The Chapter on Capital (continuation)

With its coming-together in the city, the commune possesses an economic existence as such; the city’s mere presence, as such, distinguishes it from a mere multiplicity of independent houses. The whole, here, consists not merely of its parts. It is a kind of independent organism. Among the Germanic tribes, where the individual family chiefs settled in the forests, long distances apart, the commune exists, already from outward observation, only in the periodic gathering-together [Vereinigung] of the commune members, although their unity-in-itself is posited in their ancestry, language, common past and history, etc. The commune thus appears as a coming-together [Vereinigung], not as a being-together [Verein]; as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity. The commune therefore does not in fact exist as a state or political body, as in classical antiquity, because it does not exist as a city. For the commune to come into real existence, the free landed proprietors have to hold a meeting, whereas e.g. in Rome it exists even apart from these assemblies in the existence of the city itself and of the officials presiding over it etc. True, the ager publicus, the communal or people’s land, as distinct from individual property, also occurs among the Germanic tribes. It takes the form of hunting land, grazing land, timber land etc., the part of the land which cannot be divided if it is to serve as means of production in this specific form. But this ager publicus does not appear, as with the Romans e.g., as the particular economic presence of the state as against the private proprietors, so that these latter are actually private proprietors as such, in so far as they are excluded, deprived, like the plebeians, from using the ager publicus. Among the Germanic tribes, the ager publicus appears rather merely as a complement to individual property, and figures as property only to the extent that it is defended militarily as the common property of one tribe against a hostile tribe. Individual property does not appear mediated by the commune; rather, the existence of the commune and of communal property appear as mediated by, i.e. as a relation of, the independent subjects to one another. The economic totality is, at bottom, contained in each individual household, which forms an independent centre of production for itself (manufactures purely as domestic secondary task for women etc.). In the world of antiquity, the city with its territory is the economic totality; in the Germanic world, the totality is the individual residence, which itself appears as only a small dot on the land belonging to it, and which is not a concentration of many proprietors, but the family as independent unit. In the Asiatic form (at least, predominantly), the individual has no property but only possession; the real proprietor, proper, is the commune – hence property only as communal property in land. In antiquity (Romans as the most classic example, the thing in its purest, most fully developed form), the form of state property in land and that of private property in land [are] antithetical, so that the latter is mediated by the former, or the former itself exists in this double form. The private proprietor of land hence at the same time urban citizen. Urban citizenship resolves itself economically into the simple form that the agriculturist [is a] resident of a city. In the Germanic form, the agriculturist not citizen of a state, i.e. not inhabitant of a city; [the] basis [is] rather the isolated, independent family residence, guaranteed by the bond with other such family residences of the same tribe, and by their occasional coming-together [Zusammnenkommen] to pledge each others’ allegiance in war, religion, adjudication etc. Individual landed property here appears neither as a form antithetical to the commune’s landed property, nor as mediated by it, but just the contrary. The commune exists only in the interrelations among these individual landed proprietors as such. Communal property as such appears only as a communal accessory to the individual tribal seats and the land they appropriate. The commune is neither the substance of which the individual appears as a mere accident; nor is it a generality with a being and unity as such [seiende Einheit] either in the mind and in the existence of the city and of its civic needs as distinct from those of the individual, or in its civic land and soil as its particular presence as distinct from the particular economic presence of the commune member; rather, the commune, on the one side, is presupposed in-itself prior to the individual proprietors as a communality of language, blood etc., but it exists as a presence, on the other hand, only in its real assembly for communal purposes; and to the extent that it has a particular economic existence in the hunting and grazing lands for communal use, it is so used by each individual proprietor as such, not as representative of the state (as in Rome); it is really the common property of the individual proprietors, not of the union of these proprietors endowed with an existence separate from themselves, the city itself.

