Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/22

 10 Now, the smaller the number of individuals taking part in a social movement—in other words, the less the movement is a mass movement—the feebler does the universal, the law-determined, come to the surface, the stronger is the preponderance of the accidental and of the personal. This must have increased the diverse character of the class struggles in the different communes still more. But as in those class struggles no mass phenomena ever came forward, and the law-determined and the universal was hidden under the accidental and the personal, a deeper knowledge of the social causes and of the aims of the class movements was also impossible. Great as were the achievements of the Greek philosophy, the conception of a scientific national economy remained unknown to it. Aristotle offered only suggestions for such; otherwise what the Greeks and Romans accomplished in the sphere of theoretical economics were only manuals for practical business men, principally for agriculturists, such as were compiled by Xenophon and Varro.

But if the deeper social causes of the position of the various classes were hidden beneath the acts of individual persons and local peculiarities, what wonder that the oppressed classes, when succeeding in getting hold of the political power, used this mainly for the purpose of getting rid of individual personalities and individual local institutions, never going so far as to establish a new order of society?

The most important cause, however, which stood in the way of a revolutionary effort of that sort was the slowness of the economic development. It proceeded imperceptibly. Peasant and artisan worked just as their fathers and forefathers had done; the old, the traditional, was the best and the most satisfactory. Even where people sought for something new, they tried to persuade themselves and others that it was really a return to the forgotten past. The progress in technique did not create the need for new forms of property, since it consisted only in an ever-increasing social division of labour, in a splitting up of one trade into several. In each new trade, however, production was still carried on by hand as in the old, the means of production were scanty, and manual skill played the decisive part. Certainly we find, in addition to the peasant and the artisan, also farming on a large scale, and—in the latter period of antiquity—even industrial undertakings; but they were carried on by slaves who stood outside the pale of the community exactly like foreigners. These were only undertakings for the production of luxuries, incapable of developing any great economic power—except temporarily in the time of great wars, which weakened the peasant class and made slaves cheaper. A higher form of economic life and a new social ideal cannot arise from slavedom.

The only forms of capital which develop in antiquity and the Middle Ages are the usurers' and the merchants' capital. Both may sometimes lead to rapid economic changes. But even so