In this short section Engels leaves the general discussion in order to again pay his respects to the shortcomings and deficiencies of Herr Duehring. The matter possesses no general interest for Engels merely teases his opponent upon the magnificence of his claims and the slightness of his performances.
Political economy is, in the widest sense, the science of the laws controlling the production and exchange of the material necessities of life in human society. Production and exchange are two entirely different functions. Production may exist without exchange, exchange—since there can only be exchange of products—cannot exist without production. Each of the two social functions is controlled by entirely different external influences and thus has, generally speaking, its own peculiar laws. But on the other hand they become so mutually involved at a given time and react one upon the other that they might be designated the abscisses and ordinates of the economic curve.
The conditions under which men produce and exchange develop from land to land, and in the same land from generation to generation. Political economy cannot be the same for all lands and for all historical epochs. From the bow and arrow, from the stone knife and the exceptional and occasional trading intercourse of the barbarian to the steam engine with its thousands of horse-power, to the mechanical weaving machine, to the railway and the Bank of England is a tremendous leap. The Patagonians do not have production on a large scale and world-commerce any more than they have swindlingor bankruptcy. Anyone who should attempt to apply the same laws of political economy to Patagonia as to present-day England would only succeed in producing stupid commonplaces. Political economy is thus really a historical science. It is engaged with historical material, that is, material which is always in course of development. At the close of this investigation it can, for the first time, show the few (especially as regards production and exchange) general laws which apply universally. In this way it is made evident that the laws which are common to certain methods of production or forms of exchange are common to all historical periods in which these methods of production and forms of exchange are the same. Thus for example with the introduction of specie, there came into being a series of laws which holds good for all lands and historical epochs in which specie is a means of exchange.
The method of distributing the product is in accordance with the method of production and exchange of a given society at a given time. In the tribal or village community with communal ownership of land, of which there are obvious survivals in the history of all civilized peoples, there is practically an equal distribution; where a greater inequality of distribution of the product has been introduced among the members of a society, it is a sign of the coming dissolution of the community—large and small farming have very different modes of distribution according to the historical circumstances from which they have developed. But it is apparent that large farming requires a different mode of distribution than small farming; that the large farming shows the existence of class antagonism—slave-holders and slaves, landlords and tenants, capitalists and wage workers,—but that, on the contrary, in small farming, class distinction does notarise from the farming operations of separate individuals but from the mere beginnings of farming on a large scale. The introduction and development of the use of gold into a country where formerly exchange of actual goods was the exclusive or general practice, is closely associated with a slow or rapid revolution of the mode of distribution hitherto prevailing, and to such an extent that inequality of distribution among individuals and, so, antagonism between rich and poor becomes more and more apparent. Local gild hand-production as it prevailed in the Middle Ages made great capitalists and life-long wage-workers just as impossible as the great modern industry, the credit system of to-day, and form of exchange, corresponding with the development of these, free competition, render them inevitable.
With the difference in distribution however class differences are introduced. Society becomes divided into upper and lower classes, into plunderers and plundered, into master and servant classes, and the state which the original groups composed of societies claiming the same ancestry only regarded as a means of protection of the common interests (remnants of which remain in the Orient, e.g.) and against foreign force, takes upon itself the duty of maintaining the economic and political supremacy of the dominant class against the dominated class by means of force.
So distribution is not a mere passive witness of production and exchange; it has an immediate influence on both. Every new method of production and form of exchange is impeded, not only through the old forms and their particular forms of political development, but also through the old method of distribution. It can only bring about its own method of distribution as the result of long conflict. But just in proportion as a givenmethod of production and exchange is built up and develops, distribution all the more rapidly reaches a point where it outstrips its predecessor and where it comes into collision with the system of production and exchange existing up to that time. The old tribal communistic forms of which we have already spoken may last thousands of years, as is seen in the case of the Indians and Slavs of to-day, until intercourse with the outside world develops causes of disruption within them as a conclusion of which their dissolution comes about. Modern capitalistic production on the other hand which is hardly three hundred years old and which first became dominant with the introduction of the greater industry about one hundred years ago, has, in this short time, developed antagonisms in distribution—concentration of capital on the one hand in the possession of a few persons and, on the other, concentration of propertyless masses in the great cities—which must of necessity bring it to an end.
