r less formed, the men who
have produced it and who live in it are considered more or less savage
or barbarous. This first formation constitutes what we may call
pre-history.

History, according to the literary use of the word, namely, that part of
the human _processus_ whose traditions are fixed in the memory, begins
at a moment when the artificial basis has been formed for a considerable
length of time. For example, the canalization of Mesopotamia gives us
the ancient pre-Semitic Babylonian state, while the extremely ancient
Egyptian civilization rests upon the application of the Nile to
agriculture. Upon this artificial basis, which appears in the extreme
horizon of known history, lived, as now, not shapeless masses of
individuals, but organized groups whose organization was fixed by a
certain distribution of tasks, that is to say, of labor and by
consecutive methods of co-ordination and subordination. These relations,
these connections, these ways of living were not and are not the result
of the crystallization of customs under the immediate action of the
animal struggle for existence. What is more, they presuppose the
discovery of certain instruments, and, for example, the domestication of
certain animals, the working of minerals and even of iron, the
introduction of slavery, etc., instruments and methods of economy which
have first differentiated communities from each other and have
subsequently differentiated the component parts of these communities
themselves. In other words, the works of men in so far as they live
together react upon the men themselves. Their discoveries, and their
inventions, by creating artificial ways of living, have produced not
only habits and customs (clothing, cooking of food, etc.), but relations
and bonds of coexistence proportioned and adapted to the mode of
production and reproduction of the means of immediate life.

At the dawn of traditional history economics is already operating. Men
are working to live, on a foundation which has been in great part
modified by their work and with tools which are completely their work.
And from that moment they have struggled among themselves to conquer
each from the other a superior position in the use of these artificial
means; that is to say, they have struggled among themselves whether as
serfs and masters, subjects and lords, conquered and conquerors,
exploited and exploiters, both where they have progressed and where they
have retrograded a