st be produced, whence it
appears that the producer of the more highly developed tool of force,
commonly called weapon, triumphs over the producer of the less highly
developed tool. In a word, the triumph of force depends upon the
production of weapons, therefore upon economic power, on economic
conditions, on the ability to organize actual material instruments.

Force at the present day implies the army and the navy, and the two of
them cost, to our sorrow, a heap of money. But force cannot make
money, on the contrary it gets away very fast with what is made, and
it does not make good use of it as we have just discovered painfully
with respect to the French indemnity. Money must therefore finally be
provided by means of economic production, force is thus again limited
by the economic conditions which shape the means of making and
maintaining the instruments of production. But that is not all by any
means. Nothing is more dependent upon economic conditions than armies
and fleets. Arming, concentration, organization, tactics, strategy,
depend before anything else upon the degree of development in
production and transportation. In the trade of war the free
inventiveness of liberal-minded generals has never worked a
revolution, but the discovery of better weapons and the change in
military equipment have never failed to do so. The inventiveness of
the general under the most favorable conditions finds its limitations
in the adaptation of methods of warfare to the new weapons and the new
soldiers.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century gunpowder was brought from
the Arabs to Western Europe and, as every schoolboy knows, entirely
revolutionized warfare. The introduction of gunpowder and firearms was
however by no means an act of force but an industrial and therefore
economic advance. Industry is still industry whether its object in
the creation or the destruction of material things. The introduction
of firearms not only produced a revolution in the methods of warfare
but also in the relations of master and subject. Trade and money are
concomitants of gunpowder and firearms and these former imply the
bourgeoisie. Firearms from the first were bourgeois instruments of
warfare employed on behalf of the rising monarchy against the feudal
nobility. The hitherto unassailable stone castles of the nobles
submitted to the cannon of the burghers, the fire of their guns
pierced the mail armor of the knights. The supremacy of the n