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Pre-Capitalist Economic FormationsKarl Marx's
PRE-CAPITALIST
ECONOMIC FORMATIONS
Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations was never intended for publication --
certainly, at least, not as is. It is part of a huge manuscript Marx wrote in
researching and preparing what would become A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy published in 1859.
 Marx's collection of personal notebooks, of which this text was a part, would
finally be published for public perusal in Russian in Moscow, 1939-41. It was
printed in German in 1953 as the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie
-- or the Grundrisse, or Outline, for short.
 This section of the Grundrisse -- Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations -- was
published separately in Berlin, 1952, as a pamphlet called Formen die der
Kapitalistischen Produktion vorhergehen.
 Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations focuses on dialectical materialism in
historical examination.
 ONLINE VERSION: The Formations was first published in German in Berlin in 1952.
It was translated into English in 1964 by F. Cohen for International Publishers.
Transcribed for the Internet by [e-mail] on January 23 1994.

    Part I
    Part II




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                   PRE-CAPITALIST ECONOMIC FORMATIONS

                                 1857-58

                           this etext based on
                  Jack Cohen's 1964 English translation


          As these were not intended for publication, but rather
          Marx's self-clarification, no care was given to the
          construction of paragraphs.  Rather than leave such
          interminable paragraphs intact -- and which are even
          harder to read on a computer screen -- they have been
          broken up.  They can be reassembled as follows --
          consider a one-space indent a Marx paragraph, all
          others soft paragraphs.


                                    I


 One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic
conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor
against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into
values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for
enjoyment, but as use value for money.  Another prerequisite is the
separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its
realization -- from the means and material of labor.  This means above
all that the workers must be separated from the land, which functions as
his natural laboratory.  This means the dissolution both of free petty
landownership and of communal landed property, based on the oriental
commune.

In both these forms, the relationship of the worker to the objective
conditions of his labor is one of ownership: this is the natural unity
of labor with its material prerequisites.  Hence, the worker has an
objective existence independent of his labor.  The individual is related
to himself as a proprietor, as master of the conditions of his reality.
The same relation holds between one individual and the rest.  Where this
_prerequisite_ derives from the community, the others are his co-owners,
who are so many incarnations of the common property.  Where it derives
from the individual families which jointly constitute the community,
they are independent owners co-existing with him, independent private
proprietors.  The common property which formerly absorbed everything and
embraced them all, then subsists as a special _ager publicus_ [common
land] separate from the numerous private owners.

 In both cases, individuals behave not as laborers but as owners -- and
as members of a community who also labor.  The purpose of this labor is
not the _creation of value_, although they may perform surplus labor in
order to exchange it for foreign labor -- i.e., for surplus products.
Its purpose is the maintenance of the owner and his family as well as of
the communal body as a whole.  The establishment of the individual as a
_worker_, stripped of all qualities except this one, is itself a product
of _history_.

 The first prerequisite of this earliest form of landed property appears
as a human community, such as emerges from spontaneous evolution
[naturwuchsig]: the family, the family expanded into a tribe, or the
tribe created by the inter-marriage of families or combination of
tribes.  We may take it for granted that pastoralism, or more generally
a migratory life, is the first form of maintaining existence, the tribe
not settling in a fixed place but using up what it finds locally and
then passing on.  Men are not settled by nature (unless perhaps in such
fertile environments that they could subsist on a single tree like the
monkeys; otherwise they would roam, like the wild animals).  Hence the
tribal community, the natural common body, appears not as the
consequence, but as the precondition of the joint (temporary)
appropriation and use of the soil.

Once men finally settle down, the way in which to a smaller degree this
original community is modified, will depend on various external,
climatic, geographical, physical, etc., conditions as well as on their
special natural make-up -- their tribal character.  The spontaneously
evolved tribal community, or, if you will, the herd -- the common ties
of blood, language, custom, etc.  -- is the first precondition of the
appropriation of the objective of life, and of the activity which
reproduces and gives material expression to, or objectifies
[vergegenstandlichenden] it (activity as herdsmen, hunters,
agriculturalists, etc.).  The earth is the great laboratory, the arsenal
which provides both the means and the materials of labor, and also the
location, the _basis_ of the community.  Men's relations to it is naive;
they regard themselves as its _communal proprietors_, and as those of
the community which produces and reproduces itself by living labor.
Only in so far as the individual is a member -- in the literal and
figurative sense -- of such a community, does he regard himself as an
owner or possessor.  In reality, appropriation by means of the process
of labor takes place under these preconditions, which are not the
_product_ of labor but appears as its natural or _divine_ preconditions.

Where the fundamental relationship is the same, this form can realize
itself in a variety of ways.  For instance, as is the case in most
Asiatic fundamental forms, it is quite compatible with the fact that the
_all-embracing unity_ which stands above all these small common bodies
may appear as the higher or _sole proprietor_, the real communities only
as _hereditary_ possessors.  Since the _unity_ is the real owner, and
the real precondition of common ownership, it is perfectly possible for
it to appear as something separate and superior to the numerous real,
particular communities.  The individual is then in fact propertyless, or
property -- i.e., the relationship of the individual to the natural
conditions of labor and reproduction, the inorganic nature which he
finds and makes his own, the objective body of his subjectivity --
appears to be mediated by means of a grant [Ablassen] from the total
unity to the individual through the intermediary of the particular
community.  The despot here appears as the father of all the numerous
lesser communities, thus realizing the common unity of all.  It
therefore follows that the surplus product (which, incidentally, is
legally determined in terms of [infolge] the real appropriation through
labor) belongs to this highest unity.  Oriental despotism therefore
appears to lead to a legal absence of property, in most cases created
through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small
community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining and contains
within itself all conditions of production and surplus production.

Part of its surplus labor belongs to the higher community, which
ultimately appears as a _person_.  This surplus labor is rendered both
as tribute and as common labor for the glory of the unity, in part that
of the despot, in part that of the imagined tribal entity of the god.
In so far as this type of common property is actually realized in labor,
it can appear in two ways.  The small communities may vegetate
independently side by side, and within each the individual labors
independently with his family on the land allotted to him.

(There will also be a certain amount of labor for the common store --
for insurance as it were -- on the one hand; and on the other for
defraying the costs of the community as such, i.e., for war, religious
worship, etc.  The dominion of lords, in its most primitive sense,
arises only at this point, e.g., in the Slavonic and Rumanian
communities.  Here lies the transition to serfdom, etc.)

Secondly, the unity can involve a common organization of labor itself,
which in turn can constitute a veritable system, as in Mexico, and
especially Peru, among the ancient Celts, and some tribes of India.
Furthermore, the communality within the tribal body may tend to appear
either as a representation of its unity through the head of the tribal
kinship group, or as a relationship between the heads of families.
Hence, either a more despotic or a more democratic form of the
community.  The communal conditions for real appropriation through
labor, such as irrigation systems (very important among the Asian
peoples), means of communication, etc., will then appear as the work of
the higher unity -- the despotic government which is poised above the
lesser communities.  Cities in the proper sense arise by the side of
these villages only where the location is particularly favorable to
external trade, or where the head of the state and his satraps exchange
their revenue (the surplus product) against labor, which they expend as
labor-funds.

 The second form (of property) has, like the first, given rise to
substantial variations, local, historical, etc.  It is the product of a
more dynamic [bewegten] historical life, of the fate and modification of
the original tribes.  The _community_ is here also the first
precondition, but unlike our first case, it is not here the substance of
which the individuals are mere accidents [Akzidenzen] or of which they
form mere spontaneously natural parts.  The basis here is not the land,
but the city as already created seat (centre) of the rural population
(landowners).  The cultivated area appears as the territory of the city;
not, as in the other case, the village as a mere appendage to the land.
However great the obstacles the land may put in the way of those who
till it and really appropriate it, it is not difficult to establish a
relationship with it as the inorganic nature of the living individual,
as his workshop, his means of labor, the object of his labor and the
means of subsistence of the subject.  The difficulties encountered by
the organized community can arise only from other communities which have
either already occupied the land or disturb the community in its
occupation of it.  War is therefore the great all-embracing task, the
great communal labor, and it is required either for the occupation of
the objective conditions for living existence or for the protection and
perpetuation of such occupation.  The community, consisting of kinship
groups, is therefore in the first instance organized on military lines,
as a warlike, military force, and this is one of the conditions of its
existence as a proprietor.  Concentration of settlement in the city is
the foundation of this warlike organization.  The nature of tribal
structure leads to the differentiation of kinship groups into higher and
lower, and this social differentiation is developed further by the
mixing of conquering and conquered tribes, etc.  Common land -- as state
property, ager publicus -- is here separate from private property.  The
property of the individual, unlike our first case, is here not direct
communal property, where the individual is not an owner in separation
from the community, but rather its occupier.  Circumstances arise in
which individual property does not require communal labor for its
valorization (e.g., as it does in the irrigation systems of the Orient);
the purely primitive character of the tribe may be broken by the
movement of history or migration; the tribe may remove from its original
place of settlement and occupy _foreign_ soil, thus entering
substantially new conditions of labor and developing the energies of the
individual further.  The more such factors operate -- and the more the
communal character of the tribe therefore appears, and must appear,
rather as a negative unity as against the outside world -- the more do
conditions arise which allow the individual to become a _private
proprietor_ of land -- of a particular plot -- whose special cultivation
belongs to him and his family.

The community -- as a state -- is, on the one hand, the relationship of
these free and equal private proprietors to each other, their
combination against the outside world -- and at the same time their
safeguard.  The community is based on the fact that its members consists
of working owners of land, small peasant cultivators; but in the same
measure the independence of the latter consists in their mutual relation
as members of the community, in the safeguarding of the ager publicus
for common needs and common glory, etc.  To be a member of the community
remains the precondition for the appropriation of land, but in his
capacity as member of the community the individual is a private
proprietor.  His relation to his private property is both a relation to
the land and to his existence as a member of the community, and his
maintenance as a member of the community, and his maintenance of the
community, and vice versa, etc.

Since the community, though it is here not merely a de facto _product of
history_, but one of which men are conscious as such, has therefore _had
an origin_, we have here the precondition for _property_ in land --
i.e., for the relation of the working subject to the natural conditions
of his labor as belonging to him.  But this "belonging" is mediated
through his existence as a member of the state, through the existence of
the state -- hence through a _pre-condition_ which is regarded as
divine, etc.

