n 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
upward progress, 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 f