Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/73

 orders, of States, of classes, and finally on the antagonism between accumulated labor and present labor. No antagonism, no progress. That is the law which civilisation has followed down to our day. Up to the present the productive forces have been developed thanks to this régime of the antagonism of classes. To say now that, because all the wants of all the workers were satisfied, men could give themselves up to the creation of products of a superior order, more complicated industries, would be to make abstraction of the antagonism of classes, and to overthrow the whole development of history. It is as if one should say that because, under the Roman emperors, murenas were nourished. in artificial fish-ponds, there was food in abundance for all the population of Rome. But, on the contrary, the Roman people wanted the necessary means to buy bread while the Roman aristocrats had no lack of slaves with which to feed their fishes.

The price of food has almost continually risen, while the price of manufactured articles and luxuries has almost continually fallen. Take the agricultural industry itself: the most indispensable objects, such as wheat, meat, &c., increase in price while cotton, sugar, coffee, &c., fall continually in a surprising fashion. Even among food-stuffs, properly so-called, luxuries, such as artichokes, asparagus, &c., are relatively cheaper to-day than the objects of prime necessity. In our epoch the superfluity is more easily produced than the necessaries of life. Finally, at different historical epochs, the reciprocal relations of price are not only different but opposed. Ali through the Middle Ages agricultural products were. relatively cheaper than manufactured products: in modern times the relations are reversed.