nterest, and in history
the economic side is likewise more fundamental than the political. The
example therefore proves just the opposite of what it ought to prove.
And, as with Robinson and Friday, so it is also with all the examples
of lordship and slavery up to now. Slavery, to use Duehring's own
elegant expression, always implies a means for supplying sustenance
(using the term in its broadest sense) and never merely implies a
political organization which has been developed by its own will. One
would have to be a Herr Duehring to venture to call taxes only a
secondary feature of government, or, to say that the political
groupings of the dominant bourgeois of to-day and the subjugated
proletariat are purely voluntary and not made to serve the material
interests of the bourgeois, namely profit making and the accumulation
of capital.

Let us give our attention again to our two men. Robinson "sword in
hand" makes Friday his slave. But to do this Robinson uses something
else besides his sword. A slave is not made by that means solely. In
order to be able to keep a slave one has to be superior to him in two
respects, one must first have control over the tools and objects of
labor of the slave and over his means of subsistence also. Therefore,
before slavery is possible, a certain point in production has to be
reached and a certain degree of inequality in distribution attained.
And when slave labor becomes the dominant mode of production of an
entire society a higher development of the powers of production, of
trade and of wealth, accumulation occurs. In early tribal communities
which had common ownership of the soil, slavery is either nonexistent
or its role is very subordinate. So it was at first in Rome, as a
state of farmers, but when Rome became the capital city of the world
and the soil of Italy came more and more to be owned by a numerically
small class of enormously wealthy property owners, the population of
farmers perished in front of the slave population. When at the time
of the Persian War, the number of slaves in Corinth was 460,000, and
in Aegina 470,000, and there were ten slaves to every freeman in the
population, the explanation must be sought in something other than
force; there were a highly developed art and handicraft and foreign
commerce. Slavery in the United States of America was much less due to
force than to the English cotton industry; where there was not cotton
grown or where slaves were not ra