The main point here is this: In all these forms – in which landed property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order, and where the economic aim is hence the production of use values, i.e. the reproduction of the individual within the specific relation to the commune in which he is its basis – there is to be found: (1) Appropriation not through labour, but presupposed to labour; appropriation of the natural conditions of labour, of the earth as the original instrument of labour as well as its workshop and repository of raw materials. The individual relates simply to the objective conditions of labour as being his; [relates] to them as the inorganic nature of his subjectivity, in which the latter realizes itself; the chief objective condition of labour does not itself appear as a product of labour, but is already there as nature; on one side the living individual, on the other the earth, as the objective condition of his reproduction; (2) but this relation to land and soil, to the earth, as the property of the labouring individual – who thus appears from the outset not merely as labouring individual, in this abstraction, but who has an objective mode of existence in his ownership of the land, an existence presupposed to his activity, and not merely as a result of it, a presupposition of his activity just like his skin, his sense organs, which of course he also reproduces and develops etc. in the life process, but which are nevertheless presuppositions of this process of his reproduction – is instantly mediated by the naturally arisen, spontaneous, more or less historically developed and modified presence of the individual as member of a commune – his naturally arisen presence as member of a tribe etc. An isolated individual could no more have property in land and soil than he could speak. He could, of course, live off it as substance, as do the animals. The relation to the earth as property is always mediated through the occupation of the land and soil, peacefully or violently, by the tribe, the commune, in some more or less naturally arisen or already historically developed form. The individual can never appear here in the dot-like isolation [Punktualität] in which he appears as mere free worker. If the objective conditions of his labour are presupposed as belonging to him, then he himself is subjectively presupposed as member of a commune, through which his relation to land and soil is mediated. His relation to the objective conditions of labour is mediated through his presence as member of the commune; at the same time, the real presence of the commune is determined by the specific form of the individual’s property in the objective conditions of labour. Whether this property mediated by commune-membership appears as communal property, where the individual is merely the possessor and there is no private property in land and soil – or whether property appears in the double form of state and private property alongside one another, but so that the latter appears as posited by the former, so that only the citizen is and must be a private proprietor, while his property as citizen has a separate, particular existence at the same time – or whether, finally, the communal property appears only as a complement to individual property, with the latter as the base, while the commune has no existence for-itself except in the assembly of the commune members, their coming-together for common purposes – these different forms of the commune or tribe members’ relation to the tribe’s land and soil – to the earth where it has settled – depend partly on the natural inclinations of the tribe, and partly on the economic conditions in which it relates as proprietor to the land and soil in reality, i.e. in which it appropriates its fruits through labour, and the latter will itself depend on climate, physical make-up of the land and soil, the physically determined mode of its exploitation, the relation with hostile tribes or neighbour tribes, and the modifications which migrations, historic experiences etc. introduce. The survival of the commune as such in the old mode requires the reproduction of its members in the presupposed objective conditions. Production itself, the advance of population (this too belongs with production), necessarily suspends these conditions little by little; destroys them instead of reproducing them etc., and, with that, the communal system declines and falls, together with the property relations on which it was based. The Asiatic form necessarily hangs on most tenaciously and for the longest time. This is due to its presupposition that the individual does not become independent vis-à-vis the commune; that there is a self-sustaining circle of production, unity of agriculture and manufactures, etc. If the individual changes his relation to the commune, he thereby changes and acts destructively upon the commune; as on its economic presupposition; on the other side, the alteration of this economic presupposition brought about by its own dialectic – impoverishment etc. In particular, the influence of warfare and of conquest, which e.g. in Rome belonged to the essential conditions of the commune itself, suspends the real bond on which it rests. In all these forms, the reproduction of presupposed relations – more or less naturally arisen or historic as well, but become traditional – of the individual to his commune, together with a specific, objective existence, predetermined for the individual, of his relations both to the conditions of labour and to his co-workers, fellow tribesmen etc. – are the foundation of development, which is therefore from the outset restricted, but which signifies decay, decline and fall once this barrier is suspended. Thus among the Romans, the development of slavery, the concentration of land possession, exchange, the money system, conquest etc., although all these elements up to a certain point seemed compatible with the foundation, and in part appeared merely as innocent extensions of it, partly grew out of it as mere abuses. Great developments can take place here within a specific sphere. The individuals may appear great. But there can be no conception here of a free and full development either of the individual or of the society, since such development stands in contradiction to the original relation.

Do we never find in antiquity an inquiry into which form of landed property etc. is the most productive, creates the greatest wealth? Wealth does not appear as the aim of production, although Cato may well investigate which manner of cultivating a field brings the greatest rewards, and Brutus may even lend out his money at the best rates of interest. [1] The question is always which mode of property creates the best citizens. Wealth appears as an end in itself only among the few commercial peoples – monopolists of the carrying trade – who live in the pores of the ancient world, like the Jews in medieval society. Now, wealth is on one side a thing, realized in things, material products, which a human being confronts as subject; on the other side, as value, wealth is merely command over alien labour not with the aim of ruling, but with the aim of private consumption etc. It appears in all forms in the shape of a thing, be it an object or be it a relation mediated through the object, which is external and accidental to the individual. Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics – and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds – this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as loftier. On the other side, it really is loftier in all matters where closed shapes, forms and given limits are sought for. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar.

What Mr Proudhon calls the extra-economic origin of property, by which he understands just landed property, [2] is the pre-bourgeois relation of the individual to the objective conditions of labour, and initially to the natural objective conditions of labour – for, just as the working subject appears naturally as an individual, as natural being – so does the first objective condition of his labour appear as nature, earth, as his inorganic body; he himself is not only the organic body, but also the subject of this inorganic nature. This condition is not his product but something he finds to hand – presupposed to him as a natural being apart from him. Before we analyse this further, one more point: the worthy Proudhon would not only be able to, but would have to, accuse capital and wage labour – as forms of property – of having an extra-economic origin. For the encounter with the objective conditions of labour as separate from him, as capital from the worker’s side, and the encounter with the worker as propertyless, as an abstract worker from the capitalist’s side – the exchange such as takes place between value and living labour, presupposes a historic process, no matter how much capital and labour themselves reproduce this relation and work out its objective scope, as well as its depth – a historic process, which, as we saw, forms the history of the origins of capital and wage labour. In other words: the extra-economic origin of property means nothing else than the historic origin of the bourgeois economy, of the forms of production which are theoretically or ideally expressed by the categories of political economy. But the fact that pre-bourgeois history, and each of its phases, also has its own economy and an economic foundation for its movement, is at bottom only the tautology that human life has since time immemorial rested on production, and, in one way or another, on social production, whose relations we call, precisely, economic relations.