The connection between the form of distribution and the material economic conditions of a society is so much in the nature of things that it is generally reflected in the popular instinct. As long as a method of production is in the course of development, even those whose interests are against it, who are getting the worst of the particular method of production, are highly satisfied. It was just so with the English working class at the introduction of the greater industry. As long as this method of production remained the normal social method, satisfaction with the methods of distribution was, on the whole, prevalent; and when a protest against it rose even in the bosom of the dominant class itself (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) it found at first practically no sympathy among the masses of the exploited. But directly the method of production has travelled a good portion of its upwardprogress, when half of its life was over, when its destiny was in a great measure accomplished and its successor was knocking at the door—then for the first time the ever increasingly unequal distribution appeared as unjust. Then was the first appeal made from actual facts to so-called eternal justice. This appeal to morality and justice does not bring us a step further scientifically. Economic science can find no grounds of proof in moral indignation, however justifiable, but merely a symptom. Its task is to show the newly developing social wrongs as the necessary results of existing methods of production and, at the same time, as signs of its approaching dissolution, and to point out, amid the break up of the existing economic system, the elements of the new organization of production and exchange which will abolish those social wrongs. The feeling stirred up by the poets whether in the picturing of these social wrongs or by attack upon them or, on the other hand, by denial of them and the glorification of harmony in the interests of the dominant class, is quite timely, but its slight value as furnishing proof for a given period is shown by the fact that one finds an abundance of it in every epoch.
Political economy, as the science of the conditions and forms under which various human societies have produced and exchanged and according to which they have distributed the products of their labor,—political economy, in this broad sense, has yet to be planned for the first time. All that we have so far of political economic science is almost entirely limited to the beginning and development of the capitalistic mode of production. It begins with the genesis and growth of the capitalistic mode of production, and exchange, recognises the necessity of the disappearance of these by means of the capitalistic forms, then develops the laws of the capitalisticmethods of production and their corresponding forms of exchange on the positive side, that is on the side on which they further the objects of society, as a whole and closes with the socialist criticism of the capitalistic methods of production, that is, with the exhibition of its laws on the negative side, with the proof that this method of production arrives at the point, by its own development, where it is no longer possible. This criticism proves that the capitalistic methods of production and exchange constitute more and more an insufferable fetter upon production itself. The mode of distribution which is necessarily associated with this form of production has brought about a class condition which grows daily more unbearable. It has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between the continually less numerous but constantly richer capitalists and the more numerous, but on the whole, continually poorer propertyless wage-workers. Finally the tremendous productive forces of the capitalistic methods of production, which are practically unlimited, are only awaiting their seizure at the hands of an organized co-operative society to secure for all the members of that society the means of existence and the fuller development of their faculties in an ever increasing degree.
In order to fully accomplish this criticism of the bourgeois economy acquaintance with the capitalistic form of production of exchange and of distribution was not enough. Preceding forms and others, existing side by side with the capitalistic mode in a few highly developed countries, had to be examined and compared at least in their chief features. Such an investigation and comparision has been undertaken as a whole by Marx alone and we consider that this investigation practically sums up all that has been established respecting theoretical economy prior to that of the bourgeois.
While political economy in a narrow sense arose in the minds of a few geniuses of the seventeenth century, it is, in its positive formulation by the physiocrats and Adam Smith, substantially a child of the eighteenth century, and expresses itself in the acquisitions of the great contemporary French philosophers with all the excellencies and defects of that time. What we have said of the French philosophers applies also to the economists of that day. The new science was with them not the expression of the condition and needs of the time but the expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange discovered by them were not the laws of a given historical form of those facts but were eternal natural laws; they derived them from the nature of man. But this man, seen clearly, was a burgher of the Middle Ages on the high road to becoming a modern bourgeois, and his nature consisted in this that he had to manufacture commodities and carry on his trade according to the given historical conditions of that period.