[Translator's Note: Marx's habit of occassionally omitting auxiliary
verbs makes it impossible always to interpret his meaning unambiguously.
An alternative meaning would be:

Since the community, though it is here not merely a de facto _product of
history_, but one of which men are conscious as such, has therefore _had
an origin_ (and is thus) here the precondition for _property_ in land --
i.e., for the relation of the working subject to the natural conditions
of his labor as belonging to him.  But this "belonging" is, however,
mediated by his existence as a member of the state, through the
existence of the state -- hence through a _pre-condition_ which is
regarded as divine, etc. ]

There is concentration in the city, with the land as its territory;
small-scale agriculture producing for immediate consumption; manufacture
as the domestic subsidiary, labor of wives and daughters (spinning and
weaving) or achieving independent existence in a few craft occupations
(fabric, etc.).  The precondition for the continued existence of the
community is the maintenance of equality among its free self-sustaining
peasants, and their individual labor as the condition of the continued
existence of their property.  Their relation to the natural conditions
of labor are those of proprietors; but personal labor must continuously
establish these conditions as real conditions and objective elements of
the personality of the individual, of his personal labor.

On the other hand, the tendency of this small warlike community drives
it beyond these limits, etc.  (Rome, Greece, Jews, etc.) As Niebuhr
says:

     "When the auguries had assured Numa of the divine approval for his
     election, the first preoccupation of the pious monarch was not the
     worship of the gods, but a human one.  He distributed the land
     conquered in war by Romulus and left to be occupied: he founded the
     worship of Terminnus (the god of boundary-stones).  All the ancient
     law-givers, and above all Moses, founded the success of their
     arrangements for virtue, justice, and good morals [Sitte] upon
     landed property, or at least on secure hereditary possession of
     land, for the greatest possible number of citizens."

                                   (Vol.I, 245, 2nd ed. _Roman History_)

The individual is placed in such condition of gaining his life as to
make not the acquiring of wealth his object, but self-sustenance, its
own reproduction as a member of the community; the reproduction of
himself as a proprietor of the parcel of ground and, in that quality, as
a member of the commune.  [Translator Note: This sentence in English in
original.]

The continuation of the commune is the reproduction of all its members
as self-sustaining peasants, whose surplus time belongs precisely to the
commune, the labor of war, etc.  Ownership of one's labor is mediated
through the ownership of the conditions of labor -- the plot of land,
which is itself guaranteed by the existence of the community, which in
turn is safeguarded by the surplus labor of its members in the form of
military service, etc.  The member of the community reproduces himself
not through co-operation in wealth-producing labor, but in co-operation
in labor for the (real or imaginary) communal interests aimed at
sustaining the union against external and internal stress [nach aussen
und innen].  Property formally belongs to the Roman citizen, the private
owner of land is such only by virtue of being Roman, but any Roman is
also a private landowner.

Another form of the property of working individuals, self-sustaining
members of the community, in the natural conditions of their labor, is
the _Germanic_.  Here, the member of the community as such is not, as in
the specifically oriental form, co-owner of the communal property.

(Where property exists _only_ as communal property, the individual
member as such is only the _possessor_ of a particular part of it,
hereditary or not, for any fraction of property belongs to no member for
himself, but only as the direct part of the community, consequently as
someone in direct unity with the community and not as distinct from it.
The individual is therefore only a possessor.  What exists is only
_communal_ property and _private possession_.  Historic and local, etc.,
circumstances may modify the character of this possession in its
relation to the communal property in very different ways, depending on
whether labor is performed in isolation by the private possessor or is
in turn determined by the community, or by the unity standing above the
particular community.)

Neither is the land [in the Germanic community] occupied by the
community as in the Roman, Greek (in brief, the ancient classical) form
as Roman land.  Part of it [that is, in classical antiquity] remains
with the community as such, as distinct from the members, ager publicus
in its various forms; the remainder is distributed, each plot of land
being Roman by virtue of the fact that it is the private property, the
domain, of a Roman, the share of the laboratory which is his;
conversely, he is Roman only in so far as he possesses this sovereign
right over part of the Roman soil.

[ Translator Note: The ensuing passages are noted down by Marx from
Niebuhr's _Roman History_, I, 418, 436, 614, 615, 317-19, 328-31, 333,
335. ]

     In antiquity urban crafts and trade were held in low, but
     agriculture in high, esteem; in the Middle Ages their status was
     reversed.

     The right of use of common land by possession originally belonged
     to the Patricians, who later granted it to their clients; the
     assignment of property out of the ager publicus belonged
     exclusively to the Plebeians; all assignments in favor of Plebeians
     and compensation for a share in the common land.  Landed property
     in the strict sense, if we except the area surrounding the city
     wall, was originally in the hands only of Plebeians (rural
     communities subsequently absorbed).

     Essence of the Roman Plebs as a totality of agriculturalists, as
     described in their quiritarian (citizen) property.  The ancients
     unanimously commended farming as the activity proper to free men,
     the school for soldiers.  The ancient stock [Stamm, which also
     means "tribe"] of the nation is preserved in it; it changes in the
     towns, where foreign merchants and artisans settle, as the natives
     migrate there, attracted by the hope of gain.  Wherever there is
     slavery, the freedman seeks his subsistence in such activities,
     often accumulating wealth; hence in antiquity such occupations were
     generally in their hands and therefore unsuitable for citizens;
     hence the view that the admission of craftsmen to full citizenship
     was a hazardous procedure (the Greeks, as a rule, excluded them
     from it).  "No Roman was permitted to lead the life of a petty
     trader or craftsman."  The ancients had no conception of gild pride
     and dignity, as in medieval urban history; and even there the
     military spirit declined as the gilds vanquished the (aristocratic)
     lineages, and was finally extinguished; as, consequently also the
     respect in which the city was held outside and its freedom.

     The tribes [Stamme] of the ancient states were constituted in one
     of two ways, either by kinship or by locality.  Kinship tribes
     historically precede locality tribes, and are almost everywhere
     displaced by them.  Their most extreme and rigid form is the
     institution of castes, separated from one another, without the
     right of inter-marriage, with quite different status; each with its
     exclusive, unchangeable occupation.  The locality tribes originally
     corresponded to a division of the area into districts [Gaue] and
     villages; so that in Attica under Kleisthenes, any man settled in a
     village was registered as a Demotes [villager] of that village, and
     as a member of the Phyle [tribe] of the area to which that village
     belonged.  However, as a rule his descendants, regardless of place
     of domicile, remained in the same Phyle and the same Deme, thereby
     giving to this division an appearance of ancestral descent.  The
     Roman kin-groups [gentes] did not consist of blood-relatives;
     Cicero notes, when mentioning the family name, descent from free
     men.  The members of the Roman gens had common shrines [sacra], but
     this had already disappeared in Cicero's day.  The joint
     inheritance from fellow-kinsmen who died intestate or without close
     relatives, was retained longest of all.  In most ancient times,
     members of the gens had the obligation to assist fellow-kinsmen in
     need of assistance to bear unusual burdens.  (This occurs
     universally among the Germans, and persisted longest among the
     Dithmarschen.)  The gentes of a sort of gild.  A more general
     organization than that of kin groups did not exist in the ancient
     world.  Thus among the Gaels, the aristocratic Campbells and their
     vassals constitute a clan.

Since the Patrician represents the community to a higher degree, he is
the _possessor_ of the ager publicus, and uses it through the
intermediary of his clients, etc.  (also gradually appropriates it).

The Germanic community is not concentrated in the city; a concentration
-- the city the centre of rural life, the domicile of the land workers,
as also the centre of warfare -- which gives the community as such an
external existence, distinct from that of its individual members.
Ancient classical history is the history of cities, but cities based on
landownership and agriculture; Asian history is a kind of
undifferentiated unity of town and country (the large city, properly
speaking, must be regarded merely as a princely camp, superimposed on
the real economic structure); the Middle Ages (Germanic period) starts
with the countryside as the locus of history, whose further development
then proceeds through the opposition of town and country; modern
(history) is the urbanization of the countryside, not, as among the
ancients, the ruralization of the city.


Here begins a new notebook of Marx's manuscript, entitled:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notebook V.                                             January 22, 1858
Chapter on capital. Continued.


Union in the city gives the community as such an economic existence; the
mere _presence_ of the town as such is different from a mere
multiplicity of separate houses.  Here the whole does not consist of its
separate parts.  It is a form of independent organism.  Among the
Germans, where single heads of families settle in the forests, separated
by long distances, even on an _external_ view, the community exists
merely by virtue of every act of union of its members, although their
unity _existing in itself_ is embodied [gesetzt] in descent, language,
common past and history, etc.  The _community_ therefore appears as an
_association_, not as a _union_, as an agreement [Einigung], whose
independent subjects are the landowners, and not as a unity.  In fact,
therefore, the community has no existence as a _state_, a _political
entity_ as among the ancients, because it has no existence as a _city_.
If the community is to enter upon real existence, the free landowners
must hold an _assembly_, whereas, e.g., in Rome it _exists_ apart from
such assemblies, in the presence of the _city itself_ and the officials
placed at its head, etc.

True, the ager publicus, the common land or peoples' land, occurs among
the Germans also, as distinct from the property of individuals.  It
consists of hunting grounds, common pastures or woodlands, etc., as that
part of the land which cannot be partitioned if it is to serve as a
means of production in this specific form.  However, unlike the Roman
case, the ager publicus does not appear as the particular economic being
of the state, by the side of the private owners -- who are, properly
speaking, private proprietors as such insofar as they have been
_excluded_ from or deprived of the use of the ager publicus, like the
Plebeians.  The ager publicus appears rather as a mere supplement to
individual property among the Germans, and figures as property only
insofar as it is defended against hostile tribes as the common property
of one tribe.  The property of the individual does not appear mediated
through the community, but the existence of the community and of
communal property as mediated through -- i.e., as a mutual relation of
-- the independent subjects.