The original conditions of production (or, what is the same, the reproduction of a growing number of human beings through the natural process between the sexes; for this reproduction, although it appears as appropriation of the objects by the subjects in one respect, appears in another respect also as formation, subjugation of the objects to a subjective purpose; their transformation into results and repositories of subjective activity) cannot themselves originally be products – results of production. It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital. In the relations of slavery and serfdom this separation does not take place; rather, one part of society is treated by the other as itself merely an inorganic and natural condition of its own reproduction. The slave stands in no relation whatsoever to the objective conditions of his labour; rather, labour itself, both in the form of the slave and in that of the serf, is classified as an inorganic condition of production along with other natural beings, such as cattle, as an accessory of the earth. In other words: the original conditions of production appear as natural presuppositions, natural conditions of the producer’s existence just as his living body, even though he reproduces and develops it, is originally not posited by himself, but appears as the presupposition of his self; his own (bodily) being is a natural presupposition, which he has not posited. These natural conditions of existence, to which he relates as to his own inorganic body, are themselves double: (1) of a subjective and (2) of an objective nature. He finds himself a member of a family, clan, tribe etc. – which then, in a historic process of intermixture and antithesis with others, takes on a different shape; and, as such a member, he relates to a specific nature (say, here, still earth, land, soil) as his own inorganic being, as a condition of his production and reproduction. As a natural member of the community he participates in the communal property, and has a particular part of it as his possession; just as, were he a natural Roman citizen, he would have an ideal claim (at least) to the ager publicus and a real one to a certain number of iugera [3] of land etc. His property, i.e. the relation to the natural presuppositions of his production as belonging to him, as his, is mediated by his being himself the natural member of a community. (The abstraction of a community, in which the members have nothing in common but language etc., and barely that much, is obviously the product of much later historical conditions.) As regards the individual, it is clear e.g. that he relates even to language itself as his own only as the natural member of a human community. Language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property.

Language itself is the product of a community, just as it is in another respect itself the presence [Dasein] of the community, a presence which goes without saying. <Communal production and common property as they exist e.g. in Peru are evidently a secondary form; introduced by and inherited from conquering tribes, who, at home, had common property and communal production in the older, simpler form such as is found in India and among the Slavs. Likewise the form which we find among the Celts in Wales e.g. appears as a transplanted, secondary form, introduced by conquerors among the lesser, conquered tribes. The completion and systematic elaboration of these systems by a supreme central authority shows their later origin. Just as the feudalism introduced into England was more perfect in form than that which arose spontaneously in France.> <Among nomadic pastoral tribes – and all pastoral peoples are originally migratory – the earth appears like other natural conditions, in its elemental limitlessness, e.g. in the Asiatic steppes and the high plateau. It is grazed etc., consumed by the herds, from which the pastoral peoples in turn live. They relate to it as their property, although they never stabilize this property. This is the case too with the hunting grounds of the wild Indian tribes in America; the tribe regards a certain region as its hunting domain, and asserts it by force against other tribes, or tries to drive others off the domains they assert. Among the nomadic pastoral peoples, the commune is indeed constantly united; the travelling society, the caravan, the horde, and the forms of supremacy and subordination develop out of the conditions of this mode of life. What is in fact appropriated and reproduced here is not the earth but the herd; but the earth is always used communally at each halting place.> The only barrier which the community can encounter in relating to the natural conditions of production – the earth – as to its own property (if we jump ahead to the settled peoples) is another community, which already claims it as its own inorganic body. Warfare is therefore one of the earliest occupations of each of these naturally arisen communities, both for the defence of their property and for obtaining new property. (We can indeed content ourselves here with speaking of land and soil as original property, for among the herding peoples property in natural products of the earth – e.g. sheep – is at the same time property in the pastures they wander through. In general, property in land and soil includes its organic products.) <If human beings themselves are conquered along with the land and soil as its organic accessories, then they are equally conquered as one of the conditions of production, and in this way arises slavery and serfdom, which soon corrupts and modifies the original forms of all communities, and then itself becomes their basis. The simple construction is thereby negatively determined.>

Property thus originally means no more than a human being’s relation to his natural conditions of production as belonging to him, as his, as presupposed along with his own being; relations to them as natural presuppositions of his self, which only form, so to speak, his extended body. He actually does not relate to his conditions of production, but rather has a double existence, both subjectively as he himself, and objectively in these natural non-organic conditions of his existence. The forms of these natural conditions of production are double: (1) his existence as a member of a community; hence the existence of this community, which in its original form is a clan system, a more or less modified clan system; (2) the relation to land and soil mediated by the community, as its own, as communal landed property, at the same time individual possession for the individual, or in such a way that only the fruits are divided, but the land itself and the labour remain common. (However, residences etc., even if only the Scythians’ wagons, always appear in individual possession.) A natural condition of production for the living individual is his belonging to a naturally arisen, spontaneous society, clan etc. This is e.g. already a condition for his language etc. His own productive existence is possible only on this condition. His subjective existence is thereby conditioned as such, just as it is conditioned by his relation to the earth as his workshop. (Property is, it is true, originally mobile, for mankind first seizes hold of the ready-made fruits of the earth, among whom belong e.g. the animals, and for him especially the ones that can be tamed. Nevertheless even this situation – hunting, fishing, herding, gathering fruits from trees etc. – always presupposes appropriation of the earth, whether for a fixed residence, or for roaming, or for animal pasture etc.)

Property therefore means belonging to a clan (community) (having subjective-objective existence in it); and, by means of the relation of this community to the land and soil, [relating] to the earth as the individual’s inorganic body; his relation to land and soil, to the external primary condition of production – since the earth is raw material, instrument and fruit all in one – as to a presupposition belonging to his individuality, as modes of his presence. We reduce this property to the relation to the conditions of production. Why not to consumption, since the production of the individual is originally restricted to the reproduction of his own body through the appropriation of ready objects prepared by nature itself for consumption? Even where the only task is to find and to discover, this soon requires exertion, labour – as in hunting, fishing, herding – and production (i.e. development) of certain capacities on the part of the subject. Then also, situations in which it is possible to seize hold of the things available without any instruments whatever (i.e. products of labour destined for production), without alteration of form (which already takes place for herding) etc., are themselves transitional and in no case to be regarded as normal; nor as normal original situations. The original conditions of production, incidentally, of course include substances consumable directly, without labour; thus the consumption fund appears as s component part of the original production fund.