(Herr Duehring having applied the two man theory to political economic conditions and having decided that such conditions are unjust, upon which conclusion he bases his revolutionary attitude, Engels remarks as follows):
"If we have no better security for the revolution in the present methods of distribution of the products of labor with all their crying antagonisms of misery and luxury, of poverty and ostentation, than the consciousness that this method of distribution is unjust and that justice must finally prevail, we should be in evil plight and would have to stay there a long time. The mystics of the Middle Ages who dreamed of an approaching thousand years kingdom of righteousness had the consciousness of the injustice of class antagonisms. At the beginning ofmodern history three hundred years ago, Thomas Muenzer shouted it aloud to all the world. In the English and French bourgeois revolutions the same cry was heard and died away ineffectually. And if the same cry, after the formation of class antagonisms and class distinctions left the working, suffering classes cold until 1830, if it now takes hold of one land after another with the same results and the same intensity, in proportion as the greater industry has developed in the individual countries if, in one generation, it has acquired a force which defies all the powers opposed to it and can be sure of victory in the near future—how comes it about? From this, that the greater industry has created the modern proletariat, a class, which for the first time in history can set about the abolition not of this or that particular class organization or of this or that particular class privilege but of classes in general, and it is in the position that it must carry out this line of action on the penalty of sinking to the Chinese coolie level. And that the same greater industry has on the other hand produced a class which is in possession of all the tools of production and the means of life but in every period of prosperity (Schwindelperiode) and in each succeeding panic shows that it is incapable of controlling in the future the growing productive forces; a class under whose leadership society runs headlong to ruin like a locomotive whose closed safety valve the engine driver is too weak to open. In other words it has come about that the productive forces of the modern capitalistic mode of production as well as the system of distribution based upon it are in glaring contradiction to the mode of production itself and to such a degree that a revolution in the modes of production and distribution must take place which will abolish all class differences or the whole of modern society will fall. It is in theseactual material facts, which are necessarily becoming more and more evident to the exploited proletariat, that the confidence in the victory of modern socialism finds its foundation and not in this or that bookworm's notions of justice and injustice.
(Herr Duehring argues that the causes of class subjection are to be sought in political conditions and that political force is the primary, and economic conditions merely the secondary, cause of class distinctions Engels makes the following reply to these arguments):
This is Herr Duehring's theory. It is set out, decreed so to say, here and in several other places. But we cannot find the slightest attempt to prove it or to disprove the opposite theory in the three thick volumes. Moreover if there was an abundance of proof we should get none from Herr Duehring, for the matter is proven by the famous fall of man in that Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave. That was an act of force and so a political act. And this slavery constitutes the point of departure and fundamental fact of history up to the present time and inoculates the heirs of sin with injustice so certainly that only lately it has become milder and "transformed into the more indirect forms of economic dependency." Since the whole of the remaining actual "force-possession" rests upon this original enslavement, it is clear that all economic phenomena can be explained from original political causes, that is from force. And whoever is not satisfied with this is a secret reactionary.
Let us first remark that one has to be as much in love with himself as Herr Duehring is to consider this idea as "original" since it is not so by any means. The ideathat the political doings of monarch and states are decisive events in history is as old as the writing of history itself and is the reason why we are so little aware of the real and quietly developing progress of the peoples which goes on behind these noisy and spectacular activities. This idea has dominated the whole of history in the past and got its first shock at the hands of the French bourgeois historians of the Restoration period.
To proceed, let us grant for the present that Herr Duehring is correct when he says that all history up to now has been the slavery of man by men, and we are still a long way from the root of the matter. Let us ask now how it was that Robinson came to enslave Friday. Was it merely for the pleasure of doing so? Surely not. On the contrary we are informed that Friday "was subjugated as a slave or mere tool for economic service and was kept in subjection merely as a tool." Robinson only enslaved Friday that he might work for the benefit of Robinson. And how could Robinson derive benefit from the labor of Friday? Only by virtue of the fact that Friday produced more means of livelihood by his labor than Robinson had to give him to keep him able to work. Robinson has therefore, contrary to Herr Duehring's pretty prescription, made, by the enslavement of Friday, a political organization, not just because he wanted to, but simply as a means of providing himself with food, and he ought to see how little he has in common with his lord and master Herr Duehring.
