Page:The Advancing Proletariat (1917).pdf/9

Rh of individuals. Instead, it becomes a moving panorama of the progress of the race as depicted in the struggles for supremacy of the various classes that have successively dominated society. Fundamental causes are seen at work, continuously and methodically shaping the trend of events. All the apparently disjointed and unrelated facts marshal themselves into orderly array, and take their places as guide boards along the high-road of history. The fall of Babylon, the Roman invasion of Gaul, even the Medieval Crusades, are reasonably and fully explained.

The pre-eminent fact of History, from the viewpoint of Economics and Sociology, is the institution of Private Property. Upon it Marx predicated the disestablishment of the Communal Tribes and the rise of the Nations, with the division of the people into classes in the terms of wealth and power—the separation of society into opposing camps—which carry on a continuous warfare among themselves. A warfare which he was pleased to call "the class struggle." And in each civilization we find a dominant class imposing its will upon the balance of society and maintaining the basic method of wealth production and distribution of that time. All the laws, the religion, the educational system or lack of educational system were designed to retain that class in its position of power and privilege. Internal peace depended upon the relative degrees of acquiescence in the general scheme manifested by the secondary and subject classes, and their ability to wrest concessions from the dominant class by a display of their organized strength.

It is characteristic of all civilization based on Private Property and Class Privilege, that a secondary or subject class developed within each society and eventually displaced the dominant class. The new dominant class warped the old institutions to its own purposes,