The fundamental condition of property resting on the clan system (into which the community originally resolves itself) – to be a member of the clan – makes the clan conquered by another clan propertyless and throws it among the inorganic conditions of the conqueror’s reproduction, to which the conquering community relates as its own. Slavery and serfdom are thus only further developments of the form of property resting on the clan system. They necessarily modify all of the latter’s forms. They can do this least of all in the Asiatic form. In the self-sustaining unity of manufacture and agriculture, on which this form rests, conquest is not so necessary a condition as where landed property, agriculture are exclusively predominant. On the other hand, since in this form the individual never becomes a proprietor but only a possessor, he is at bottom himself the property, the slave of him in whom the unity of the commune exists, and slavery here neither suspends the conditions of labour nor modifies the essential relation.

It is now clear, further, that:

Property, in so far as it is only the conscious relation – and posited in regard to the individual by the community, and proclaimed and guaranteed as law – to the conditions of production as his own, so that the producer’s being appears also in the objective conditions belonging to him – is only realized by production itself. The real appropriation takes place not in the mental but in the real, active relation to these conditions – in their real positing as the conditions of his subjective activity.

It is thereby also clear that these conditions change. Only when tribes hunt upon it does a region of the earth become a hunting domain; only cultivation of the soil posits the land as the individual’s extended body. After the city of Rome had been built and the surrounding countryside cultivated by its citizens, the conditions of the community were different from what they had been before. The aim of all these communities is survival; i.e. reproduction of the individuals who compose it as proprietors, i.e. in the same objective mode of existence as forms the relation among the members and at the same time therefore the commune itself. This reproduction, however, is at the same time necessarily new production and destruction of the old form. For example, where each of the individuals is supposed to possess a given number of acres of land, the advance of population is already under way. If this is to be corrected, then colonization, and that in turn requires wars of conquest. With that, slaves etc. Also, e.g., enlargement of the ager publicus, and therewith the patricians who represent the community etc. Thus the preservation of the old community includes the destruction of the conditions on which it rests, turns into its opposite. If it were thought that productivity on the same land could be increased by developing the forces of production etc. (this precisely the slowest of all in traditional agriculture), then the new order would include combinations of labour, a large part of the day spent in agriculture etc., and thereby again suspend the old economic conditions of the community. Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. The older and more traditional the mode of production itself – and this lasts a long time in agriculture; even more in the oriental supplementation of agriculture with manufactures – i.e. the longer the real process of appropriation remains constant, the more constant will be the old forms of property and hence the community generally. Where there is already a separation between the commune members as private proprietors [on one side,] and they themselves as the urban commune and proprietors of the commune’s territorium [on the other], there the conditions already arise in which the individual can lose his property, i.e. the double relation which makes him both an equal citizen, a member of the community, and a proprietor. In the oriental form this loss is hardly possible, except by means of altogether external influences, since the individual member of the commune never enters into the relation of freedom towards it in which he could lose his (objective, economic) bond with it. He is rooted to the spot, ingrown. This also has to do with the combination of manufacture and agriculture, of town (village) and countryside. In classical antiquity, manufacture appears already as a corruption (business for freedmen, clients, aliens) etc. This development of productive labour (not bound in pure subordination to agriculture as a domestic task, labour by free men for agriculture or war only, or for religious observances, and manufactures for the community – such as construction of houses, streets, temples), which necessarily develops through intercourse with aliens and slaves, through the desire to exchange the surplus product etc., dissolves the mode of production on which the community rests, and, with it, the objective individual, i.e. the individual defined as Roman, Greek, etc. Exchange acts in the same way; indebtedness etc.

The original unity between a particular form of community (clan) and the corresponding property in nature, or relation to the objective conditions of production as a natural being, as an objective being of the individual mediated by the commune – this unity, which appears in one respect as the particular form of property – has its living reality in a specific mode of production itself, a mode which appears both as a relation between the individuals, and as their specific active relation to inorganic nature, a specific mode of working (which is always family labour, often communal labour). The community itself appears as the first great force of production; particular kinds of production conditions (e.g. stock-breeding, agriculture), develop particular modes of production and particular forces of production, subjective, appearing as qualities of individuals, as well as objective [ones].

In the last analysis, their community, as well as the property based on it, resolves itself into a specific stage in the development of the productive forces of working subjects – to which correspond their specific relations amongst one another and towards nature. Until a certain point, reproduction. Then turns into dissolution.

Property, then, originally means – in its Asiatic, Slavonic, ancient classical, Germanic form – the relation of the working (producing or self-reproducing) subject to the conditions of his production or reproduction as his own. It will therefore have different forms depending on the conditions of this production. Production itself aims at the reproduction of the producer within and together with these, his objective conditions of existence. This relation as proprietor – not as a result but as a presupposition of labour, i.e. of production – presupposes the individual defined as a member of a clan or community (whose property the individual himself is, up to a certain point). Slavery, bondage etc., where the worker himself appears among the natural conditions of production for a third individual or community (this is not the case e.g. with the general slavery of the Orient, only from the European point of view) – i.e. property no longer the relation of the working individual to the objective conditions of labour – is always secondary, derived, never original, although [it is] a necessary and logical result of property founded on the community and labour in the community. It is of course very simple to imagine that some powerful, physically dominant individual, after first having caught the animal, then catches humans in order to have them catch animals; in a word, uses human beings as another naturally occurring condition for his reproduction (whereby his own labour reduces itself to ruling) like any other natural creature. But such a notion is stupid – correct as it may be from the standpoint of some particular given clan or commune – because it proceeds from the development of isolated individuals. But human beings become individuals only through the process of history. He appears originally as a species-being [Gattungswesen], clan being, herd animal – although in no way whatever as a ζῶον πολιτιϰόν [4] in the political sense. Exchange itself is a chief means of this individuation [Vereinzelung]. It makes the herd-like existence superfluous and dissolves it. Soon the matter [has] turned in such a way that as an individual he relates himself only to himself, while the means with which he posits himself as individual have become the making of his generality and commonness. In this community, the objective being of the individual as proprietor, say proprietor of land, is presupposed, and presupposed moreover under certain conditions which chain him to the community, or rather form a link in his chain. In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], [5] which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him.