The childish example therefore which Herr Duehring has discovered in order to show that force is the "historical fundamental" proves that force is only a means to further an economic interest, and in history the economic side is likewise more fundamental than the political. The example therefore proves just the oppositeof 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 thetime of the Persian War, the number of slaves in Corinth was 460,000, and in Ægina 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 raised, as in the border states, for the cotton producing states, it perished of its own accord and without any employment of force simply because it did not pay.
When Herr Duehring therefore calls the property of the present day property resting on force and designates it as "that form of domination which does not merely signify the exclusion of one's fellow beings from the use of the natural means of sustenance, but implies in addition that the subjection of man has lain at the foundation of human slavery" he puts the matter upside down. The subjection of humanity to slavery in all its forms means the control by the master of the means of labor by virtue of which alone he can employ his slaves upon them and the disposal of the means of livelihood by which he can keep his slaves alive. In all cases therefore it implies a certain power of possession which transcends the ordinary? How did this arise? Occasionally it is clear that it was seized and can therefore be said to rest upon force but this is by no means essential. It can be got by labor, be robbed, be obtained by trade, or taken by fraud. It must be worked for generally before it can be stolen.
Private property does not historically come into existence by any means as a rule as the product of robbery and violence. On the contrary. It arises from thelimitation of certain things in the early tribal communes. It develops in the first place within the tribe and afterwards in exchange with peoples outside of the tribe in the form of wares. In proportion as the products of the tribe assume the form of commodities, i.e., the less they are produced for the use of the producer and the more for the purpose of exchange, the exchange destroys the original form of distribution in the commune itself, and the more unequal become the shares of the individual members of the community with respect to material possessions. So the old communal ownership of land becomes more and more invaded, the communal property is rapidly converted into a village of farmers, each tilling his own piece of ground. Oriental despotism and the changing government of conquering nomads had no power to alter the old form of communal ownership for a thousand years. But the continual destruction of the primitive domestic industry through the competition of the products of the great industry is bringing about its dissolution. The thing has little to do with force as has lately appeared in the matter of the division of the communal property of the feudal societies on the Moselle and in Hochwald. The peasants are finding the substitution of individual for communal holdings to their interests. Even the growth of a primitive aristocracy as among the Celts, the Germans, and in Mesopotamia, is a result of the communal ownership of landed property, and does not depend upon force in the slightest degree but upon free will and custom. Especially where private property arises it appears as the result of a change in the methods of production and exchange in the interests of the increase of production and the development of commerce and therefore arises from economic causes. Force plays no role in this. It is clear that the institution of privateproperty must have already existed before the robber is able to possess himself of other people's goods and that force may change the possession but cannot alter private property as such.
But to explain the "subjection of men to slavery" in its modern form, in wage-labor, we can make no use of either force or property acquired by force. We have already mentioned the part which the transformation of the products of labor into commodities, their production not for use alone, but for exchange, plays in the destruction of the primitive communal property and therefore in the bringing into existence directly or indirectly the universality of private property. But Marx has proved in his "Capital"—and Herr Duehring does not venture to intrude upon the matter—that at a certain stage in economic development the production of commodities is transformed into capitalistic production and that at this point "the law of appropriation resting upon the production and circulation of commodities, the law of private property, by its own inevitable dialectic becomes changed into its opposite, the exchange of equivalents, which appeared as its original mode of operation, but has now become so twisted that there is only an appearance of exchange since. In the first place, the portion of capital exchanged for labor-force is itself only a portion of the product of another's labor taken without an equivalent, and in the second place, it is not only supplied by its producers, the workers, but it must be supplied also with a new surplus. Originally property seemed to us to be established on labor only—property now appears (as a conclusion of the Marxian argument), on the side of the capitalist, as the right to unpaid labor and, on the side of the workingman, as an impossibility, the ownership of his own product. The differencebetween property and labor is the result of a law which apparently proceeded from their identity." In other words if we exclude the possibility of force, robbery, and cheating absolutely, if we take the position that all private property originally depended upon the personal labor of its possessor and that equivalents are always exchanged we nevertheless come, in the course of the development of production and exchange, of necessity, to the modern capitalistic methods of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and livelihood in the hands of a single class few in numbers, to the degradation of the other consisting of the immense majority of producers to the position of propertyless proletarians, to the periodical alternations of swindling operations and trade crises and to the whole of the present anarchy in production. The entire result rests on purely economic grounds without robbery, force, or any intervention of politics or the government being necessary. Property resting on force becomes a mere phrase which merely serves to obscure the understanding of the real development of things.
