capitalists and wage workers,--but
that, on the contrary, in small farming, class distinction does not
arise 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 given method 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. Moder