Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"

the one hand in the possession of a few persons and, on the other, concentration of propertyless masses in the great cities--which must of necessity bring it to an end.

The connection between the form of distribution and the material economic conditions of a society is so much in the nature of things that it is generally reflected in the popular instinct. As long as a method of production is in the course of development, even those whose interests are against it, who are getting the worst of the particular method of production, are highly satisfied. It was just so with the English working class at the introduction of the greater industry. As long as this method of production remained the normal social method, satisfaction with the methods of distribution was, on the whole, prevalent; and when a protest against it rose even in the bosom of the dominant class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) it found at first practically no sympathy among the masses of the exploited. But directly the method of production has travelled a good portion of its upward progress, when half of its life was over, when its destiny was in a great measure accomplished and its successor was knocking at the door--then for the first time the ever increasingly unequal distribution appeared as unjust. Then was the first appeal made from actual facts to so-called eternal justice. This appeal to morality and justice does not bring us a step further scientifically. Economic science can find no grounds of proof in moral indignation, however justifiable, but merely a symptom. Its task is to show the newly developing social wrongs as the necessary results of existing methods of production and, at the same time, as signs of its approaching dissolution, and to point out, amid the break up of the existing economic system, the elements of the new organization of production and exchange which will abolish those social wrongs. The feeling stirred up by the poets whether in the picturing of these social wrongs or by attack upon them or, on the other hand, by denial of them and the glorification of harmony in the interests of the dominant class, is quite timely, but its slight value as furnishing proof for a given period is shown by the fact that one finds an abundance of it in every epoch.