duction and distribution must become a fetter upon production before it can be overthrown, the actual power which will overthrow it, or at least the form which this will assume in the consciousness of the men who will do this work, may be of a moral or ethical character. For man possesses the peculiarity of placing absolute standards on relative matters, and he calls moral everything that accelerates his progress on any road which he may be travelling, and immoral everything that retards this progress. When he finds, therefore, that any given arrangement is in his way he declares it to be immoral and fights it with all the force of his "moral nature."
He may, therefore, be depended upon to make a moral issue of, and lead a crusade against, anything that will stand in the way of his economic progress. It is to the economic facts of capitalism that we must therefore look for the basis of socialism.
In order to appreciate properly these facts, we must go back a little to the beginning of our examination of the capitalist system. We have there noted the difference between the wealth of capitalistic society and that of the forms of society which preceded it. We have noted that difference to be in the fact that capitalistic wealth is an aggregation of commodities. This, as was also already noted, is due to the circumstance that the purpose of capitalistic production is different from that of any former mode of production.
This difference in the purpose of production, production for the market instead of for use, has wrought a change in the process of distribution of the social product between the different social elements which are to share therein. Under former systems of production this process was a very simple one, and the persons engaged in it were conscious and well aware of what they were doing. It was an extra-economic process, in a way, the real economic process being confined to the process of production. It was in the capitalist system that the process of distribution first
