e
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 private property
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 un