Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/123

 hardly likely to disappear even in a Socialist society.

The discovery of tools, the division of labour and its consequences—in short, the economic development contributes still further to increase such difference, or even to create new. In any case, they cannot exceed a certain narrow limit, so long as the social labour does not yield a surplus over that necessary to the maintenance of the members of the society. As long as that is not the case, no idlers can be maintained at the cost of society, none can get considerably more in social products than the other. At the same time, however, there arise at this very stage, owing to the increasing enmity of the tribes to each other and the bloody method of settling their differences, as well as through the common labour and the common property, so many new factors through which the social instincts are strengthened that the small jealousies and differences arising between the families, the different degrees of age, or the various callings can just as little bring a split in the community as that between individuals. Despite the beginnings of division of labour which are to be found there, human society was never more closely bound up together, or more in unison than at the time of the primitive Gentile co-operative society, which preceded the beginning of class antagonisms.

Things, however, alter so soon as social labour begins, in consequence of its necessary productivity, to produce a surplus. Now it becomes possible for single individuals and professions to secure for themselves permanently a greater sh^re in the social product than the others can secure. Single individuals, only seldom, temporarily, and as a matter of exception, will be able to achieve that for themselves alone; on the other hand, it is very obvious that any classes specially favoured in any particular manner by the circumstances—for example, such as are conferred by special knowledge or special powers of self-defence, can acquire the strength to permanently appropriate the social surplus for themselves. Property in the products is narrowly bound up with property in the means of production; who possesses the latter can dispose of the