At bottom, every individual household contains an entire economy,
forming as it does an independent centre of production (manufacture
merely the domestic subsidiary labor of the women, etc.).  In classical
antiquity, the city with its attached territory formed the economic
whole.  In the Germanic world, the individual home, which itself appears
merely as a point in the land belonging to it; there is no concentration
of a multiplicity of proprietors, but the family as an independent unit.
In the Asiatic form (or at least predominantly so), there is no
property, but only individual possession; the community is properly
speaking the real proprietor -- hence property only as _communal
property_ in land.  In antiquity (Romans as the classic example, the
thing in its purest and most clearly marked form), there is a
contradictory form of state landed property and private landed property,
so that the latter is mediated through the former, or the former exists
only in this double form.  The private landed proprietor is therefore
simultaneously an urban citizen.  Economically, citizenship may be
expressed more simply as a form in which the agriculturalist lives in a
city.  In the Germanic form, the agriculturalist is not a citizen --
i.e., not an inhabitant of cities -- but its foundation is the isolated,
independent family settlement, guaranteed by means of its association
with other such settlements by men of the same tribe, and their
occassional assembly for purposes of war, religion, the settlement of
legal disputes, etc., which establishes their mutual surety.  Individual
landed property does not here appear as a contradictory form of communal
landed property, nor as mediated by the community, but the other way
round.  The community exists only in the mutual relation of the
individual landowners as such.  Communal property as such appears only
as a communal accessory to the individual kin settlements and land
appropriations.  The community is neither the substance, of which the
individual appears merely as the accident, nor is it the general, which
_exists and has being_ as such in men's minds, and in the reality of the
city and its urban requirements, distinct from the separate economic
being of its members.  It is rather on the one hand, the common element
in language, blood, etc., which is the premise of the individual
proprietor; but on the other hand, it has real being only in its _actual
assembly_ for communal purposes; and, insofar as it has a separate
economic existence, in the communally-used hunting-grounds, pastures,
etc., it is used thus by every individual proprietor as such, and not in
his capacity as the representative of the state (as in Rome).  It is
genuinely the common property of the individual owners, and not of the
union of owners, possessing an existence of its own in the city,
distinct from that of the individual members.

 The crucial point here is this: in all these forms, where landed
property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order, and
consequently the economic object is the production of use values --
i.e., the _reproduction of the individual_ in certain definite
relationships to his community, of which it forms the basis -- we find
the following elements:

  1. Appropriation of the natural conditions of labor, of the _earth_
     as the original instrument of labor, both laboratory and
     repository of its raw materials; however, appropriation not by
     means of labor, but as the preliminary condition of labor.  The
     individual simply regards the objective conditions of labor as
     his own, as the inorganic nature of this subjectivity, which
     realizes itself through them.  The chief objective condition of
     labor itself appears not as the _product_ of labor, but occurs
     as _nature_.  On the one hand, we have the living individual, on
     the other the earth, as the objective condition of his
     reproduction.

  2. The _attitude_ to the land, to the earth, as the property of the
     working individual, means that a man appears from the start as
     something more than the abstraction of the "working individual",
     but has an _objective mode of existence_ in his ownership of the
     earth, which is _antecedent_ to his activity and does not appear
     as its mere consequence, and is as much a precondition of his
     activity as his skin, his senses, for whole skin and sense
     organs are also developed, reproduced, etc., in the process of
     life, they are also presupposed by it.  What immediately mediates
     this attitude is the more or less naturally evolved, more or
     less historically evolved and modified existence of the
     individual as _a member of a community_ -- his primitive
     existence as part of a tribe, etc.

An isolated individual could no more possess property in land than he
could speak.  At most, he could live off it as a source of supply, like
the animals.  The relation to the soil as property always arises through
the peaceful or violent occupation of the land by the tribe of the
community in some more or less primitive or already historically
developed form.  The individual here can never appear in the total
isolation of the mere free laborer.  If the objective conditions of his
labor are presumed to belong to him, he himself is subjectively presumed
to belong to a community which mediates his relationship to the
objective conditions of labor.  Conversely, the real existence of the
community is determined by the specific form of its ownership of the
objective conditions of labor.  The property mediated by its existence
in a community may appear as _communal property_, which gives the
individual only possession and no private property in the soil; or else
it may appear in the dual form of state and private property, which
co-exist side by side, but in such a way as to make the former the
precondition of the latter, so that only the citizen is and must be a
private proprietor, while on the other hand his property qua citizen
also has a separate existence.  Lastly, communal property may appear as
a supplement to private property, which in this case forms the basis; in
this case, the community has no existence except in the _assembly_ of
its members and in their association for common purposes.

These different forms of relationship of communal tribal members to the
tribal land -- to the earth upon which it has settled -- depend partly
on the natural character [Naturanlagen] of the tribe, partly on the
economic conditions in which the tribe really exercises its ownership of
the land -- i.e., appropriates its fruits by means of labor.  And this
in turn will depend on the climate, the physical properties of the soil,
the physically conditioned mode of its utilization, the relationships to
hostile or neighboring tribes, and such modification as are introduced
by migrations, historical events, etc.  If the community as such is to
continue in the old way, the reproduction of its members under the
objective conditions already assumed as given, is necessary.  Production
itself, the advance of population (which also falls under the head of
production), in time necessarily eliminates these conditions, destroying
instead of reproducing them, etc., and as this occurs the community
decays and dies, together with the property relations on which it was
based.

The Asiatic form necessarily survives the longest and most stubbornly.
This is due to the fundamental principle on which it is based -- that
is, that the individual does not become independent of the community;
that the circle of production is self-sustaining, unity of agriculture
and craft manufacture, etc.  If the individual changes his relation to
the community, he modifies and undermines both the community and its
economic premise; conversely, the modification of this economic premise
-- produced by its own dialectic, pauperization, etc.  Note especially
the influence of warfare and conquest.  While, e.g., in Rome this is an
essential part of the economic condition of the community itself, it
breaks the real bond on which the community rests.

In all these forms, the basis of evolution is the _reproduction_ of
relations between individuals and community _assumed as given_ -- they
may be more or less primitive, more or less the result of history, but
fixed into tradition -- and a _definite, predetermined objective_
existence, both as regards the relation to the conditions of labor and
the relation between one man and his co-workers, fellow-tribesmen, etc.
Such evolution is therefore from the outset _limited_, but once the
limits are transcended, decay and disintegration ensue.  Evolution of
slavery, concentration of landed property, exchange, a monetary economy,
conquest, etc., as among the Romans.  All these appeared nevertheless up
to a point to be compatible with the base, and merely innocent
extensions of it, or else mere abuses arising from it.  Considerable
developments are thus possible within a given sphere.  Individuals may
appear to be great.  But free and full development of individual or
society is inconceivable here, for such evolution stands in
contradiction to the original relationship.

 Among the ancients, we discover no single enquiry as to which form of
landed property, etc., is the most productive, which creates maximum
wealth.  Wealth does not appear as the aim of production, although Cato
may well investigate the most profitable cultivation of fields, or
Brutus may even lend money at the most favorable rate of interest.  The
enquiry is always about what kind of property creates the best citizens.
Wealth as an end in itself appears only among a few trading peoples --
monopolists of the carrying trade -- who live in the pores of the
ancient world like the Jews in medieval society.  Wealth is, on the one
hand, a thing, realized in things, in material products as against man
as a subject.  On the other hand, in its capacity as value, it is the
mere right to command other people's labor, not for the purpose of
dominion, but of private enjoyment, etc.  In all its forms, it appears
in the form of objects, whether of things or of relationships by means
of things, which lie outside of, and as it were accidentally beside, the
individual.

Thus the ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however
narrowly national, religious, or political a definition) as the aim of
production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which
production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production.  In fact,
however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is
wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments,
productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange?
What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of
nature -- those of his own nature as well as those of so-called
"nature"? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative
dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical
evolution which make the totality of this evolution -- i.e., the
evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any _previously
established_ yardstick -- an end in itself? What is this, if not a
situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but
produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed
by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois
political economy -- and in the epoch of production to which it
corresponds -- this complete elaboration of what lies within man,
appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed,
one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly
external compulsion.  Hence in one way the childlike world of the
ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for
closed shape, form and established limitation.  The ancients provide a
narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or,
where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is _vulgar_ and _mean_
[gemein].

 What Mr.  Proudhon calls the _extra-economic_ origin of property -- by
which he means landed property -- is the pre-bourgeois relationship of
the individual to the objective conditions of labor, and in the first
instance to the _natural_ objective conditions of labor.  For, just as
the working subject is a natural individual, a natural being, so the
first objective condition of his labor appears as nature, earth, as an
inorganic body.  He himself is not only the organic body, but also
inorganic nature as a subject.  This condition is not something he has
produced, but something he finds to hand; something existing in nature
and which he presupposed.  Before proceeding in our analysis, a further
point: poor Proudhon not only could, but ought equally to be obliged, to
accuse _capital_ and _wage-labor_ -- as forms of property -- of
_extra-economic_ origin.  For the fact that the worker finds the
objective condition of his labor as something separate from him, as
_capital_, and the fact that the capitalist finds the _worker_
propertyless, as abstract laborers -- the exchange as it takes place
between value and living labor -- assumes a _historic process_, however
much capital and wage-labor themselves reproduce this relationship and
elaborate it in objective scope, as well as in depth.  And this historic
process, as we have seen, is the evolutionary history of both capital
and wage-labor.  In other words, the _extra-economic origin_ of property
merely means the historic origin of the bourgeois economy, of the forms
of production to which the categories of political economy give
theoretical or ideal expression.  But to claim that pre-bourgeois
history and each phase of it, has its own _economy_ [Okonomie -- not
clear if Marx means "economies" or "economy"] and an _economic base_ of
its movement, is at bottom merely to state the tautology that human life
has always rested on some kind of production -- _social_ production --
whose relations are precisely what we call economic relations.

 The original conditions of production cannot initially be themselves
produced -- they are not the results are not the results of production.
(Instead of original conditions of production we might also say: for if
this reproduction appears on one hand as the appropriation of the
objects by the subjects, it equally appears on the other as the
moulding, the subjection, of the objects by and to a subjective purpose;
the transformation of the objects into results and repositories of
subjective activity.) What requires explanation is not the _unity_ of
living and active human beings with the natural, in organic conditions
of their metabolism with nature, and therefore their appropriation of
nature; nor is this the result of a historic process.  What we must
explain is the _separation_ of these inorganic conditions of human
existence from this active existence, a separation which is only fully
completed in the relationship between wage-labor and capital.