All forms (more or less naturally arisen, spontaneous, all at the same time however results of a historic process) in which the community presupposes its subjects in a specific objective unity with their conditions of production, or in which a specific subjective mode of being presupposes the communities themselves as conditions of production, necessarily correspond to a development of the forces of production which is only limited, and indeed limited in principle. The development of the forces of production dissolves these forms, and their dissolution is itself a development of the human productive forces. Labour begins with a certain foundation – naturally arisen, spontaneous, at first – then historic presupposition. Then, however, this foundation or presupposition is itself suspended, or posited as a vanishing presupposition which has become too confining for the unfolding of the progressing human pack.

In so far as classical landed property reappears in modern small-parcel landownership, it itself belongs to political economy and we shall come to it in the section on landed property.

(All this is to be returned to at greater depth and length.)

What we are here concerned with is this: the relation of labour to capital, or to the objective conditions of labour as capital, presupposes a process of history which dissolves the various forms in which the worker is a proprietor, or in which the proprietor works. Thus above all (1) Dissolution of the relation to the earth – land and soil – as natural condition of production – to which he relates as to his own inorganic being; the workshop of his forces, and the domain of his will. All forms in which this property appears presuppose a community, whose members, although there may be formal distinctions between them, are, as members of it, proprietors. The original form of this property is therefore itself direct common property (oriental form, modified in the Slavonic; developed to the point of antithesis, but still as the secret, if antithetical, foundation in classical and Germanic property). (2) Dissolution of the relations in which he appears as proprietor of the instrument. Just as the above form of landed property presupposes a real community, so does this property of the worker in the instrument presuppose a particular form of the development of manufactures, namely craft, artisan work; bound up with it, the guild-corporation system etc. (The manufacture system of the ancient Orient can be examined under (1) already.) Here labour itself still half artistic, half end-in-itself etc. Mastery. Capitalist himself still master-journeyman. Attainment of particular skill in the work also secures possession of instrument etc. etc. Inheritability then to a certain extent of the mode of work together with the organization of work and the instrument of work. Medieval cities. Labour still as his own; definite self-sufficient development of one-sided abilities etc. (3) Included in both is the fact that he has the means of consumption in his possession before production, which are necessary for him to live as producer – i.e. during production, before its completion. As proprietor of land he appears as directly provided with the necessary consumption fund. As master in a craft he has inherited it, earned it, saved it up, and as a youth he is first an apprentice, where he does not appear as an actual independent worker at all, but shares the master’s fare in a patriarchal way. As journeyman (a genuine one) there is a certain communality in the consumption fund possessed by the master. While it is not the journeyman’s property either, still, through the laws of the guild, tradition etc., at least co-possession etc. (To be gone into further.) (4) Dissolution likewise at the same time of the relations in which the workers themselves, the living labour capacities themselves, still belong directly among the objective conditions of production, and are appropriated as such – i.e. are slaves or serfs. For capital, the worker is not a condition of production, only work is. If it can make machines do it, or even water, air, so much the better. And it does not appropriate the worker, but his labour – not directly, but mediated through exchange.

These are, now, on one side, historic presuppositions needed before the worker can be found as a free worker, as objectless, purely subjective labour capacity confronting the objective conditions of production as his not-property, as alien property, as value for-itself, as capital. But the question arises, on the other side, which conditions are required so that he finds himself up against a capital?

<‘The power to sell one’s self and one’s own when in distress was a grievous general right; it prevailed in the North as well as among the Greeks and in Asia: the power of the creditor to take into servitude a debtor who could not make payment, and to obtain payment through sale of the debtor’s labour or of his person, was almost equally widespread.’ (Niebuhr, I, p. 600.)> <In one passage Niebuhr says that the Greek writers writing in the period of Augustus had great difficulty with, and misunderstood, the relation between patricians and plebeians, confusing this relation with that between patrons and clients, because they ‘write at a time when rich and poor were the only true classes of citizens; where the needy person, no matter how noble his ancestry, required a patron, and where the millionaire, even if he were a freed slave, was sought out as a patron. They could hardly find a trace of inherited dependency-relations any longer.’ (I, 620.)> <‘Craftsmen were to be found in both classes – Metoikoi [6] and freedmen and their descendants – and the plebeian who abandoned agriculture assumed the limited civic rights to which these were restricted. They did not lack the privilege of legal corporations; and their guilds were so highly esteemed, that Numa [7] was named as their founder: they were 9: pipers, gold-smiths, carpenters, dyers, harness makers, tanners, copper-smiths, potters, and the ninth guild, the miscellaneous remainder … Those among them who were independent citizens; isopolites, [8] who belonged to no patron – if there was such a right; and descendants of servitors, whose bondage was dissolved by extinction of their patron’s line; all these people without a doubt remained as distant from the wranglings of the patricians and the commune as did the Florentine guilds from the feuds of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines: the servitors probably still stood entirely under the command of the patricians.’ (I, 623.)>

