Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/213

 and robbed of master and subject classes find their explanation in the relatively undeveloped productivity of human labor. As long as the actual working people claim that they have no time left at the close of their necessary labors to attend to the common business of society—the organization of labor, the business of the government, the administration of justice, art, science, etc., just so long will distinct classes exist which are free from actual labor to carry on these functions. Naturally these classes do not hesitate to lean more and more and more upon the shoulders of the working class for their own advantage. The development of the great industry with its enormous increase in the forces of production for the first time permitted of the subdivision of labor in all social grades and thus allowed of the reduction of the time necessary for labor so that enough leisure remains for all to take part in the actual public business—theoretical as well as practical. So that now for the first time the dominant and exploiting classes have become superfluous and even an obstacle to social progress, and so now for the first time they will be unceremoniously brushed aside in spite of their "pure force."

When Herr Duehring then shows his scorn of the Greek civilisation because it was founded on slavery he might just as reasonably reproach the Greeks for not having steam engines and electric telegraphs. And when he explains that our modern wage slavery is only a somewhat transformed and ameliorated inheritance of chattel slavery and not to be explained from itself (that is from the economic laws of modern society) it only signifies that wage slavery, like chattel slavery, is a form of class domination and class subjection as every child knows, or it is false. So we might with the same right maintain that wage slavery is only a milder form of