Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/124

 former. The endeavours to monopolise the social surplus by the privileged class produces in it the desire to monopolise and take sole possession of the means of production. The forms of this monopoly can be very diverse, either common ownership of the ruling class or caste, or private property of the individual families or individuals of this class.

In one way or another the mass of the workings people become disinherited, degraded to slaves, serfs, wage labourers; and with the loss of common property in the means of production and their use in common is the strongest bond torn asunder which held primitive society together.

And if the social distinctions which managed to form themselves within primitive society were kept within narrow limits, now the class distinctions, which can form themselves, have practically no limit. They can grow on the one side through the technical progress which increases the surplus of the product of the social labour over the amount necessary to the simple maintenance of society; on the other hand, through the expansion of the community, while the number of the exploiters remains the same or even decreases, the number of those working and producing surplus for each exploiter grows. In this way the class distinctions can enormously increase, and with them grow the social antagonisms.

In the degree in which this development advances, society grows more and more divided, the class war becomes the principal, most general and continuous form of the struggle of the individuals for life in human society; in the same degree the social instincts lose strength, but they become so much the stronger within that class whose welfare is on the whole always more and more identical with that of the commonweal.

It is, however, specially the exploited, oppressed, and uprising classes in whom the class war strengthens thus the social instincts and virtues; and that because they are obliged to put their whole personality into this with much more intensity than the ruling classes, who are often in a position to leave their defence, be it with