Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/60

 activity is possible; even the sailor and the aeronaut need a point of departure and a landing place. Furthermore, it is a means of production that cannot be increased at pleasure. For all this it must be noted that as yet it has but rarely happened that every inch of ground in any state was actually occupied or used productively by its inhabitants; even in China there are still wide stretches of unproductive land.

In medieval Europe each farmer possessed his buildings and parcel of land. Water, forest and pasture were municipal property, and there was enough land so that each might be given possession of any which he reduced to cultivation. Then came the development of commodity-production. The products of the land now had an exchange value. As a result the land also became, as it were, a product; it had a value. As soon as this occurred the communities began to limit their numbers and take measures to insure the perpetual possession of lands; they became close corporations.

But another class, the feudal lords, were also yearning for the communal property. And in regions where farming on a large scale had developed they succeeded in driving the small farmers from the soil. In the course of events practically all land became the private property of a few.

Thus a monopoly has come into existence, and a monopoly of an altogether extraordinary sort. The earth's surface is held by a few, »not only against the propertyless proletarian class, but against part of the capitalist class itself. A part