On one side, historic processes are presupposed which place a mass of individuals in a nation etc. in the position, if not at first of real free workers, nevertheless of such who are so δυνάμει, whose only property is their labour capacity and the possibility of exchanging it for values then present; individuals who confront all objective conditions of production as alien property, as their own not-property, but at the same time as values, as exchangeable, hence appropriable to a certain degree through living labour. Such historic processes of dissolution are also the dissolution of the bondage relations which fetter the worker to land and soil and to the lord of land and soil; but which factually presuppose his ownership of the necessaries of life – this is in truth the process of his release from the earth; dissolution of the landed property relations, which constituted him as a yeoman, as a free, working small landowner or tenant (colonus), a free peasant; * dissolution of the guild relations which presuppose his ownership of the instrument of labour, and which presuppose labour itself as a craftsmanlike, specific skill, as property (not merely as the source of property); likewise dissolution of the client-relations in the various forms in which not-proprietors appear in the retinue of their lord as co-consumers of the surplus product and wear the livery of their master as an equivalent, participate in his feuds, perform personal services, imaginary or real etc. It will be seen on closer inspection that all these processes of dissolution mean the dissolution of relations of production in which: use value predominates, production for direct consumption; in which exchange value and its production presupposes the predominance of the other form; and hence that, in all these relations, payments in kind and services in kind predominate over payment in money and money-services. But this only by the way. It will likewise be found on closer observation that all the dissolved relations were possible only with a definite degree of development of the material (and hence also the intellectual) forces of production.

* The dissolution of the still earlier forms of communal property and real community goes without saying.

What concerns us here for the moment is this: the process of dissolution, which transforms a mass of individuals of a nation etc. into free wage labourers δυνάμει – individuals forced solely by their lack of property to labour and to sell their labour – presupposes on the other side not that these individuals’ previous sources of income and in part conditions of property have disappeared, but the reverse, that only their utilization has become different, that their mode of existence has changed, has gone over into other hands as a free fund or has even in part remained in the same hands. But this much is clear: the same process which divorced a mass of individuals from their previous relations to the objective conditions of labour, relations which were, in one way or another, affirmative, negated these relations, and thereby transformed these individuals into free workers, this same process freed – δυνάμει – these objective conditions of labour – land and soil, raw material, necessaries of life, instruments of labour, money or all of these – from their previous state of attachment to the individuals now separated from them. They are still there on hand, but in another form; as a free fund, in which all political etc. relations are obliterated. The objective conditions of labour now confront these unbound, propertyless individuals only in the form of values, self-sufficient values. The same process which placed the mass face to face with the objective conditions of labour as free workers also placed these conditions, as capital, face to face with the free workers. The historic process was the divorce of elements which up until then were bound together; its result is therefore not that one of the elements disappears, but that each of them appears in a negative relation to the other – the (potentially) free worker on the one side, capital (potentially) on the other. The separation of the objective conditions from the classes which have become transformed into free workers necessarily also appears at the same time as the achievement of independence by these same conditions at the opposite pole.

If the relation of capital and wage labour is regarded not as already commanding and predominant over the whole of production, * but as arising historically – i.e. if we regard the original transformation of money into capital, the process of exchange between capital, still only existing δυνάμει on one side and the free workers existing δυνάμει on the other – then of course one cannot help making the simple observation, out of which the economists make a great show, [9] that the side which appears as capital has to possess raw materials, instruments of labour and necessaries of life so that the worker can live during production, before production is completed. This further takes the form that there must have taken place on the part of the capitalist an accumulation – an accumulation prior to labour and not sprung out of it – which enables him to put the worker to work and to maintain his effectiveness, to maintain him as living labour capacity. † This act by capital which is independent of labour, not posited by labour, is then shifted from the prehistory of capital into the present, into a moment of its reality and of its present activity, of its self-formation. From this is ultimately derived the eternal right of capital to the fruits of alien labour, or rather its mode of appropriation is developed out of the simple and just laws of equivalent exchange. [10]

* For in that case the capital presupposed as condition of wage labour is wage labour’s own product, and is presupposed by it as its own presupposition, created by it as its own presupposition.

† Once capital and wage labour are posited as their own presupposition, as the basis presupposed to production itself, then what appears initially is that the capitalist possesses, in addition to the fund of raw materials and necessaries required for the labourer to reproduce himself, to create the required means of subsistence, i.e. to realize necessary labour, a fund of raw material and means of labour in which the worker realizes his surplus labour, i.e. the capitalist’s profit. On further analysis this takes the form that the worker constantly creates 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 and the other part fulfils the conditions for the existence of capital. As we have seen, in the case of the surplus capital – and surplus capital in relation to its antediluvian relation to labour – all real, present capital and each of its elements has equally been appropriated without exchange, without an equivalent, as objectified, appropriated alien labour.

Wealth present in the form of money can be exchanged for the objective conditions of labour only because and if these are separated from labour itself. We saw that money can be piled up in part by way of the sheer exchange of equivalents; but this forms so insignificant a source that it is not worth mentioning historically – if it is presupposed that this money is gained through the exchange of one’s own labour. The monetary wealth which becomes transformed into capital in the proper sense, into industrial capital, is rather the mobile wealth piled up through usury – especially that practised against landed property – and through mercantile profits. We shall have occasion below to speak further of both of these forms – in so far as they appear not as themselves forms of capital, but as earlier forms of wealth, as presuppositions for capital.

