paid labor
and, on the side of the workingman, as an impossibility, the ownership
of his own product. The difference between 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 aristocracy more 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