Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/218

212 Museum of Antiquities by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.

Civilization is, as we have seen, that stage of society, in which the division of labor, the resulting exchange between individuals, and the production of commodities combining them, reach their highest development and revolutionize the whole society.

The production of all former stages of society was mainly collective, and consumption was carried on by direct division of products within more or less small communes. This collective production was confined within the narrowest limits. But it implied the control of production and of the products by the producers. They knew what became of their product: it did not leave their hands until it was consumed by them. As long as production moved on this basis, it could not grow beyond the control of the producers, and it could not create any strange ghostly forces against them. Under civilization, however, this is the inevitable rule.

Into the simple process of production, the division of labor was gradually interpolated. It undermined the communism of production and consumption, it made the appropriation of products by single individuals the prevailing rule, and thus introduced the exchange between individuals, in the manner mentioned above. Gradually, the production of commodities became the rule.

This mode of production for exchange, not for home consumption, necessarily passes the products on from hand to hand. The producer gives his product away in exchange. He does no longer know what becomes of it. With the advent of money and of the trader who steps in as a middleman between the producers, the process of exchange becomes still more complicated. The fate of the products becomes still more