It is inherent in the concept of capital, as we have seen – in its origin – that it begins with money and hence with wealth existing in the form of money. It is likewise inherent in it that it appears as coming out of circulation, as the product of circulation. The formation of capital thus does not emerge from landed property (here at most from the tenant [Pächter] in so far as he is a dealer in agricultural products); or from the guild (although there is a possibility at the last point); but rather from merchant’s and usurer’s wealth. But the latter encounter the conditions where free labour can be purchased only when this labour has been released from its objective conditions of existence through the process of history. Only then does it also encounter the possibility of buying these conditions themselves. Under guild conditions, e.g., mere money, if it is not itself guild money, masters’ money, cannot buy the looms to make people work with them; how many an individual may operate etc. is prescribed. In short, the instrument itself is still so intertwined with living labour, whose domain it appears, that it does not truly circulate. What enables money-wealth to become capital is the encounter, on one side, with free workers; and on the other side, with the necessaries and materials etc., which previously were in one way or another the property of the masses who have now become object-less, and are also free and purchasable. The other condition of labour, however – a certain level of skill, instrument as means of labour etc. – is already available to it in this preliminary or first period of capital, partly as a result of the urban guild system, partly as a result of domestic industry, or industry which is attached to agriculture as an accessory. This historic process is not the product of capital, but the presupposition for it. And it is through this process that the capitalist inserts himself as (historic) middle-man between landed property, or property generally, and labour. History knows nothing of the congenial fantasies according to which the capitalist and the workers form an association etc., nor is there a trace of them in the conceptual development of capital. Manufactures may develop sporadically, locally, in a framework which still belongs to a quite different period, as e.g. in the Italian cities alongside the guilds. But as the sole predominant forms of an epoch, the conditions for capital have to be developed not only locally but on a grand scale. (Notwithstanding this, individual guild masters may develop into capitalists with the dissolution of the guilds; but the case is rare, in the nature of the thing as well. As a rule, the whole guild system declines and falls, both master and journeyman, where the capitalist and the worker arise.)

