Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/188

 of what it ought to prove. And, as with Robinson and Friday, so it is also with all the examples of lordship and slavery up to now. Slavery, to use Duehring's own elegant expression, always implies a means for supplying sustenance (using the term in its broadest sense) and never merely implies a political organization which has been developed by its own will. One would have to be a Herr Duehring to venture to call taxes only a secondary feature of government, or, to say that the political groupings of the dominant bourgeois of to-day and the subjugated proletariat are purely voluntary and not made to serve the material interests of the bourgeois, namely profit making and the accumulation of capital.

Let us give our attention again to our two men. Robinson "sword in hand" makes Friday his slave. But to do this Robinson uses something else besides his sword. A slave is not made by that means solely. In order to be able to keep a slave one has to be superior to him in two respects, one must first have control over the tools and objects of labor of the slave and over his means of subsistence also. Therefore, before slavery is possible, a certain point in production has to be reached and a certain degree of inequality in distribution attained. And when slave labor becomes the dominant mode of production of an entire society a higher development of the powers of production, of trade and of wealth, accumulation occurs. In early tribal communities which had common ownership of the soil, slavery is either nonexistent or its role is very subordinate. So it was at first in Rome, as a state of farmers, but when Rome became the capital city of the world and the soil of Italy came more and more to be owned by a numerically small class of enormously wealthy property owners, the population of framers perished in front of the slave population. When at the