Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/112

 of the struggle for sexual natural selection. With men alone, thanks to the perfection of their tools, the struggle against individuals of the same kind to maintain themselves in the struggle for life is developed. But even then there is a great distinction between wars and the struggle for existence. The first is a struggle which breaks out between two different societies; it means an interruption of production, and thus can never be a permanent institution. But at the same time it necessitates, at least where no great class antagonisms exist, the strongest social cohesion, and thus encourages in the highest degree the social instincts. Competition, on the other hand, is a struggle between individuals, and indeed between individuals of the same society. This struggle is a regulator—although certainly a most peculiar one—which keeps the social co-operation of the various individuals going, and arranges that in the last resort these private producers shall always produce what is socially necessary, that is, what is under the given social conditions necessary. If war forms an occasional interruption of production, so does the struggle for life form its constant and necessary companion in the production of wares.

Just as war so does competition mean a tremendous waste of force, but it has been at the same time a means by which to extort the highest degree of tension of all the productive forces and their most rapid improvement.

It has consequently had a great economic importance, and has created such gigantic productive forces that the framework of commodity production becomes too narrow, as at one time the framework of the primitive social or co-operative, production became too narrow for the growing division of labour. But over-production, no less than the artificial limitation of production by employers' associations, shows that the time is past when competition as a spur to production helps on social evolution.

But it has always done even this only because it drove it on to the greatest possible expansion of production. On the other hand, the competitive struggle between individuals of the same society has