Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/180

 arise from the farming operations of separate individuals but from the mere beginnings of farming on a large scale. The introduction and development of the use of gold into a country where formerly exchange of actual goods was the exclusive or general practice, is closely associated with a slow or rapid revolution of the mode of distribution hitherto prevailing, and to such an extent that inequality of distribution among individuals and, so, antagonism between rich and poor becomes more and more apparent. Local gild hand-production as it prevailed in the Middle Ages made great capitalists and life-long wage-workers just as impossible as the great modern industry, the credit system of to-day, and form of exchange, corresponding with the development of these, free competition, render them inevitable.

With the difference in distribution however class differences are introduced. Society becomes divided into upper and lover classes, into plunderers and plundered, into master and servant classes, and the state which the original groups composed of societies claiming the same ancestry only regarded as a means of protection of the common interests (remnants of which remain in the Orient, e. g.) and against foreign force, takes upon itself the duty of maintaining the economic and political supremacy of the dominant class against the dominated class by means of force.

So distribution is not a mere passive witness of production and exchange; it has an immediate influence on both. Every new method of production and form of exchange is impeded, not only through the old forms and their particular forms of political development, but also through the old methods of distribution. It can only bring about its own method of distribution as the result of long conflict. But just in proportion as a given