In the relationship of slavery and serfdom there is no such separation;
what happens is that one part of society is treated by another as the
mere _inorganic and natural_ condition of its own reproduction.  The
slave stands in no sort of relation to the objective conditions of his
labor.  It is rather _labor_ itself, both in the form of the slave as of
the serf, which is placed among the other living things [Naturwesen] _as
inorganic condition_ of production, alongside the cattle or as an
appendage of the soil.  In other words: the original conditions of
production appear as natural prerequisites, _natural conditions of
existence of the producer_, just as his living body, however reproduced
and developed by him, is not originally established by himself, but
appears as his _prerequisite_; his own (physical) being is a natural
prerequisite, not established by himself.  These _natural conditions of
existence_, to which he is related as to an inorganic body, have a dual
character: they are (1) subjective and (2) objective.  The producer
occurs as part of a family, tribe, a grouping of his people, etc.  --
which acquires historically differing shapes as the result of mixture
and conflict with others.  It is as such a communal part that he has his
relation to a determined (piece of) nature (let us still call it earth,
land, soil), as his own inorganic being, the conditions of his
production and reproduction.  As the natural part of the community he
participates in the communal property and takes a separate share in his
own possession; just so, as a Roman citizen by birth, he has (at least)
ideally a claim to the ager publicus and a real claim to so and so many
juggera [units] of land, etc.  His _property_ -- i.e., his relation to
the natural prerequisites of his own production as _his own_ -- is
mediated by his natural membership of a community.  (The abstraction of
a community whose members have nothing in common but language, etc., and
barely even that, is plainly the product of much later historical
circumstances.) It is, for instance, evident that the individual is
related to his language as _his own_ only as the natural member of a
human community.  Language as the product of an individual is an
absurdity.  But so also is property.

 Language itself is just as much the product of a community, as in
another respect it is the existence of the community: it is, as it were,
the communal being speaking for itself.  Communal production and
communal ownership, as found, e.g., in Peru, is evidently a _secondary_
form introduced and transmitted by conquering tribes, who amongst
themselves [bei sich selbst] had been familiar with common ownership and
communal production in the older and simpler forms, such as occurs in
India and among the Slavs.  Similarly, the form found, e.g., among the
Celts in Wales appears to have been introduced there by more advanced
conquerors, and thus to be _secondary_.  The completeness and systematic
elaboration of these systems under [the direction of] a supreme
authority demonstrate their later origins.  Just so the feudalism
introduced into England was formally more complete than the feudalism
which had naturally grown up on France.

Among nomadic pastoral tribes -- and all pastoral people are originally
migratory -- the earth, like all other conditions of nature, appears in
its elementary boundlessness, e.g., in the Asian steppes and the Asian
high plateaux.  It is grazed, etc., consumed by the herds, which provide
the nomadic peoples with their subsistence.  They regard it as their
property, though never fixing that property.  This is the case with the
hunting grounds of the wild Indian tribes of America: the tribe
considers a certain region as its hunting territory and maintains it by
force against other tribes, or seeks to expel other tribes from the
territory they claim.  Among the nomadic pastoral tribes the community
is in fact always united, a travelling party, caravan, horde, and the
forms of higher and lower rank develop out of the conditions of this
mode of life.  What is _appropriated_ and _reproduced_ is here only the
herd and not the soil, which is always used in temporary commonality
wherever the tribe breaks its wanderings.

Let us pass on to the consideration of settled peoples.  The only
barrier which the community can encounter in its relation to the natural
conditions of production _as its own_ -- to the land -- is some _other
community_, which has already laid claim to them as its inorganic body.
Was is, therefore, one of the earliest tasks of every primitive
community of this kind, both for the defence of property and for its
acquisition.  (It will be sufficient to speak of original property in
land, for among pastoral peoples property in such natural products of
the earth as, e.g., sheep, is at the same time property in the pastures
they pass through.  In general, property in land includes property in
its organic products.) Where man himself is captured as an organic
accessory of the land and together with it, he is captured as one of the
conditions of production, and this is the origin of slavery and serfdom,
which soon debase and modify the original forms of all communities, and
themselves become their foundation.  As a result, the simple structure
is determined negatively.

 Thus originally _property_ means no more than man's attitude to his
natural conditions of production as belonging to him, as the
_prerequisites of his own existence_; his attitude to them as _natural
prerequisites_ of himself, which constitutes, as it were, a prolongation
of his body.  In fact, he stands in no relation to his conditions of
production, but has a double existence, subjectively as himself and
objectively in these natural inorganic conditions of his being.  The
forms of these natural conditions of production have a double character:
(1) his existence as part of a community, which in its original form is
a tribal community, more or less modified; (2) his relation to the
_land_ as _his own_ [als dem seinigen], in virtue of the community,
communal landed property, at the same time _individual possession_ for
the individual, or in such a manner that the soil and its cultivation
remain in common and only its products are divided.  (However,
_dwellings_ etc., even if no more than the waggons of the Scythians,
nevertheless appear to be always in the possession of individuals.)
Membership of a _naturally evolved society_, a tribe, etc., is a natural
condition of production for the living individual.  Such membership is,
e.g., already a condition of his language, etc.  His own productive
existence is only possible under this condition.  His subjective
existence as such is conditioned by it as much as it is conditioned by
the relationship to the earth as to his laboratory.  (True, property is
originally _mobile_, for in the first instance man takes possession of
the ready-made fruits of the earth, including animals and especially
those capable of domestication.  However, even this situation --
hunting, fishing, pastoralism, subsistence by collecting the fruit of
the trees, etc.  -- always assumes the appropriation of the earth,
whether as a place of fixed settlement or a territory for roaming, a
pasture for his animals, etc.)

 _Property_ therefore means _belonging to a tribe_ (community) (to have
one's subjective/objective existence within it), and by means of the
relationship of this community to the land, to the external primary
condition of production -- for the earth is at the same time raw
material, tool, and fruit -- as the preconditions belonging to his
individuality, as its mode of existence.  We reduce this _property to
the relationship to the conditions of production_.  Why not to those of
consumption, since originally the act of producing by the individual is
confined to the reproduction of his own body through the appropriation
of ready-made objects prepared by nature for consumption? But even where
these have merely to be _found_ and _discovered_, effort, labor -- as in
hunting, fishing, the care of flocks -- and the production (i.e., the
development) of certain capacities by the subject, are soon required.
Moreover, conditions in which man need merely reach for what is already
available, without any tools (i.e., without products of labor already
designed for production), et., are very transitory, and can nowhere be
regarded as normal; not even as normal in the most primitive state.  In
addition, the original conditions of production automatically include
matter directly consumable without labor, such as fruit, animals, etc.;
consequently, the fund of consumption itself appears as a part of the
_original fund of production_.

 The fundamental condition of property based on tribalism (which is
originally formed out of the community) is to be a member of the tribe.
Consequently, a tribe conquered and subjugated by another becomes
_propertyless_ and part of the _inorganic conditions_ of the conquering
tribe's reproduction, which that community regards as its own.  Slavery
and serfdom are therefore simply further developments of property based
on tribalism.  They necessarily modify all its forms.  This they are
least able to do in the Asiatic form.  In the self-sustaining unity of
and agriculture on which this form is based, conquest is not so
essential a condition as where _landed property_, _agriculture_,
predominate exclusively.  On the other hand, since the individual in
this form never becomes an owner but only a possessor, he is at bottom
himself the property, the slave of that which embodies the unity of the
community.  Here slavery neither puts an end to the conditions of labor,
nor does it modify the essential relationship.

 It is, therefore, now evident that:

 Insofar as property is merely a conscious attitude to the conditions of
production as to _one's own_ -- an attitude established by the community
for the individual, proclaimed and guaranteed as law; insofar as the
existence of the producer therefore appears as an existence within the
objective conditions _belonging to him_, it is realized only through
production.  Actual appropriation takes place not through the
relationship to these conditions as expressed in thought, but through
the active, real relationship to them; in the process of positing them
as the conditions of man's subjective activity.

 But this also clearly means that _these conditions change_.  What makes
a region of the earth into a hunting ground, is being hunted over by
tribes; what turns the soil into a prolongation of the body of the
individual is agriculture.  Once the _city of Rome_ had been built and
its surrounding land cultivated by its citizens, the conditions of the
community were different from what they had been before.  The object of
all these communities is preservation -- i.e., the production of the
individuals which constitute them as proprietors, i.e., in the same
objective mode of existence, which also forms the relationship of the
members to each other, and therefore forms the community itself.  But
this reproduction is at the same time necessarily new production and the
destruction of the old form.

For instance, where each individual is supposed to possess so many acres
of land, the mere increase in population constitutes an obstacle.  If
this is to be overcome, colonization will develop and this necessitates
wars of conquest.  This leads to slavery, etc., also, e.g., the
enlargement of the ager publicus, and hence to the rise of the
Patricians, who represent the community, etc.  Thus the reservation of
the ancient community implies the destruction of the conditions upon
which it rests, and turns into its opposite.  Suppose, for instance,
that productivity could be increased without increase in territory, by
means of a development of the forces of production (which in
agriculture, a most traditional occupation, are the slowest of all).
This would imply new methods and combinations of labor, the high
proportion of the day which would then have to be devoted to
agriculture, etc., and once again the old economic conditions of the
community would cease to operate.  The act of reproduction itself
changes not only the objective conditions -- e.g., transforming village
into town, the wilderness into agricultural clearings, etc.  -- but the
producers change with it, by the emergence of new qualities, by
transforming and developing themselves in production, forming new powers
and new conceptions, new modes of intercourse, new needs, and new
speech.