This course, historically expressed, is the story of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political conditions are the decisive causes of economic conditions," the modern bourgeoisie would necessarily not have progressed as the result of a fight with feudalism, but would be the darling child of its womb. Everybody knows that the opposite is the case. The bourgeoisie, originally bound to pay feudal dues to the dominant feudal nobility, recruited from bond slaves and thralls, in a subject state, has, in the course of its conflict with the nobility captured position after position, and finally has come into possession of the power in civilized countries. In France it directly attacked the nobility, in England it made the aristocracymore and more bourgeois and finally incorporated it with itself as a sort of ornament. And how did this come about? Entirely through the transformation of economic conditions which was sooner or later followed either by the voluntary or compulsory transformation of political conditions. The fight of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the fight of the city against the country, of industry against landlordism, of economy based on money against economy based on natural products. The distinctive weapons of the bourgeois in this fight were those which came into existence through the development of increasing economic force by reason of the growth at first of hand manufacture and afterwards machine-manufacture and through the extension of trade. During the whole of this conflict the political power was in the hands of the nobility, with the exception of a period when the king employed the bourgeoisie against the nobility in order to hold one in check by means of the other. From the very moment, however, in which the bourgeoisie still deprived of political power began to be dangerous because of the development of its economic power the monarchy again turned to the nobility and thereby brought about the revolution of the bourgeois first in England and then in France. The political conditions in France remained unaltered until the economic conditions outgrew them. In politics the noble was everything, the bourgeois nothing. As a social factor the bourgeoisie was of the highest importance while the nobility had abandoned all its social functions and yet pocketed revenues, social services which it did not any longer perform. Even this is not sufficient. Bourgeois society was, as far as the whole matter of production is concerned, tied and bound in the political feudal forms of the Middle Ages, which this production, notonly as regards manufacture but as regards handwork also had long transcended amid all the thousandfold gild-privileges and local and provincial tax impositions which had become mere obstacles and fetters to production. The bourgeois revolution put an end to them. But the economic condition did not, as Herr Duehring would imply, forthwith adapt itself to the political circumstances,—that the king and the nobility spent a long time in trying to effect—but it threw all the mouldy old political rubbish aside and shaped new political conditions in which the new economic conditions might come into existence and develop. And it has developed splendidly in this suitable political and legal atmosphere, so splendidly that the bourgeoisie is now not very far from the position which the nobility occupied in 1789. It is becoming more and more not alone a social superfluity but a social impediment. It takes an ever diminishing part in the work of production and becomes more and more, as the noble did, a mere revenue consuming class. And this revolution in its position and the creation of a new class, that of the proletariat, came about without any force-nonsense but by purely economic means. Further more, it has by no means accomplished it by its own willful act. On the other hand it has accomplished itself irresistibly against the wish and intentions of the bourgeoisie. Its own productive forces have taken the management of affairs and are driving modern bourgeois society to the necessity of revolution or destruction. And if the bourgeoisie now appeals to force to ward off the ruin arising from the decrepit economic condition it proves thereby that it suffers from the same error as Herr Duehring, in that it thinks that "political conditions are the distinctive causes of economic condition" and that by the use of the prime factor of merepolitical force it can manufacture the secondary factor of economic conditions. It thinks that it can shape economic conditions and their inevitable development, and therefore eliminate the economic effects of the steam engine, and the modern industry which has proceeded from it. It thinks that it can abolish the world commerce and the bank credit development of to-day from the universe by means of Krupp guns and Mauser rifles.
