peculiarity. Both are distinguished from the struggle for existence of the animal world in that the latter is a struggle of individuals or entire societies against the surrounding nature; a fight against living and inanimate forces of nature in which those best fitted for the particular circumstances can best maintain themselves and reproduce their kind. But it is not a fight for life or death against other individuals of the same kind, with the exception of a few beasts of prey, even with whom the last kind of struggle plays only a secondary part in the struggle for life, with the exception