ut for science.

(5) So, then, the history of civilization has been what it is because of
the economic systems by which the material necessities of life (foods,
raiments and houses) have been produced, not because gods have made
spiritual revelations, nor yet because men have made great discoveries
and persuasively taught them. According to Marx, who discovered the key
to the door of history, it is constituted neither by the gods in the
skies, nor the great men on earth; but by economic systems. These create
the divinities and the leaders, not they them.

(6) Thus far in the history of mankind every civilization has rested
upon the institution of slavery and there have been, speaking broadly,
three different forms of it, with their correspondingly different
civilizations, chattel, feudal and capital. Each of these forms of
slavery has been the foundation for a superstructure of a civilization
peculiar to a distinct period of history. Chattel, feudal and capital
slaveries respectively constituted the foundations for the
superstructures of ancient, mediaeval and modern civilizations. The
second of the two great discoveries by Marx was that the wage slavery of
capitalism, by far the worst of all slaveries, is due to surplus
profits.

(7) Since civilizations have their embodiments in religious and
political institutions (churches and states with what goes with them) so
clearly as to justify the contention that religion and politics are the
halves of one and the same reality--civilization--it follows that I am
right in carrying my materialism over from the realm of religion into
that of politics.

(8) A system of economics is about the most materialistic thing in the
world, yet it is the only key which will open the door to the temple of
human history. Having opened it with this key, the first thing to be
seen is a world divided into two classes, one class whose
representatives live by owning the material means and the machines for
production and distribution; and another class whose representatives
live by working in making and operating these machines, with the result
of producing and distributing the material commodities by which the
world is fed, clothed and housed, but to the surfeiting of the owners
who as such produce nothing and have everything and the starving of the
workers who produce everything and have nothing.

(9) Capitalists and communists agree that when the goal of humanity has
been reached the world