Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/39

 diminish the supply of food. This does not demand the destruction of these others, but the bending of their will because of a superiority of muscle or nerve force.

Such contests also take place among men. They are less frequent between individuals than between societies. They are waged over means of winning life, from hunting grounds and fishing places to markets and colonies. Such conflicts always end either with the destruction of one party, or, more frequently, with a breaking or bending of its will. Each time this is only a passing event. But out of this develops a continuous bending of the will of one man by another, that ends in a condition of continuous exploitation.

Class antagonisms are antagonisms of volitions. The will to live of the capitalists meets with conditions that force it to bend the will of the workers and to make use of it. Without this bending of the will there would be no capitalist profit, and no capitalist could exist. The will of the laborer to live, on the other hand, forces him to rebel against the will of the capitalist. Therefore the class struggle.

Thus we see that the will is the motive force of the whole economic process. It is the starting point and ebters into every expression of that process. There is nothing more absurd than to look upon the will and economic phenomena as two factors independent of each other. It is a part of the fetish-like conception that confuses the economic process—that is, the forms of social co-operative and competitive labor of mankind—with the material objects of such labor, and that imagines that just as men make use of raw materials and tools to form certain objects according to their own ideas, so the "creative personalities" make use through their free will of the economic process to form "thus and so," certain definite social relations to suit their needs. Because the laborer stands outside of the raw material and tools, because he stands