The more traditional the mode of production itself, i.e., the more the
_real process_ of appropriation remains the same, the more unchanging
will the ancient forms of property be and therefore also the community
as a whole.  (Note that the traditional mode persists for a long time in
agriculture and even longer in the oriental combination of agriculture
and manufacture.) Where the members of the community have already
acquired separate existence as private proprietors from their collective
existence as an urban community and owners of the urban territory,
conditions already arise which allow the individual to _lose_ his
property -- i.e., the double relationship which makes him both a citizen
with equal status, a member of the community, and a _proprietor_.  In
the central form this _loss_ is hardly possible, except as a result of
entirely external influences, for the individual member of the community
never establishes so independent a relation to it as to enable him to
lose his (objective, economic) tie with it.  He is firmly rooted.  This
is also an aspect of the union of manufacture and agriculture, of town
(in this instance the village) and country.  Among the ancients,
manufacture already appears as corruption (fit business for freedmen,
clients, and foreigners), etc.  Productive labor is freed from its pure
subordination to agriculture, where it is the domestic labor of free
persons, destined only for the purpose of farming, and war or religious
observance and communal tasks such as the construction of houses, roads,
or temples.  This development, which necessarily arises from intercourse
with foreigners, from slaves, the desire to exchange the surplus
product, etc., dissolves the mode of production upon which the community
rests, and with it the _objectively individual man_ -- i.e., the
individual determined as a Greek, a Roman, etc.  Exchange has the same
effect, and so has indebtedness, etc.

 We have an original unity between a specific form of community or
tribal unit and the property in nature connected with it, or the
relation to the objective conditions of production as naturally
existing, as the objective being of the individual by means of the
community.  Now this unity, which in one sense appears as the particular
form of property, has its living reality in a specific _mode of
production_ itself, and this mode appears equally as the relationship of
the individuals to one another and as their specific daily behavior
towards inorganic nature, their specific mode of labor (which is always
family labor and often communal labor).  The community itself appears as
the first great force of production; special kinds of conditions of
production (e.g., animal husbandry, agriculture) lead to the evolution
of a special mode of production and special forces of production, both
objective and subjective, the latter appearing as qualities of the
individuals.

 In the last instance, the community and the property resting upon it
can be reduced to a specific stage in the development of the forces of
production of the laboring subjects -- to which correspond specific
relations of these subjects with each other and with nature.  Up to a
certain point, reproduction.  Thereafter, it turns into dissolution.

 _Property_ -- and this applies to its Asiatic, Slavonic ancient
classical and Germanic forms -- therefore originally signifies a
relation of the working (producing) subject (or a subject reproducing
himself) to the conditions of his production or reproduction as his own.
Hence, according to the conditions of production, property will take
different forms.  The object of production itself is to reproduce the
producer in and together with these objective conditions of his
existence.  This behavior as a proprietor -- which is not the result but
the precondition of labor, i.e., of production -- assumes a specific
existence of the individual as part of a tribal or communal entity
(whose property he is himself up to a certain point).  Slavery, serfdom,
etc., where the laborer himself appears among the natural conditions of
production for a third individual or community -- and where property
therefore is no longer the relationship of the independently laboring
individual to the objective conditions of labor -- is always secondary,
never primary, although it is the necessary and logical result of
property founded upon the community and upon labor in the community.
(This character of slavery does _not_ apply to the general slavery of
the orient, which is so considered _only_ from the European point of
view.)

It is of course easy to imagine a powerful, physically superior person,
who first captures animals and them captures men in order to make them
catch animals for him; in brief, one who uses man as a naturally
occurring condition for his reproduction like any other living natural
thing; his own labor being exhausted in the act of domination.  But such
a view is stupid, though it may be correct from the point of view of a
given tribal or communal entity; for it takes the _isolated_ man as its
starting-point.  But man is only individualized through the process of
history.  He originally appears as a _generic being, a tribal being, a
herd animal_ -- though by no means as a "political animal" in the
political sense.  Exchange itself is a major agent of this
individualization.  It makes the herd animal superfluous and dissolves
it.  Once the situation is such, that man as an isolated person has
relation only to himself, the means of establishing himself as an
isolated individual have become what gives him his general communal
character [sein Sich-Allgemein-und-Gemeinmachen].  In such a community,
the objective existence of the individual as a proprietor -- say a
landed proprietor -- is presupposed, though he is a proprietor under
certain conditions which chain him to the community, or rather
constitute a link in his chain.  In bourgeois society, e.g., the worker
exists purely subjectively, without object; but the thing which
_confronts_ him has now become the _true common entity_ which he seeks
to devour and which devours him.

 All the forms in which the community imputes to the subjects a specific
objective unity with the conditions of their production, or in which a
specific subjective existence imputes the community itself as condition
of production, necessarily correspond only to a development of the
forces of production which is limited both in fact and in principle.
(These forms are of course more or less naturally evolved, but at the
same time also the results of a historic process.) The evolution of the
forces of production dissolves them, and their dissolution is itself an
evolution of the human forces of production.  Labor is initially
undertaken on a certain basis -- first primitive -- then historical.
[Es wird erst gearbeitet von gewisser Grundlage aus -- erst naturwuchsig
-- dann historische Voraussetzung_.  The sentence is elliptic and open
to various possible interpretations.] Later, however, this basis or
presupposition is itself cancelled, or tends to disappear, having become
too narrow for the development of the progressive human horde.

 Insofar as the landed property of classical antiquity reappears in
modern allotment property, it belongs to political economy and we shall
deal with it in the section on landed property.

 (All this is to be analyzed again more deeply and in greater detail
later.)

 What we are concerned with here is this: the relationship of labor to
capital or to the objective conditions of labor as capital, presupposes
a historical process which dissolves the different forms, in which the
laborer is an owner and the owner labors.  This means first and
foremost:

(1) a _dissolution_ of the relation to the earth -- to land or soil --
    as a natural condition of production which man treats as his own
    inorganic being, the laboratory of his forces and the domain of his
    will.  All forms in which this property is found, assume a _communal
    entity_ whose members, whatever the formal distinctions between
    them, are _proprietors_ by virtue of being its members.  Hence, the
    original form of this property is _direct communal property_ (the
    _oriental form_, modified among the Slavs; developed to the point of
    contradictions in classical antiquity and Germanic property, though
    still the hidden, if antagonistic, foundation).

(2) _Dissolution of the relations_ in which man appears as the
    _proprietor of the instrument_.  As the above form of landed
    property assumes a _real community_, so this ownership of the tool
    by the laborer assumes a particular form of development of
    manufacture -- namely, in the form of _handicraft labor_.  Gild and
    corporative institutions are bound up with this.  (The manufacturing
    activities of the ancient orient may be included under our heading
    (1) above.) here, labor itself is still half the expression of
    artistic creation, half its own reward, etc.  [Hier die Arbeit
    selbst noch halb kunstlerisch, halb Selbstzweck.] The institution of
    the "master craftsman".  The capitalist himself still a master
    craftsman.  Special craft skill itself ensures the ownership of the
    instrument, etc., etc.  In a sense, the mode of labor becomes
    hereditary together with the organization of labor and its
    instrument.  Medieval town life.  Labor still belongs to a man; a
    certain self-sufficient development of specialized [einseitige]
    capacities, etc.

(3) Included in both is the fact that man possesses means of consumption
    prior to production, necessary in order to enable him to keep alive
    as producer -- i.e., in the course of production, _before_ its
    completion.  As a landowner, he appears to be directly provided with
    the necessary fund for consumption.  As a master artisan, he had
    inherited, earned or saved this fund, and as a youngster, he is
    still an _apprentice_, he does not yet appear as an independent
    worker in the strict sense, but shared the master's food in the
    patriarchal manner.  As a (genuine) journeyman, there is a certain
    common utilization of the fund of consumption which is in the
    master's possession.  Though this is not the journeyman's
    _property_, the laws and customs, etc., of the gild at least make
    him into a co-possessor.  (This point to be elaborated.)

(4) On the other hand, _dissolution_ both of the relations under which
    the _laborers themselves_, the _living units of labor power_ are
    still a _direct part of the objective conditions of production_ and
    are appropriated as such -- and are therefore slaves or serfs.  For
    capital, the worker does not constitute a condition of production,
    but only labor.  If this can be performed by machinery, or even by
    water or air, so much the better.  And what capital appropriates is
    not the laborer, but his labor -- and not directly, but by means of
    exchange.

 These, then, on the one hand, are historic prerequisites without which
the laborer cannot occur as free laborer, as objectiveless, purely
subjective capacity for laboring, confronting the objective conditions
of production as his _non-property_, as _someone else's property_, as
_value_ existing for itself, as capital.  On the other hand, we must now
ask what conditions are necessary if he is to confront _capital_.


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                                Karl Marx
                   PRE-CAPITALIST ECONOMIC FORMATIONS

                                 1857-58

                           this etext based on
                  Jack Cohen's 1964 English translation


          As these note were not intended for publication, rather
          Marx's self-clarification, no care was given to the
          construction of paragraphs.  Rather than leave such
          interminable paragraphs intact -- and which are even
          harder to read on a computer screen -- they have been
          broken up.  They can be reassembled as follows --
          consider a one-space indent a Marx paragraph, all
          others soft paragraphs.


                                   II


 The formula "capital", in which living labor stands in the relation of
non-property to raw material, instrument and the means of subsistence
required during the period of production, implies in the first instance
_non-property in land_ -- i.e., the absence of a state in which the
working individual regards the land, the soil, as his own and labor as
its proprietor.  In the most favorable case, he stands both in relation
of landowner to himself in his capacity as a laboring subject.
Potentially, the ownership of land includes both property in raw
materials, and in the original instrument of labor, the soil, as well as
in its spontaneous fruits.  In the most original form, this means that
the individual regards the soil as belonging to him, and finds in it raw
material, instrument, and means of subsistence not created by labor but
by earth itself.  Once this relationship is reproduced, then secondary
instruments and fruits of the earth produced by labor immediately appear
included in the primitive form of landownership.  It is this historic
situation which is in the first instance negated by the more complete
property-relationship involved in the relation of the worker to the
conditions of labor as capital.  This is historic situation No.  1 which
is negated in the new relationship, or assumed to have been dissolved by
history.

A second historical step is implied in _property in the instrument_ --
i.e., in the relation of the laborer to the instruments as to his own,
in which he labors as the owner of the instrument (which assumes that
the instrument is subsumed in his individual labor, i.e., which assumes
a special and limited phase of development of the productive force of
labor).  We are considering a situation in which the laborer not only
owns the instrument, but in which this form of the _laborer as
proprietor_ or of the _laboring proprietor_ is already distinct and
separate from _landed property_, and not, as in the first case, an
accident of landed property and subsumed under it: in other words, the
artisan and urban development of labor.  Hence, also, we here find raw
material and means of subsistence _mediated_ as the property of the
artisan, mediated through his craft, through his property in the
instrument.  This second historic step now exists distinct and separate
from the first, which in turn will appear considerably modified by the
mere fact that _this second type of property_ or of _working proprietor_
has established its independent existence.

