HKB
classes have become superfluous and even an obstacle to social progress, and so now for the first time they will be unceremoniously brushed aside in spite of their "pure force."
When Herr Duehring then shows his scorn of the Greek civilisation because it was founded on slavery he might just as reasonably reproach the Greeks for not having steam engines and electric telegraphs. And when he explains that our modern wage slavery is only a somewhat transformed and ameliorated inheritance of chattel slavery and not to be explained from itself (that is from the economic laws of modern society) it only signifies that wage slavery, like chattel slavery, is a form of class domination and class subjection as every child knows, or it is false. So we might with the same right maintain that wage slavery is only a milder form of cannibalism, the established original method of disposing of conquered enemies.
The role which force has played in history with respect to economic development is therefore clear. In the first place, all political force rests originally on an economic social function, and developed in proportion as the old tribal communistic society was dissolved and transformed into various grades of private producers, and the administrators of the communal functions therefore became more widely separated from the rest of the community. In the second place, when political force, independent of society, has transformed itself from the position of servant to that of master, it may work in two directions. In the first place, it may work sensibly and in the direction of general economic development. In this case there is no quarrel between the two, economic development is advanced. Or it may work against it and then with few exceptions it succumbs to the economic development. These few exceptions consist of individual cases of tyranny where barbaric conquerors have overcome a country and have destroyed the economic forces which they did not know how to handle. Thus the Christians in Spain destroyed the irrigation works upon which the highly developed agriculture and horticulture of that country depended. Every conquest by a more barbarous people interferes with economic development and destroys numerous productive forces. But in the great majority of instances of the permanent conquest of a country, the more barbaric conquerors are obliged to adopt the higher economic conditions into which their conquest has brought them. They are assimilated into the conquered people and are compelled to adopt their language. But where--apart from instances of conquest--the inner political forces of a country comes in conflict with its economic development, which at the present day is practically true of all political force, the battle has always ended with the destruction of the political force. Without exception and inexorably, economic development has attained its goal. The last most striking example of which we have already called attention to, the French Revolution. If, as according to Herr Duehring's teachings, the economic development and the economic conditions of a certain country are altogether dependent upon political forces there is no explanation of the fact that Frederick William IV after 1848 could not succeed, in spite of his army, in attaching the guilds of the Middle Ages and other romantic tomfooleries to the steam-engines, railroads and the newly developing greater industry, or why the Czar who is still much more powerful could not only not pay his debts but could not collect his forces without drawing on the credit of the economic conditions of Western Europe.