Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/192

 property and labor is the result of a law which apparently proceeded from their identity." In other words if we exclude the possibility of force, robbery, and cheating absolutely, if we take the position that all private property originally depended upon the personal labor of its possessor and that equivalents are always exchanged we nevertheless come, in the course of the development of production and exchange, of necessity, to the modern capitalistic methods of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and livelihood in the hands of a single class few in numbers, to the degradation of the other consisting of the immense majority of producers to the position of propertyless proletarians, to the periodical alternations of swindling operations and trade crises and to the whole of the present anarchy in production. The entire result rests on purely economic grounds without robbery, force, or any intervention of politics or the government being necessary. Property resting on force becomes a mere phrase which merely serves to obscure the understanding of the real development of things.

This course, historically expressed, is the story of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political conditions are the decisive causes of economic conditions, the modern bourgeoisie would necessarily not have progressed as the result of a fight with feudalism, but would be the darling child of its womb. Everybody knows that the opposite is the case. The bourgeoisie, originally bound to pay feudal dues to the dominant feudal nobility, recruited from bond slaves and thralls, in a subject state, has, in the course of its conflict with the nobility captured position after position, and finally has come into possession of the power in civilized countries. In France it directly attacked the nobility, in England it made the aristocracy