Since the instrument itself is already the product of labor -- i.e., the
element which constitutes property is already established by labor --
the community can here no longer appear, as it can in the first case, in
its primitive form.  The community on which this form of property is
based already appears as something produced, secondary, something which
has come into being, a community produced by the laborer himself.  It is
clear that where ownership of the instrument is the relationship to the
conditions of labor as property, in actual labor the instrument appears
merely as _a means_ of individual labor, and the art of really
appropriating the instrument, to employ it as a means of labor, appears
as a special skill of the laborer, which makes him the owner of his
tools.  In short, the essential character character of gild or
corporative systems (artisan labor as its subject and the constituent
element of ownership) is analyzable in terms of a relation to the
instrument of production: the tool as property.  This differs from the
relations to the earth, tot he land as one's own, which is rather that
of the raw material as property.  In this historic state No.2 property
is thus constituted by the laboring subject's relation to this single
element of the conditions of production, which makes him into a laboring
proprietor; and this state may exist only as contradiction of state
No.1, or, if you like, as supplementary to a modified state No.1.  The
first formula of capital negates this historic state also.

There is a third _possible form_ which is to act as proprietor neither
of the land nor of the instrument (i.e., nor of labor itself), but only
of the means of subsistence, which are then found as the natural
condition of the laboring subject.  This is at bottom the formula of
slavery and serfdom, which is also negated, or assumed to have been
historically dissolved, in the relation of the worker to the conditions
of production as capital.

The primitive forms of property necessarily dissolve into the relation
of property to the different objective elements conditioning production;
they are the economic basis of different forms of community, and in turn
presuppose forms of community.  These forms are significantly modified
once labor itself is placed among the _objective conditions of
production_ (as in slavery and serfdom), as a result of which the simple
affirmative character of all forms of property embraced in No.1 is lost
and modified.  All of these include potential slavery, and therefore
their own abolition.  So far as No.2 is concerned, in which the
particular kind of labor -- i.e., its craft mastery and consequently
property in the instrument of labor -- equals property in the conditions
of production, this admittedly excludes slavery and serfdom.  However,
it may lead to an analogous negative development in the form of a caste
system.

The third form, of property in the means of subsistence, cannot contain
any relationship of the _laboring_ individual to the conditions of
production, and therefore of existence, unless it is dissolved into
slavery and serfdom.  It can only be the relation of the member of the
primitive community founded upon landed property, who happens to have
lost his ownership of land without as yet having advanced to property
No.2, as in the case of the Roman plebs at the time of "bread and
circuses" [that is, of a propertyless mass living on a public dole].
The relation of retainers to their lords, or that of personal service,
is essentially different.  For it (personal service) forms at bottom
merely the mode of existence of the landowner, who no longer labors
himself, but whose property includes the laborers themselves as serfs,
etc., among the conditions of production.  What we have here as an
essential relation of appropriation is the _relationship of domination_.
Appropriation can create no such relation to animal, the soil, etc.,
even though the animal serves its master.  The appropriation of
another's _will_ is presupposed in the relationship of domination.
Beings without will, like animals, may indeed render services, but their
owner is not thereby _lord and master_.  However, what we see here is,
how the _relations of domination and servitude_ also enter into this
formula of the appropriation of the instruments of production; and they
constitute a necessary ferment of the development and decay of all
primitive relations of property and production.  At the same time, they
express their limitations.  To be sure, they are also reproduced in
capital, though in an indirect (mediated) form, and hence they also
constitute a ferment in its dissolution, and are the emblems of its
limitations.

      "The right to sell oneself and one's dependence in times of
     distress, was unfortunately general; it prevailed both in the
     North, among the Greeks and in Asia.  The right of the creditor to
     take the defaulting debtor into servitude, and to redeem the debt
     either by his labor or by the sale of his person, was almost
     equally widespread."
                                                       (Neibuhr, I, 600)

[In another passage, Niebuhr explains the difficulties and
misunderstandings of Greek writers of the Augustan period over the
relationship between Patricians and Plebians and their confusion of this
relationship with that between Patrons and Clients, as being due to the
fact that

     "they were writing at a time when rich and poor constituted the
     only real classes of citizens; where the man in need, no matter how
     noble his origins, required a Patron and the millionaire, even
     though only a freedman, was sough after as a Patron.  They could
     find scarcely a trace of inherited relations of attachment".
     (I.620)]

     "Artisans were to be found in both classes (resident aliens and
     freedmen together with their descendants), and plebians who
     abandoned agriculture passed into the limited citizen status
     enjoyed by these.  Nor did they lack the honor of legally
     recognized gilds, and these were so highly respected that Numa was
     supposed to have been their founder.  There were nine such gilds;
     pipers, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, harness-makers, tanners,
     saddlers, coppersmiths, and potters, the ninth corporation
     embracing the rest of the crafts....  Those among them were
     independent citizens, or who enjoyed a status equivalent to
     citizenship, independent of any patron (supposing such status was
     recognized); or those who were descendants of dependent men whose
     bond had lapsed with the extinction of their patrons' families:
     these undoubtedly remained as remote from the quarrels of ancient
     citizens and the commons [der Gemeinde] as the Florentine gilds
     remained outside the feuds of the Guelf and Ghibelline families.
     It is probable that the population in servitude were still as a
     whole at the disposal of the patricians." (I,623)

 On the one hand, we presuppose historical processes which transform a
mass of individuals of a nation, if not perhaps immediately into genuine
free laborers, then at any rate into potential free laborers, whose
property is their labor-power and the possibility of exchanging it for
the existing values.  Such individuals confront all objective conditions
of production as _alien property_, as their own _non-property_, but at
the same time as something which can be exchanged as _values_ and
therefore to some extent appropriated by living labor.

Such historic processes of dissolution are the following:

-- the dissolution of the servile relationship which binds the laborer
to the soil, and to the lord of the soil, but in fact assumes his
property in the means of subsistence (which amounts in truth to his
reparation from the soil);

-- the dissolution of relations of property which constitute a laborer
as yeoman, or free, working, petty landowner or tenant (colonus), or
free peasant [note by Marx: We take for granted the dissolution of the
even more ancient forms of communal property and real community];

-- the dissolution of gild relations which presuppose the laborer's
property in the instrument of production and labor itself, as a certain
form of craft skill [handwerksmassig bestimmte Geschicklichkeit] not
merely as the source of property but as property itself;

-- also the dissolution of the relation of clientship in its different
types, in which _non-proprietors_ appear as co-consumers of the surplus
produce in the retinue of their lord, and in return wear his livery,
take part in his feuds, perform real or imaginary acts of personal
service, etc.

Closer analysis will show that what is dissolved in all these processes
of dissolution are relations of production in which use-value
predominates; production for immediate use.  Exchange-value and its
production presuppose the predominance of the other form.  Thus in all
the above circumstances, deliveries in kind and labor services
[Naturaldienste] predominate over money payments and services
remunerated by money.  But this is only incidental [or this could be
translated as "But this observation is by the way"].  Again, closer
examination will also reveal that all the dissolved relations were
rendered possible only by a certain degree of development of the
material (and therefore also of the mental) productive forces.

 What concerns us at this point is the following.  The process of
dissolution which turns a mass of individuals in a nation, etc., into
potential free wage-laborers -- individuals obliged merely by their lack
of property to labor and to sell their labor -- does _not_ presuppose
the _disappearance_ of the previous sources of income or (in part) of
the previous conditions of property of these individuals.  On the
contrary, it assumes that _only_ their use has been altered, that their
mode of existence has been transformed, that they have passed into other
people's hands as a _free fund_, or perhaps that they have partly
remained in _the same hands_.  But this much is evident.  The process
which has in one way or another separated a mass of individuals from its
previous affirmative relations to the _objective conditions of labor_,
which negated these relations and thereby transformed these individuals
into _free laborers_, is also the same process which has liberated these
_objective conditions of labor_ potentially from _their previous ties_
to the individuals which are now separated from them.  (These conditions
of labor comprise land, raw material, means of subsistence, instruments
of labor, money or all of these.) They are still _present_, but present
in a different form, as a _free fund_, one in which all the old
political, etc., relations are obliterated, and which now confront those
separated, propertyless individuals merely in the form of _values_, of
values maintaining themselves and each other [an sich festhaltenden
Werten].  The same process which counterposes the masses of free
laborers to the _objective conditions of labor_, has also counterposed
these conditions to them as _capital_.  The historic process was one of
the separation of hitherto combined elements; its results is therefore
not the disappearance of one of these elements, but a situation in which
each of them appears negatively related to the other: the (potentially)
free laborer on one hand, (potential) capital on the other.  The
separation of the objective conditions from the classes which are now
transformed into free laborers, must equally appear at the opposite pole
as the establishment of independence by these very conditions.

 Let us consider the relationship of capital and wage labor not as
something which has already reached decisive importance, and encroaches
on production as a whole (Marx note: For in this case capital,
presupposed as the condition of wage-labor, is the product of labor, and
established as condition by labor itself, created by labor as its own
presupposition), but as something which is still in the process of
historical formation.  We consider the original transformation of money
into capital, the process of exchange between capital existing only
potentially on one hand, and the free laborers existing potentially on
the other.  We then find ourselves naturally making the simple
observation, with which the economists make great play -- namely, that
the side which appears as capital must possess raw materials, tools, and
food enough to enable the worker to live before production is completed.
Moreover, it would appear that accumulation -- an accumulation prior to
labor and not arising from labor -- must have taken place on the part of
the capitalist, which enables him to set the laborer to work and to
maintain him in activity, as living labor power.

(Marx note: Once capital and wage labor have been established as their
own prerequisites, i.e., as a base presupposed for production, the
following state of affairs appears to exist: In the first instance, it
seems that the capitalist must possess not only a fund of raw materials
and means of subsistence sufficient for the laborer to reproduce
himself, to produce the necessary means of subsistence, to realize
_necessary labor_; but also a fund of raw material and instruments of
production, by means of which the laborer realizes his surplus labor,
i.e., the capitalist's profit.  Further analysis will reveal that the
laborer is constantly creating a double fund for the capitalist, or in
the form of capital.  One part of this fund constantly fulfils the
conditions of his own existence, the other part, the conditions of
existence of capital.  As we have seen, surplus capital -- and surplus
capital in its relation to its prehistoric relation to labor -- includes
the _appropriation_ of all _real, present capital_, and of each element
of such capital, which is appropriated uniformly as _alien labor_
transformed into an object and appropriated by capital, without
exchange, without the transfer of an equivalent for it.)

