Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/30

 but these were operated by slaves who were considered as aliens outside of the community life. These industries produced only luxuries and could develop no special economic strength, except temporarily in times of great wars which weakened agriculture and made slave material cheap. A high economic form and a new social ideal cannot arise upon a slave economy.

The single form of capital which was developed in antiquity and the Middle Ages was usury and commercial capital. Both of these may, at times, bring about rapid economic changes. But commercial capital could only further the division of the old trades into countless new ones and the advance of the great industry dependent on slave labor. Usurious capital operated simply to stunt existing forms of production without creating new ones. The struggle against usurious capital and against the great agricultural industries which were operated by slaves led to occasional political struggles very similar to the social revolutions of our time. But the goal of these was always only the restoration of an earlier condition and not a social renovation. Such was the case in the liquidation of debts brought about for the Greek peasants, by Solon, and in the movements of the Roman peasants and proletarians from which the Gracchi receive their name. To all of these causes—slowness of economic development, lack of recognition of deeper social