In all these cases there is an astoundingly equalized well-being, not perhaps mechanically equal; but there is no wealth. Because well-being is the control over articles of consumption, while wealth is the dominion over mankind. In no such cases are the means of production, “capital,” “producing any surplus values”; there are no “free laborers” and no capitalism, and the political form of these communities approximates very closely to a “freemen’s citizenship,” and tends to approximate it more and more, so far as the pressure of the surrounding states, organized from and based on the laws of war, permit its development. The “state” decomposes, or else in new countries such as Utah or New Zealand, it returns to a rudimentary stage of development; while the free self-determination of free men, scarcely acquainted with a class fight constantly tends to pierce through ever more thoroughly. Thus in the German Empire there was a parallel development between the political rise of the unions of the imperial free cities, the decline of the feudal states, the emancipation of the crafts, then still comprising the entire “plebs” of the cities, and the decay of the patrician control of the city government. This beneficent development was stopped by the erection of new primitive feudal states on the easterly border of the former German Empire, and thus the economic blossom of German culture was ruined. Whoever believes in a conscious purpose in history may say that the human race was again required to pass through another school of suffering before it could be redeemed. The Middle Ages had discovered the system of free labor, but had not developed it to its full capacity or efficiency. It was reserved for the new slavery of capitalism to discover and develop the incomparably more efficient system of coöperating labor, the division of labor in the workshops, in order to crown man as the ruler of natural forces, as king of the planet. Slavery of antiquity and of modern capitalism was once necessary; now it has become superfluous. According to the story, every free citizen of Athens disposed of five human slaves; but we have supplied to our fellow citizens of modern society a vast mass of enslaved power, slaves of steel, that do not suffer in creating values. Since then we have ripened toward a civilization as much higher than the civilization of the time of Pericles, as the population, power and riches of the modern communities exceeds those of the tiny state of Athens.
Athens was doomed to dissolution—by reason of slavery as an economic institution, by reason of the political means. Having once entered that pathway, there was no outlet except death to the population. Our path will lead to life.
The same conclusion is found by either the historical-philosophical view, which took into account the tendency of the development of the state, or the study of political economy, which regards the tendency of economic development; viz., that the economic means wins along the whole line, while the political means disappears from the life of society, in that one of its creations, which is most ancient and most tenacious of life; capitalism decays with large landed estates and ground rentals.
This has been the path of suffering and of salvation of humanity, its Golgotha and its resurrection into an eternal kingdom—from war to peace, from the hostile splitting up of the hordes to the peaceful unity of mankind, from brutality to humanity, from the exploiting State of robbery to the Freemen’s Citizenship.
NOTES
[1] “History is unable to demonstrate any one people, wherein the first traces of division of labor and of agriculture do not coincide with such agricultural exploitations, wherein the efforts of labor were not apportioned to one and the fruits of labor were not appropriated by some one else, wherein, in other words, the division of labor had not developed itself as the subjection of one set under the others.”—Robertus-Jagetzow, Illumination on the social question, second edition. Berlin, 1890, p. 124. (Cf. Immigration and Labor. The economic aspects of European Immigration to the United States, by Dr. Isaac A. Hourwich. Putnam’s, N. Y., 1912.—Translator.)
[2] Achelis, Die Ekstase in ihrer kulturellen Bedeutung, vol. 1 of Kulturprobleme der Gegenwart, Berlin, 1902.
[3] Grosse, Formen der Familie. Freiburg and Leipzig, 1896, p. 39.
[4] Ratzel, Völkerkunde. Second Edition. Leipzig and Wien, 1894–5, II, p. 372.