This action of capital, which is independent and not established by
labor, is then transferred from this history of its origin into the
present, and transformed into a factor of its reality and effectiveness,
of its self-creation [Selbstformation].  Finally, the eternal right of
capital to the fruit of other men's labor is derived from this state of
affairs, or rather what happens is, that the mode of acquisition of
capital is derived from the simple and "just" laws of the exchange of
equivalents.

 Wealth occurring in the form of money can only be realized against the
objective conditions of labor, because and if these have been separated
from labor itself.  We have seen that money can in part be accumulated
by the sheer exchange of equivalents; however, this is so insignificant
a source that it is not worth mention historically -- assuming, that is,
that we suppose this money to have been earned by the exchange of one's
own labor.  It is rather money accumulated by usury -- especially usury
on landed property -- and mobile (monetary) wealth accumulated through
mercantile profits, that turns into capital in the strictest sense, into
industrial capital.  We will have occassion to deal with both forms
below -- that is, insofar as they themselves appear not as forms of
capital but as prior forms of wealth which are the prerequisites for
capital.

 As we have seen, the concept -- the origin -- of capital implies
_money_ as its starting point, and therefore it implies a derivation
from circulation; capital appears as the _product_ of circulation.
Capital formation does not therefore arise from landed property (though
it might arise from the agricultural tenant insofar as he is also a
trader in farm products), nor from the gild (though this provides a
possibility) but from mercantile and usurious wealth.  But the merchant
and usurer only encounter the conditions which permit the purchase of
free labor, once free labor has been detached from the objective
conditions of its existence as a result of a historical process.  At
this point, it also becomes possible to buy these _conditions_
themselves.  Under gild conditions, for instance, mere money (unless it
is the money of gild masters) cannot purchase looms in order to put men
to work on them; there are regulations determining how many looms a man
may employ, etc.  In short, the instrument of labor is still so
intimately merged with living labor, appearing as the domain of living
labor, that is does not truly circulate.  What enable monetary wealth to
run into capital is, on the one hand, that it finds free laborers, and
on the other hand, it finds means of subsistence, materials, etc., which
would otherwise be in one form or another the _property_ of the now
objectiveless masses, and are also _free_ and available for sale.

However, the other condition of labor -- a certain craft skill, the
existence of the instrument as a means of labor, etc.  -- is found
_ready to hand_ by capital in this preparatory or first period of
capital.  This is partly the result of the urban gild system, partly of
domestic industry, or such industry as exists as an accessory to
agriculture.  The historic process is not the result of capital, but its
prerequisite.  By means of this process, the capitalist then inserts
himself as a (historical) middleman between landed property and labor.
History ignores the sentimental illusions about capitalist and laborer
forming an association, etc.; nor is there a trace of such illusions in
the development of the concept of capital.  Sporadically, _manufacture_
may develop locally in a framework belonging to quite a different
period, as in the Italian cities _side by side_ with the gilds.  But if
capital is to be the generally dominant form of an epoch, its conditions
must be developed not merely locally, but on a large scale.  (This is
compatible with the possibility that during the dissolution of the gilds
individual gild-masters may turn into industrial capitalists; however,
in the nature of the phenomenon, this happens rarely.  All in all, the
entire gild system -- both master and journeyman -- dies out, where the
capitalist and laborer emerge.)

 However, it is evident, and borne out by closer analysis of the
historic epoch which we are now discussing, that the _age of
dissolution_ of the earlier modes of production and relations of the
worker to the objective conditions of labor, is _simultaneously an age_
in which _monetary wealth_ has already developed to a certain extent,
and also one in which it is rapidly growing and expanding, by means of
the circumstances which accelerate this dissolution.  Just as it is
itself an agent of that dissolution, so that dissolution is the
condition of its transformation into capital.  But the _mere existence
of monetary wealth_, even its conquest of a sort of supremacy, is not
sufficient for this _dissolution to result in capital_.  If it were,
then ancient Rome, Byzantium, etc., would have concluded their history
with free labor and capital, or rather, would have entered upon a new
history.  There the dissolution of the old relations of property was
also tied to the development of monetary wealth -- of commerce, etc.
However, in fact the result of this dissolution was not industry, but
the domination of countryside over city.

The _original formations of capital_ does not, as is often supposed,
proceed by the _accumulation_ of food, tools, raw materials or in short,
of the _objective_ conditions of labor detached from the soil and
already fused with human labor.

[Marx note: Nothing is more obviously and superficially circular than
the reasoning which argues (a) that the _workers_ who must be employed
by capital if capital is to exist as such, must first be _created_ and
called into life by _its_ accumulation (waiting, as it were, on its "Let
there be labor"); while (b) capital could not accumulate without alien
labor, except perhaps its own labor.  I.e., that capital might itself
exist in the form of _non-capital_ and _non-money_, for prior to the
existence of capital, labor can only realize its value in the form of
handicraft work, of petty agriculture, etc.; in short, of forms, all of
which permit little or _no accumulation_, allow for only a small surplus
produce, and _consume_ the greater part of that.  We shall have to
return to the concept of "accumulation" later.]

Not by means of capital creating the objective conditions of labor.  Its
_original formation_ occurs simply because the historic process of the
dissolution of an old mode of production, allows value, existing in the
form of _monetary wealth_ to _buy_ the objective conditions of labor on
one hand, to exchange the _living_ labor o the now free workers for
money, on the other.  All these elements are already in existence.  What
separates them out is a historical process, a process of dissolution, nd
it is _this_ which enables money to turn into _capital_.  Insofar as
money itself plays a part here, it is only to the extent that it is
itself an extremely powerful agent of dissolution which intervenes in
the process, and hence contributes to the creation of the _plucked_,
objectiveless, _free laborers_.  It is certainly not by _creating_ the
objective conditions of such laborers' existence, but rather by
accelerating their separation from them -- i.e., by accelerating their
loss of property.

For instance, when the great English landowners dismissed their
retainers, who had consumed a share of their surplus produce of their
land; when their farmers drove out the small cottagers, etc., then a
doubly free mass of living labor power was thrown on to the _labor
market_: free from the old relation of clientship, villeinage, or
service, but also free from all goods or chattels, from every real and
objective form of existence, _free from all property_.  Such a mass
would be reduced either to the sale of its labor power or to beggary,
vagabondage, or robbery as its only source of income.  History records
the fact that it first tried beggary, vagabondage, and crime, but was
herded off this road on to the narrow path which led to the labor market
by means of the gallows, pillory, and whip.  (Hence the _governments_ of
Henry VII, VIII, etc., also appear as conditions of the historic process
of dissolution and as creators of the conditions for the existence of
capital.) Conversely, the means of subsistence formerly consumed by the
lords and their retainers, were now available for purchase by money, and
money wished to purchase them in order through their instrumentality to
purchase labor.  Money had neither created nor accumulated these means
of subsistence.  They were already present, consumed, and reproduced,
before they were consumed and reproduced through the intervention of
money.  The only change was that these means of production were now
thrown on to the _exchange-market_.  They had now been detached from
their immediate connection with the mouths of the retainers, etc., and
transformed from use-values into exchange-values, thus falling under the
government and sovereignty of monetary wealth.  The same applies to the
instruments of labor.  Monetary wealth neither invented nor manufactured
spinning wheel and loom.  But once spinners and weavers had been
separated from their land, they and their wheels and looms came under
the sway of monetary wealth, etc.

_Capital unites the masses of hands and instruments which are already
there.  This and only this is what characterizes it.  It brings them
together under its sway._

This is its _real accumulation_; the accumulation of laborers plus their
instruments at given points.  We shall have to go into this more deeply
when we come to the so-called accumulation of capital.

Admittedly, monetary wealth in the form of merchants' wealth had helped
to accelerate and dissolve the old relations of production, and had,
e.g., enabled the landowner to exchange his corn, cattle, etc., for
imported use-values, instead of squandering his own production with his
retainers, whose number, indeed, was to a large extent taken as the
measure of his wealth.  (This point has already been neatly made by A.
Smith.) Monetary wealth had given greater significance to the
exchange-value of his retinue.  This was also true of his tenants, who
were already semi-capitalists, though in a rather disguised manner.  The
evolution of exchange-value is favored by the existence of _money_ in
the form of a social order of merchants.  It dissolves a production
whose object is primarily immediate use-value, and the forms of property
which correspond to such production -- the relations of labor to its
objective conditions -- thus giving an impetus to the creation of a
_labor market_ (not to be confused with a slave market).  However, even
this effect of money is possible only if we presuppose the existence of
_urban craft activity_, which rests _not_ on capital and wage-labor, but
on the organization of labor in gilds, etc.  Urban labor itself had
created the means of production, for which the gilds became as great an
embarrassment as were the old relations of landed property in an
improved agriculture, which was in turn partly the consequence of the
greater sale of agricultural products to the cities, etc.

Other circumstances assisted the dissolution of the old relations of
production, accelerated the separation of the laborer or the non-laborer
capable of work, from the objective conditions of his reproduction, and
thus advanced the transformation of money into capital.  Such were,
e.g., the factors which in the 16th century increased the mass of
commodities in circulation, the mass of currency in circulation,
creating new needs and consequently raising the exchange value of native
products, raising prices, etc.  Nothing can therefore be more foolish
than to conceive the _original formation_ of capital as if it meant the
accumulation and creation of the _objective conditions of production_ --
food, raw materials, instruments -- which were then offered to the
_dispossessed_ workers.  What happened was rather that monetary wealth
partly helped to detach the labor power of the individuals capable of
work from these conditions.  The rest of this process of separation
proceeded without the intervention of monetary wealth.  Once the
original formation of capital had reached a certain level, monetary
wealth could insert itself as an intermediary between the objective
conditions of life, now "liberated" and the equally liberated, but now
also _unfettered and footloose_, living labor powers, buying the one
with the other.  As to the _formation of monetary wealth_ itself, before
its transformation into capital: this belongs to the prehistory of the
bourgeois economy.  Usury, trade, the cities and government finance
which arise with them, play the chief parts in it.  Also _hoarding_ by
tenant farmers, peasants, etc., though to a smaller extent.

