Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/179

 or bankruptcy. Anyone who should attempt to apply the same laws of political economy to Patagonia as to present-day England would only succeed in producing stupid commonplaces. Political economy is thus really a historical science. It is engaged with historical material, that is, material which is always in course of development. At the close of this investigation it can, for the first time, show the few (especially as regards production and exchange) general laws which apply universally. In this way it is made evident that the laws which are common to certain methods of production or forms of exchange are common to all historical periods in which these methods of production and forms of exchange are the same. Thus for example with the introduction of specie, there came into being a series of laws which holds good for all lands and historical epochs in which specie is a means of exchange.

The method of distributing the product is in accordance with the method of production and exchange of a given society at a given time. In the tribal or village community with communal ownership of land, of which there are obvious survivals in the history of all civilized peoples, there is practically an equal distribution; where a greater inequality of distribution of the product has been introduced among the members of a society, it is a sign of the coming dissolution of the community—large and small farming have very different modes of distribution according to the historical circumstances from which they have developed. But it is apparent that large farming requires a different mode of distribution than small farming; that the large farming shows the existence of class antagonism—slave-holders and slaves, landlords and tenants, capitalists and wage workers,—but that, on the contrary, in small farming, class distinction does not