Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/596

578 in those minor groups, now developed into clans, rose above the primordial state by their complex organization, their division of labor, and their larger enterprise. But now, as we read in the writings of the Socialist Democrats, with distinction of classes and the institution of personal slavery opens the first epoch of human civilization. In this slavery period the whole man is an instrument of labor, and with all his faculties he is the property of the owner who commands his entire service.

In the second civilization period, characterized by handicraft and the possession of land on the small scale, the still widely diffused custom of socage or compulsory service is a reminiscence of the suppressed institution of slavery. The working people are now burgesses enjoying personal freedom, yet hindered in their spontaneous development by the guild. These craftsmen and workers of the soil are the owners and masters of the implements of their calling. Still they do not attain true enjoyment of life, inasmuch as their whole time is engrossed with mechanical toil, in order to procure a livelihood.

The third estate becomes emancipated from the control of the aristocracy of landlordism, the nobility, and the Church. But already the factory system, the system of production by division of labor, was in operation—a system which strips the workman of his little property, and places him under the control of capital.

The factory system is transformed into machine industry. The simpler tools and machinery of early times, worked by hand, have been in the present century developed into a vast complicity of machines producing motion, transferring motion, and doing the work of mechanical tools. These machines tie the workman fast to themselves, reduce his personal service to a minimum of manipulations, and complete the physical and moral wretchedness of the laboring population by increased employment of women and children.

Machinery is an instrument for the accumulation of capital, and of capital as "unpaid labor" at that.

The development of the various forms of production down to the present time when private capital rules everything, and when small capitalists have no chance as against the great, has been vividly portrayed by Marx. He regards the development of the economic social forms as a natural-history process. ("Capital," page 7.) The proposition on which the whole matter hinges, namely, that regarding "unpaid labor," has the appearance of being so simple and so true, that even to many among the laboring class the grand conclusion appears evident, namely, that "the doom of capitalistic private property is about to be sealed. The expropriators will suffer expropriation." (Ibid., page 793.)

Here we see set forth as the natural consequence of development the violent introduction of the Socialist-Democratic state. With the rise of that form of polity the domination of private capital comes to