Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/35

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NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE
3

ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF FORMS OF SOCIAL DOMINATION.

In the last analysis the superiority of physical force is the decisive factor in social domination. In its social aspect such physical force does not appear as the greater bodily strength of some individuals; it rather presupposes the equality of bodily strength of men, taken in the average, superiority thus resting purely with the majority. Such a numerical relation does not necessarily correspond with the numerical relationship existing between groups of people having interests opposed to each other. Inasmuch as not everybody knows his own real interests, especially not his fundamental interests, and inasmuch as not everybody knows and recognizes the interests of his class as his own individual interests, it is materially determined by the extensive and intensive development of class-consciousness, which in its turn depends upon the mental and moral stage of evolution reached by a class. Again, that mental and moral stage of evolution is determined by