Trade is everywhere the intermediary for exchange value, or
alternatively, the transfer of exchange value can be described as trade
-- for just as circulation acquires an independent existence in
commerce, so does money in the social stratum of the merchants.  We may
see that the development of exchange and exchange-value brings about
both the dissolution of labor's relations of property in its conditions
of existence and also of labor as something which is itself part of the
objective conditions of production.  All these are relations which
express both a predominance of use-value and of production directed
towards immediate consumption, and also the predominance of a real
community which is still present as an immediate prerequisite of
production.  Production based on exchange-value and a community based on
the exchange of these exchange-values, and labor as the general
condition of wealth, all presuppose and produce the separation of labor
from its objective conditions.  Though, as we saw in the last chapter on
money, production for exchange and community based on exchange may
appear to posit property as deriving solely from _labor_, and private
property in the production of one's labor as a precondition, this
appearance is deceptive.  The exchange of equivalents occurs (but it is
merely) the surface layer of a production which rests on the
appropriation of other people's labor _without exchange_, but under the
_guise of exchange_.  This system of exchange has _capital_ as its
basis.  If we consider it in isolation from capital, as it appears on
the surface, as an _independent_ system, this is mere _illusion_, though
a _necessary illusion_.  It is therefore no longer surprising to find
that the system of exchange-values -- the exchange of equivalents
measured in labor -- turns into the _appropriation of other people's
labor without exchange_, the total separation of labor and property, or
rather that it reveals this appropriation as its concealed background.
For the rule of exchange-values, and of production producing
exchange-values, _presupposes_ alien labor power as itself an
exchange-value.  I.e., it presupposes the separation of living labor
power from its objective conditions; a relationship to these -- or to
its own objectivity -- as someone else's property; in a word, a relation
to them as _capital_.

The golden age of labor emancipating itself occurred only in those
periods when feudalism was in decay, but still engaged in internecine
conflict -- as in England in the 14th and the first-half of the 15th
centuries.  If labor is once again to be related to its objective
conditions as to its property, another system must replace that of
private exchange, for as we have seen private exchange assumes the
exchange of labor transformed into objects against labor-power, and
thereby the appropriation of living labor without exchange.

Historically, money is often transformed into capital in quite simple
and obvious ways.  Thus, the merchant sets to work a number of spinners
and weavers, who formerly engaged in these activities as subsidiary
occupations to their agricultural work, and turns a subsidiary
occupation into a principal one, after which he has them under his
control and sway as wage-laborers.  The next step is to remove them from
their homes and to assemble them in a single house if labor.  In this
simple process, it is evident that the merchant has prepared neither raw
materials nor instruments nor means of subsistence for the weaver or the
spinner.  All he has done is gradually to confine them to one sort of
labor, in which they are dependent on the _buyer_, the _merchant_, and
thus eventually find themselves producing solely _for_ and _by means of_
him.  Originally, he has bought their labor merely by the purchase of
their product.  As soon as they confine themselves to the production of
this exchange-value, and are therefore obliged to produce immediate
_exchange-values_, and to exchange their labor entirely for money in
order to go on living, they come under his domination.  Finally, even
the illusion of _selling_ him their products, disappears.  He purchases
their labor and takes away first their property in the product, soon
also their ownership of the instrument, unless he allows them the
_illusions of ownership_ in order to diminish his costs of production.

The original historical forms in which capital appears at first
sporadically or _locally, side by side_ with the old modes of
production, but gradually bursting them asunder, make up _manufacture_
in the proper sense of the word (not yet the factory).  This arises,
where there is mass-production for export -- hence on the basis of
large-scale maritime and overland trade, and in the centres of such
trade, as in the Italian cities, Constantinople, the Flemish, Dutch
cities, some Spanish ones such as Barcelona, etc.  Manufacture does not
initially capture the so-called urban crafts, but the rural subsidiary
occupations, spinning and weaving, the sort of work which least requires
craft skill, technical training.  Apart from those great emporia, in
which it finds the basis of an _export_ market, and where production is,
as it were _by its spontaneous nature_, directed towards exchange-value
-- i.e., manufactures directly connected with shipping, including
shipbuilding itself, etc.  The rural subsidiary occupations contain the
broad basis of manufactures, whereas a high degree of progress in
production is required in order to carry on the urban crafts as factory
industries.  Such branches of production as glassworks, metal factories,
sawmills, etc., which from the start demand a greater concentration of
labor-power, utilize more natural power, and demand both mass-production
and a concentration of the means of production, etc.: these also lend
themselves to manufacture.  Similarly, paper mills, etc.

The other aspect of this process is the appearance of the tenant farmer
and the transformation of the agricultural population into free
day-laborers.  Though the last place where this transformation triumphs
in its purest and most logical forms, is the countryside, some of its
earliest developments occur there.  Hence the ancients, who never
advanced beyond specifically urban craft kill and application, were
never able to achieve large-scale industry.  For its first prerequisite
is the involvement of the entire countryside in the production, not of
use-values, but of exchange values.  Glassworks, papermills, ironworks,
etc., cannot be conducted on gild principles.  They require
mass-production, sales to a general market, _monetary wealth_ on the
part of the entrepreneur.  Not that he creates the subjective or
objective conditions; but under the old relations of property and
production these conditions cannot be brought together.  (After this,
the dissolution of the relations of serfdom and the rise of manufacture
gradually transform all branches of production into branches operated by
capital.) However, the towns themselves contain an element for the
formation of genuine wage-labor -- namely, day-laborers outside the gild
system, unskilled laborers, etc.

 We thus see that the transformation of money into capital presupposes a
historic process which separates the objective conditions of labor, and
makes them independent of and sets them against the laborers.  However,
once capital and its process have come into being, they conquer all
production and everywhere bring about and accentuate the separation
between labor and property, labor and the objective conditions of labor.
Subsequent development will show in what ways capital destroys artisan
labor, small working landownership, etc., and also itself in those forms
in which it does _not_ appear in contradiction to labor: _petty
capital_, and intermediate or hybrid types between the classic, adequate
mode of production of capital itself, and the old modes of production
(in their original form), or as renewed on the basis of capital.

 The only accumulation which is a prerequisite for the rise of capital,
is that of _monetary wealth_, which, when considered in isolation, is
entirely unproductive, emerges only from circulation and belongs only to
circulation.  Capital rapidly creates itself an internal market by
destroying all rural subsidiary crafts -- i.e., by spinning and weaving
for all, providing clothing for all, etc.; in short, by turning the
commodities formerly produced as immediate use-values into
exchange-values.  This process is the automatic result of the separation
of the laborers from the soil and from their property (though even only
serf property) in the conditions of production.

  Though urban crafts are based substantially on exchange and the
creation of exchange-values, the main object of production is not
_enrichment_ or _exchange-value as exchange-values_, but the
_subsistence of man as an artisan, as a master-craftsman_, and
consequently use-value.  Production is therefore everywhere subordinate
to a presupposed consumption, supply to demand, and its expansion is
slow.

 _The production of capitalists and wage-laborers is therefore a major
product of the process by which capital turns itself into values_.
Ordinary political economy, which concentrates only on the objects
produced, forgets this entirely.  Inasmuch as this process establishes
reified labor as what is simultaneously the _non-reification_ of the
laborer, as the reification of a subjectivity opposed to the laborer, as
the _property_ of someone else's will, capital is necessarily also a
_capitalist_.  The idea of some socialists, that we need capital but not
capitalists, is completely false.  The concept of capital implies that
the objective conditions of labor -- and these are its own product --
acquire a _personality_ as against labor, or what amounts to the same
thing, that they are established as the property of a personality other
than the worker's.  The concept of capital implies the capitalist.
However, this error is certainly no greater than that of, e.g., all
philologists who speak of the existence of _capital_ in classical
antiquity, and of Roman or Greek capitalists.  This is merely another
way of saying that in Rome and Greece labor was _free_, an assertion
which these gentlemen would hardly make.  If we now talk of
plantation-owners in America as capitalists, if they _are_ capitalists,
this is due to the fact that they exist as anomolies within a world
market based upon free labor.  Were the term capital to be applicable to
classical antiquity -- though the word does not actually occur among the
ancients (but among the Greeks the word _arkhais_ is used for what the
Roman's called the _principalis summa reicreditae_, the principal of a
loan) -- then the nomadic hordes with their flocks on the steppes of
Central Asia would be the greatest capitalists, for the original meaning
of the word capital is cattle.  Hence the contract of _metairie_
(crop-sharing) which is frequent in the South of France, because of
capital shortage, is still sometimes called "bail de bestes a cheptel"
(contract of leasing cattle).  If we permit ourselves a little bad
Latin, then our capitalists or _Capitales Homines_ (headmen) would be
those "qui debent censum de capite" (who pay a head tax).

 Difficulties which do not arise in the conceptual analysis of money do
arise in that of capital.  Capital is essentially a _capitalist_; but at
the same time production in general is _capital_, as an element in the
existence of the capitalist quite distinct from him.  Thus we shall
later find that in the term _capital_ much is subsumed that does not
apparently belong to the concept.  E.g., capital is loaned.  It is
accumulated, etc.  In all these relations it appears to be a mere
object, and entirely to coincide with the matter of which it consists.
However, further analysis will clarify this and other problems.  (In
passing, the following amusing observation: The good Adam Mueller, who
takes all figurative phrases in a mystical sense, had also heard about
_living capital_ in ordinary life, as opposed to _dead_ capital, and
dresses up the notion theosophically.  King Atheistan could have taught
him a thing or two about this:

     "Reddam de meo propio decimas Deo tam in _Vivente Capitale_ quam
     in _mortuis fructuis terrae_."

     (I shall give a tithe of my property to God, both in living
     cattle and in the dead fruits of the soil.)

Money always retains the same form in the same substratum, and is
therefore more readily conceived as an object.  But the same thing,
commodity, money, etc., can represent capital or revenue, etc.  Thus
even the economists recognize that money is nothing tangible, but that
the same thing can be subsumed now under the heading capital, now under
some other and quite contrary term, and accordingly that it _is_ or _is
not_ capital.  It is evidently _a relation and can only be a relation of
production_.


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