Let us look at this omnipotent "force" of Herr Duehring a little more closely. Robinson enslaved Friday "sword in hand." How did he get the sword? Robinson's imaginary island never grew swords on trees and some answer to this question is due from Herr Duehring. We might just as well assume that as Robinson became possessed of a sword so, one fine morning, Friday appeared with a loaded revolver in his hand. Thereupon the "force" is entirely reversed. Friday takes command and Robinson must submit. We beg pardon of the reader for returning to the story of Robinson Crusoe, which is more appropriate to the nursery than to an economic discussion, but what can we do about it? We are compelled to pursue Herr Duehring's axiomatic scientific methods and it is not our fault if we always find ourselves in the realms of childishness. The revolver then triumphs over the sword and it should be apparent even to the maker of childish axioms that superior force is no mere act of the will but requires very real preliminary conditions for the carrying out of its purposes, especially mechanical instruments, the more highly developed of which have the superiority over the less highly developed. Furthermore these tools must be produced, whence it appears that the producer of the more highly developedtool of force, commonly called weapon, triumphs over the producer of the less highly developed tool. In a word, the triumph of force depends upon the production of weapons, therefore upon economic power, on economic conditions, on the ability to organize actual material instruments.
Force at the present day implies the army and the navy, and the two of them cost, to our sorrow, a heap of money. But force cannot make money, on the contrary it gets away very fast with what is made, and it does not make good use of it as we have just discovered painfully with respect to the French indemnity. Money must therefore finally be provided by means of economic production, force is thus again limited by the economic conditions which shape the means of making and maintaining the instruments of production. But that is not all by any means. Nothing is more dependent upon economic conditions than armies and fleets. Arming, concentration, organization, tactics, strategy, depend before anything else upon the degree of development in production and transportation. In the trade of war the free inventiveness of liberal-minded generals has never worked a revolution, but the discovery of better weapons and the change in military equipment have never failed to do so. The inventiveness of the general under the most favorable conditions finds its limitations in the adaptation of methods of warfare to the new weapons and the new soldiers.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century gunpowder was brought from the Arabs to Western Europe and, as every schoolboy knows, entirely revolutionized warfare. The introduction of gunpowder and firearms was however by no means an act of force but an industrial and therefore economic advance. Industry isstill industry whether its object in the creation or the destruction of material things. The introduction of firearms not only produced a revolution in the methods of warfare but also in the relations of master and subject. Trade and money are concomitants of gunpowder and firearms and these former imply the bourgeoisie. Firearms from the first were bourgeois instruments of warfare employed on behalf of the rising monarchy against the feudal nobility. The hitherto unassailable stone castles of the nobles submitted to the cannon of the burghers, the fire of their guns pierced the mail armor of the knights. The supremacy of the nobility fell with the heavily armed cavalry of the nobility. With the development of the bourgeoisie, infantry and artillery became more and more the important arms of the service and because of artillery the trade of war had to create another industrial subdivision, to-wit, engineering.
The development of firearms proceeded very slowly. Shooting remained clumsy and small arms were ineffective in spite of many individual inventions. Three hundred years elapsed before a musket was produced which sufficed for the arming of a complete infantry. First at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a musket with a bayonet attached, which discharged a stone superseded the pike as an infantry weapon. The infantry of that day was exceedingly unreliable, only kept together by physical force, composed of the basest elements of society, frequently made up of men picked up by the press gang and prisoners of war intermingled with soldiers recruited by the various princes. The only fighting formation in which these soldiers could be made to use the new weapon was the linear tactic, which reached its highest development under Frederick II. The whole infantry of an army was drawn up in a very longhollow square three files deep and advanced in battle array en masse. It was usually permitted to one of the two wings to be a little in advance or a little in the rear. This helpless body could only advance and keep its formation on perfectly level ground and then only at a slow marching time (seventy-five steps to the minute) a change of formation during the fight was impossible and victory or defeat was determined rapidly at a stroke as soon as the infantry came under fire.
These helpless lines in the American Revolutionary War came into collision with the rebel troops, which certainly could not drill but could shoot so much the better in that they were fighting for their own interests and therefore did not desert like the enlisted soldiers. These did not, like the English, deploy in massed bodies on the open field, but in rapidly moving bodies of sharpshooters in the thick woods. The organised lines were here powerless and had to contend against invisible and unapproachable foes. The sharpshooters thereupon were brought into existence as a part of the army organization—a new method of fighting arising from a change in the military material.
