significance of a right founded, not on labor, but on violence.

As soon as there is war, and one man has taken any thing from any other
man, money can no longer be always the representative of labor; money
received by a warrior for the spoils of war, which he sells, even if he
is the commander of the warriors, is in no way a product of labor, and
possesses an entirely different meaning from money received for work on
shoes. As soon as there are slave-owners and slaves, as there always
have been throughout the whole world, it is utterly impossible to say
that money represents labor.

Women have woven linen, sold it, and received money; serfs have woven for
their master, and the master has sold them and received the money. The
money is identical in both cases; but in the one case it is the product
of labor, in the other the product of violence. In exactly the same way,
a stranger or my own father has given me money; and my father, when he
gave me that money, knew, and I know, and everybody knows, that no one
can take this money away from me; but if it should occur to any one to
take it away from me, or even not to hand it over at the date when it was
promised, the law would intervene on my behalf, and would compel the
delivery to me of the money; and, again, it is evident that this money
can in no wise be called the equivalent of labor, on a level with the
money received by Semyon for chopping wood. So that in any community
where there is any thing that in any manner whatever controls the labor
of others, or where violence hedges in, by means of money, its
possessions from others, there money is no longer invariably the
representative of labor. In such a community, it is sometimes the
representative of labor, and sometimes of violence.

Thus it would be where only one act of violence from one man against
others, in the midst of perfectly free relations, should have made its
appearance; but now, when centuries of the most varied deeds of violence
have passed for accumulations of money, when these deeds of violence are
incessant, and merely alter their forms; when, as every one admits, money
accumulated itself represents violence; when money, as a representative
of direct labor, forms but a very small portion of the money which is
derived from every sort of violence,--to say nowadays that money
represents the labor of the person who possesses it, is a self-evident
error or a deliberate lie.

It may be said, that t