Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/191

 property must have already existed before the robber is able to possess himself of other people's goods and that force may change the possession but cannot alter private property as such.

But to explain the "subjection of men to slavery" in its modern form, in wage-labor, we can make no use of either force or property acquired by force. We have already mentioned the part which the transformation of the products of labor into commodities, their production not for use alone, but for exchange, plays in the destruction of the primitive communal property and therefore in the bringing into existence directly or indirectly the universality of private property. But Marx has proved in his "Capital"—and Herr Duehring does not venture to intrude upon the matter—that at a certain stage in economic development the production of commodities is transformed into capitalistic production and that at this point "the law of appropriation resting upon the production and circulation of commodities, the law of private property, by its own inevitable dialectic becomes changed into its opposite, the exchange of equivalents, which appeared as its original mode of operation, but has now become so twisted that there is only an appearance of exchange since. In the first place, the portion of capital exchanged for labor-force is itself only a portion of the product of another's labor taken without an equivalent, and in the second place, it is not only supplied by its producers, the workers, but it must be supplied also with a new surplus. Originally property seemed to us to be established on labor only—property now appears (as a conclusion of the Marxian argument), on the side of the capitalist, as the right to unpaid labor and, on the side of the workingman, as an impossibility, the ownership of his own product. The difference