What the American Revolution began the French completed in the military realm. To the drilled troops of the Coalition the French Revolution opposed soldiers who were badly drilled but who constituted large masses, the product of the whole nation. Some means had to be discovered of protecting Paris with these masses. That could not be done without victory in the open field. A mere musketry engagement would not suffice, a form would have to be discovered by which the masses could be utilized and this was found in the column. The column formation allowed slightly drilled troops to keep better order and by means of a bettermarching speed (one hundred steps to the minute) allowed it to break through the stiff old-fashioned line arrangement. It was possible by this formation to fight in country unsuitable to the line formation, to mass troops in places suitable, to associate scattered sharpshooters with the columns, to keep back, occupy and wear the lines of the enemy, until the decisive movement came when a charge could be made by the troops held in reserve. This new method of combining riflemen and columns and making a complete army corps consisting of all arms, which was fully developed on its tactical and strategic side by Napoleon, was only rendered possible by the change in military material brought about by the French Revolution. There were still two very important technical preliminaries, first the making of light carriages for field pieces which were constructed by Gribevaul by means of which alone the required quick advance was rendered possible, and making the army rifle a more precise weapon by adapting to it some of the features of the hunting rifle. Without these improvements military sharpshooting would have been impossible.
The revolutionary method of arming the entire population was subjected to certain limitations and chiefly as regards the excusing of the well to do, and in this form became common to most of the great continental countries. Prussia alone sought by its militia system to make the entire force of its people available for military purposes. Prussia was the first state to provide its entire infantry with the latest weapons, and to place officers in the rear, since between 1830 and 1860 trained officers leading their troops had played an unimportant part. The results of 1866 were largely due to these innovations.
In the Franco Prussian War two armies came into contact both of which had their officers in the rear andwhich both used substantially the same tactics as in the time of the old smooth bore flintlocks. The Prussians however by the introduction of company columns had made an attempt to discover a method of fighting more suitable to the new system of arming. But on the 18th of August at St. Privat the Prussian guard which employed the company column formation lost the most part of five regiments, over a third of its strength in two hours (176 officers and 5114 men) after which the company column form of battle order came in for no less criticism than the battalion column form and the line formation. Every attempt to oppose a solid formation to the fire of the enemy was thereafter abandoned. The battle was thereafter, on the German side, carried on by dense swarms of riflemen into which the columns dissolved under the fire of the enemy spontaneously, without orders from the superior officers, and this was, in fact, the only possible method of advance under fire. The private soldier was again cleverer than his officer; he had discovered the only form of fighting formation, and set himself to follow it in spite of the resistance of his leaders.
In the Franco-German war there is a point of departure of entirely different significance from all preceding wars. In the first place the weapons are now so complete that a new revolutionary departure in this respect is no longer possible. When you have cannon with which you can decimate a battalion as far as your eye can make it out, and when you have rifles by which you can aim at individuals, and which take less time to load than to aim, all further advances as far as battle in the field goes are immaterial. The era of progress on this side is substantially closed. In the second place, however, this war has induced all the great states of thecontinent to adopt the highly developed Prussian militia system and thus to take up a military burden which will ruin them in a few years. The army has become the main object of the state, it has become an object in itself. The people only exist to furnish and maintain soldiers. Militarism dominates and devours Europe. But this militarism has in it the seeds of its own destruction. The competition of the various states with each other necessitates the spending of more money every year on the army, the fleet, weapons of destruction, etc., and thus accelerates financial breakdown. On the other hand, with the increasingly rigid military service, the whole people becomes familiar with the use of military weapons. It therefore becomes able at some time to impose its will upon the dominating military authority. And this time arrives as soon as the mass of the people—country and city workers and farmers—has the will. At this point the army of the classes becomes the army of the masses, the machine refuses to do the work, militarism goes under in the dialectic of its own development. What the bourgeois democrats of 1848 could not accomplish, just because they were bourgeois and not proletarian, namely the endowment of the laboring masses with a will, the content of which corresponded with their class condition, socialism will certainly accomplish. And that means the destruction of militarism and with it of all standing armies absolutely and entirely.
