Commonwealth or Communism. The more consciously and vigorously we work for this aim, the sooner shall we do away with all class domination and bring the organisation of society into harmony with the present vast and still developing productive forces.
The State
Engels traces the effect of the overthrow of the gens institutions in Greece, and shows how, unknown to its members, they lost control of their products, for when the producers no longer produce for their own consumption, but for exchange, the products become commodities and their producers lose all control of them. The result of all this is production for exchange without any direct relation to the needs of society and the enslavement of the producers of the commodities by the owners of the means of production. With this came the tilling of the soil by individuals on their own account, and this was necessarily followed by the private ownership of land, and there arose a great landless class. With the production of commodities came money, the general commodity for which all others could be exchanged, and this, in its turn, facilitated the growth of commodity production, circulation and exchange. This necessitated again new social and political forms; the gens had outgrown the new methods of production. It was no longer capable of maintaining order within society or of allowing the new productive forces to expand. Nor was it capable of regulating the new relations between debtor, creditor, and all the intricacies of social organisation within a society based on commodity production and class domination. Hence arose the State. In view of the fact, however, that the State as such is still so largely deified and looked upon as something quite permanent which we can at most only modify here and there to suit our purposes, it will be well to dwell a little longer on what Engels has to say on the subject of the State. Discussing the influence which was undermining gentil society in the Greece of heroic times, Engels shows how the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the paternal family, and the consequent laws of inheritance, raised the power of the family as against the gens and formed the rudiments of a hereditary nobility and monarchy. With the growth of the possibility of accumulating wealth came slavery, first only applying to prisoners of war, but soon embracing the poorer members of one's own tribe. "In short," says Engels, "wealth is praised and respected as the highest treasure, and the old gentil institutions are abused in order to justify the forcible robbery of wealth. Only one thing was missing: an institution that not only secured the newly acquired property of private individuals against the communistic traditions of the gens, that not only declared as sacred the formerly-despised private property and represented the protection of this sacred property as the highest purpose of human society, but that also stamped the gradually developing new forms of acquiring property, of constantly increasing wealth with the universal sanction of society. An institu-
