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 for