nal
conditions. The Iroquois were far from controlling the forces of nature,
but within the limits drawn for them by nature they dominated their own
production. Apart from a failure of the crops in their little gardens,
the exhaustion of the fish supply in their lakes and rivers or of the
game stock in their forests, they always knew what would be the outcome
of their mode of gaining a living. A more or less abundant supply of
food, that would come of it. But the outcome could never be any
unpremeditated social upheavals, breaking of gentile bonds or division
of the gentiles against one another by conflicting class interests.
Production was carried on in the most limited manner; but--the producers
controlled their own product. This immense advantage of barbarian
production was lost in the transition to civilization. To win it back on
the basis of man's present gigantic control of nature and of the free
association rendered possible by it, that will be the task of the next
generations.

Not so among the Greeks. The advent of private property in herds of
cattle and articles of luxury led to an exchange between individuals, to
a transformation of products into commodities. Here is the root of the
entire revolution that followed. When the producers did no longer
consume their own product, but released their hold of it in exchange for
another's product, then they lost the control of it. They did not know
any more what became of it. There was a possibility that the product
might be turned against the producers for the purpose of exploiting and
oppressing them. No society can, therefore, retain for any length of
time the control of its own production and of the social effects of the
mode of production, unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.

How rapidly after the establishment of individual exchange and after the
transformation of products into commodities the product manifests its
rule over the producer, the Athenians were soon to learn. Along with the
production of marketable commodities came the tilling of the soil by
individual cultivators for their own account, soon followed by
individual ownership of the land. Along came also the money, that
general commodity for which all others could be exchanged. But when men
invented money they little suspected that they were creating a new
social power, that one universal power before which the whole of society
must bow down. It was this new power, suddenly sprung into e