Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/219

213 uncertain. The number of merchants is great and one does not know what the other is doing. The products now pass not only from hand to hand, but also from market to market. The producers have lost the control of the aggregate production in their sphere of life, and the merchants have not yet acquired this control. Products and production become the victims of chance. But chance is only one pole of an interrelation, the other pole of which is called necessity. In nature, where chance seems to reign also, we have long ago demonstrated the innate necessity and law that determines the course of chance on every line. But what is true of nature, holds also good of society. Whenever a social function or a series of social processes become too powerful for the control of man, whenever they grow beyond the grasp of man and seem to be left to mere chance, then the peculiar and innate laws of such processes shape the course of chance with increased elementary necessity. Such laws also control the vicissitudes of the production and exchange of commodities. For the individual producer and exchanger, these laws are strange, and often unknown, forces, the nature of which must be laboriously investigated and ascertained. These economic laws of production are modified by the different stages of this form of production. But generally speaking, the entire period of civilization is dominated by these laws. To this day, the product controls the producer. To this day, the aggregate production of society is managed, not on a uniform plan, but by blind laws, that rule with elementary force and find their final expression in the storms of periodical commercial crises.

We have seen that human labor power is enabled at a very early stage of production to produce considerably more than is needed to maintain the