That is the moral of our history of modern infantry. The second moral which brings us back to Herr Duehring is that the entire organization and methods of warfare of modern armies and, with them, victory and defeat, are dependent upon material things, that is upon economic conditions, upon soldier material and upon weapon material and therefore upon the quality of a populationand upon technique. Only a hunting people like the Americans could rediscover the sharpshooter. Now the Yankees of the old States have, from purely economic causes, become transformed into farmers, industrialists, sailors and merchants, who no longer shoot in the primeval forests and on that account have become all the more successful in the field of speculation where they have developed into colossal appropriators. Only a Revolution like the French which emancipated the burghers and still more the peasants could discover the simultaneously massed armies and free advance by which they overcame the stiff old line formation, the military product of the absolutism against which they fought. And as for the advances in technique as soon as they were applicable and were applied, forthwith changes, nay revolutions, in the methods of warfare were at once made, often against the will of the military leaders as we have seen over and over again to be the case. A diligent subaltern could explain to Herr Duehring how at the present day the making of war is dependent upon the productivity and means of communication of the back country as well as of the theatre of war. In short, economic conditions and means of power are always the things which help "force" to victory, and without them "force" comes to an end. So that he who would reform the art of war according to the axioms of Herr Duehring would only get a flogging for his pains.
If we go from the land to the sea we shall discover a complete revolution, even within the last twenty years. The warship of the Crimean War was the wooden three decker, with from sixty to a hundred guns, which depended upon its sailing power and had only a weak auxiliary steam engine. It carried in general thirty-two pounders of about sixty hundred weight and only a fewsixty-eight pounders of ninety-five hundred weight. At the end of the war ironclad floating batteries were used, clumsy and slow but impregnable to the artillery of that time. Very soon iron plates were placed on the warships, at first thin, four inches thickness of iron was then considered to constitute a remarkably great thickness. But the progress in artillery soon discounted the thickness of armour, for every addition to the armour there was a new and more powerful artillery which pierced it with the greatest ease. So now we have warships with ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty-four inches of armour plate (the Italians are going to build a warship with armourplate three feet thick) on the one hand and on the other hand guns which reach to a hundred tons and which hurl projectiles amounting to two thousand pounds in weight to unheard of distances. The modern war vessel is a rapid travelling armoured screw steamer of eight to ten thousand tons and of from six to eight thousand horse power provided with turrets and four or six very powerful big guns, together with a ram at the bow below the water line for the purpose of destroying the ship of the enemy. It is a colossal machine in which steam not only furnishes the driving power but also steers, raises the anchor, moves the towers, aims and loads the guns, works the pumps, takes in and lowers the boats, which are frequently steamers, and so forth. And the contest between the armour plate and the projectile is so far from having been settled that a ship is to-day practically obsolete as soon as it has left the ways. The modern warship is not only a product of modern industry but a masterpiece, a product of the dissipation of wealth. The country in which the greater industry has developed the most completely has a monopoly of shipbuilding. All the Turkish, almost all the Russian and the greaterpart of the German warships are built in England. Armour plate of the best type is made almost exclusively in Germany. Of the three iron foundries which are alone in the position to turn out the heaviest artillery, two of them, Woolwich and Elswick, are in England, the third Krupp's is in Germany. Here it may be seen that the pure political power which Herr Duehring maintains to be the original reason for economic conditions is on the contrary inseparable from economic conditions and that not only the existence but the very management of the tool of force on the sea, the warship, is in itself a branch of modern industry. And that this is so gives nobody more trouble than just that force, the state, which has now to pay more for one ship than it had formerly for a small fleet and sees that these expensive ships are obsolete as soon as they are launched. And the state is just as much upset as Herr Duehring would be over the fact that the controller of the economic force of the ship, the engineer, is a much more important person than the man of pure force, the captain. On the other hand we have no further grounds for annoyance when we see that how as a result of this contest between armour plate and projectile the battle ship has arrived at the point when it is as expensive as it is unfit for fighting and that this contest shows the dialectic law of progress at work in naval warfare according to which militarism like every other historical phenomenon must come to an end as a result of its own development.
We can thus see as plain as noonday that it is not true that "the original reason must be sought in pure political force and not in indirect economic force." Quite the contrary. Economic force is the control of the power of the great industry. Political force in naval matters which is dependent upon modern ships of war is by nomeans "pure force" but is involved in economic force, in the advanced development of metallurgy, in the mastery of historical technique and the possession of rich coal-fields.