It goes without saying – and shows itself if we go more deeply into the historic epoch under discussion here – that in truth the period of the dissolution of the earlier modes of production and modes of the workers relation to the objective conditions of labour is at the same time a period in which monetary wealth on the one side has already developed to a certain extent, and on the other side grows and expands rapidly through the same circumstances as accelerate the above dissolution. It is itself one of the agencies of that dissolution, while at the same time that dissolution is the condition of its transformation into capital. But the mere presence of monetary wealth, and even the achievement of a kind of supremacy on its part, is in no way sufficient for this dissolution into capital to happen. Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium etc. would have ended their history with free labour and capital, or rather begun a new history. There, too, the dissolution of the old property relations was bound up with development of monetary wealth – of trade etc. But instead of leading to industry, this dissolution led in fact to the supremacy of the countryside over the city. – The original formation of capital does not happen, as is sometimes imagined, with capital heaping up necessaries of life and instruments of labour and raw materials, in short, the objective conditions of labour which have already been unbound from the soil and animated by human labour. * Capital does not create the objective conditions of labour. Rather, its original formation is that, through the historic process of the dissolution of the old mode of production, value existing as money-wealth is enabled, on one side, to buy the objective conditions of labour; on the other side, to exchange money for the living labour of the workers who have been set free. All these moments are present; their divorce is itself a historic process, a process of dissolution, and it is the latter which enables money to transform itself into capital. Money itself, to the extent that it also plays an active role, does so only in so far as it intervenes in this process as itself a highly energetic solvent, and to that extent assists in the creation of the plucked, object-less free workers; but certainly not by creating the objective conditions of their existence; rather by helping to speed up their separation from them – their propertylessness. When e.g. the great English landowners dismissed their retainers, who had, together with them, consumed the surplus product of the land; when further their tenants chased off the smaller cottagers etc., then, firstly, a mass of living labour powers was thereby thrown onto the labour market, a mass which was free in a double sense, free from the old relations of clientship, bondage and servitude, and secondly free of all belongings and possessions, and of every objective, material form of being, free of all property; dependent on the sale of its labour capacity or on begging, vagabondage and robbery as its only source of income. It is a matter of historic record that they tried the latter first, but were driven off this road by gallows, stocks and whippings, onto the narrow path to the labour market; owing to this fact, the governments, e.g. of Henry VII, VIII etc. appear as conditions of the historic dissolution process and as makers of the conditions for the existence of capital. On the other side, the necessaries of life etc., which the landowners previously ate up together with their retainers, now stood at the disposal of any money which might wish to buy them in order to buy labour through their instrumentality. Money neither created nor stockpiled these necessaries; they were there and were consumed and reproduced before they were consumed and reproduced through its mediation. What had changed was simply this, that these necessaries were now thrown on to the exchange market – were separated from their direct connection with the mouths of the retainers etc. and transformed from use values into exchange values, and thus fell into the domain and under the supremacy of money wealth. Likewise with the instruments of labour. Money wealth neither invented nor fabricated the spinning wheel and the loom. But, once unbound from their land and soil, spinner and weaver with their stools and wheels came under the command of money wealth. Capital proper does nothing but bring together the mass of hands and instruments which it finds on hand. It agglomerates them under its command. That is its real stockpiling; the stockpiling of workers, along with their instruments, at particular points. This will have to be dealt with more closely in the so-called stockpiling of capital. Monetary wealth – as merchant wealth – had admittedly helped to speed up and to dissolve the old relations of production, and made it possible for the proprietor of land for example, as A. Smith already nicely develops, [11] to exchange his grain and cattle etc. for use values brought from afar, instead of squandering the use values he himself produced, along with his retainers, and to locate his wealth in great part in the mass of his co-consuming retainers. It gave the exchange value of his revenue a higher significance for him. The same thing took place in regard to his tenants, who were already semi-capitalists, but still very hemmed-in ones. The development of exchange value – favoured by money existing in the form of the merchant estate – dissolves production which is more oriented towards direct use value and its corresponding forms of property – the relations of labour to its objective conditions – and thus pushes forward towards the making of the labour market (certainly to be distinguished from the slave market). However, even this action of money is only possible given the presupposition of an urban artisanate resting not on capital but on the organization of labour in guilds etc. Urban labour itself had created means of production for which the guilds became just as confining as were the old relations of landownership to an improved agriculture, which was in part itself a consequence of the larger market for agricultural products in the cities etc. The other circumstances which e.g. in the sixteenth century increased the mass of circulating commodities as well as that of money, which created new needs and thereby raised the exchange value of indigenous products etc., raised prices etc., all of these promoted on one side the dissolution of the old relations of production, sped up the separation of the worker or non-worker but able-bodied individual from the objective conditions of his reproduction, and thus promoted the transformation of money into capital. There can therefore be nothing more ridiculous than to conceive this original formation of capital as if capital had stockpiled and created the objective conditions of production – necessaries, raw materials, instrument – and then offered them to the worker, who was bare of these possessions. Rather, monetary wealth in part helped to strip the labour powers of able-bodied individuals from these conditions; and in part this process of divorce proceeded without it. When the formation of capital had reached a certain level, monetary wealth could place itself as mediator between the objective conditions of life, thus liberated, and the liberated but also homeless and empty-handed labour powers, and buy the latter with the former. But now, as far as the formation of money-wealth itself is concerned, this belongs to the prehistory of the bourgeois economy. Usury, trade, urbanization and the treasury rising with it play the main roles here. So, too, hoarding by tenants, peasants etc.; although to a lesser degree. – This shows at the same time that the development of exchange and of exchange value, which is everywhere mediated through trade, or whose mediation may be termed trade – money achieves an independent existence in the merchant estate, as does circulation in trade – brings with it both the dissolution of labour’s relations of property in its conditions of existence, in one respect, and at the same time the dissolution of labour which is itself classed as one of the objective conditions of production; all these are relations which express a predominance of use value and of production directed towards use value, as well as of a real community which is itself still directly present as a presupposition of production. Production based on exchange value and the community based on the exchange of these exchange values – even though they seem, as we saw in the previous chapter on money, to posit property as the outcome of labour alone, and to posit private property over the product of one’s own labour as condition – and labour as general condition of wealth, all presuppose and produce the separation of labour from its objective conditions. This exchange of equivalents proceeds; it is only the surface layer of a production which rests on the appropriation of alien labour without exchange, but with the semblance of exchange. This system of exchange rests on capital as its foundation, and, when it is regarded in isolation from capital, as it appears on the surface, as an independent system, then it is a mere illusion, but a necessary illusion. Thus there is no longer any ground for astonishment that the system of exchange values – exchange of equivalents measured through labour – turns into, or rather reveals as its hidden background, the appropriation of alien labour without exchange, complete separation of labour and property. For the domination of exchange value itself, and of exchange-value-producing production, presupposes alien labour capacity itself as an exchange value – i.e. the separation of living labour capacity from its objective conditions; a relation to them – or to its own objectivity – as alien property; a relation to them, in a word, as capital. Only in the period of the decline and fall of the feudal system, but where it still struggles internally – as in England in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries – is there a golden age for labour in the process of becoming emancipated. In order for labour to relate to its objective conditions as its property again, another system must take the place of the system of private exchange, which, as we saw, posits the exchange of objectified labour for labour capacity, and therefore the appropriation of living labour without exchange. – The way in which money transforms itself into capital often shows itself quite tangibly in history; e.g. when the merchant induces a number of weavers and spinners, who until then wove and spun as a rural, secondary occupation, to work for him, making their secondary into their chief occupation; but then has them in his power and has brought them under his command as wage labourers. To draw them away from their home towns and to concentrate them in a place of work is a further step. In this simple process it is clear that the capitalist has prepared neither the raw material, nor the instrument, nor the means of subsistence for the weaver and the spinner. All that he has done is to restrict them little by little to one kind of work in which they become dependent on selling, on the buyer, the merchant, and ultimately produce only for and through him. He bought their labour originally only by buying their product; as soon as they restrict themselves to the production of this exchange value and thus must directly produce exchange values, must exchange their labour entirely for money in order to survive, then they come under his command, and at the end even the illusion that they sold him products disappears. He buys their labour and takes their property first in the form of the product, and soon after that the instrument as well, or he leaves it to them as sham property in order to reduce his own production costs. – The original historic forms in which capital appears at first sporadically or locally, alongside the old modes of production, while exploding them little by little everywhere, is on one side manufacture proper (not yet the factory); this [12] springs up where mass quantities are produced for export, for the external market – i.e. on the basis of large-scale overland and maritime commerce, in its emporiums like the Italian cities, Constantinople, in the Flemish, Dutch cities, a few Spanish ones, such as Barcelona etc. Manufacture seizes hold initially not of the so-called urban trades, but of the rural secondary occupations, spinning and weaving, the two which least requires guild-level skills, technical training. Apart from these great emporiums, where the external market is its basis, where production is thus, so to speak, naturally oriented towards exchange value – i.e. manufactures directly connected with shipping, shipbuilding itself etc. – it takes up its first residence not in the cities, but on the land, in villages lacking guilds etc. The rural subsidiary occupations have the broad basis [characteristic] of manufactures, while the urban trades demand great progress in production before they can be conducted in factory style. Likewise certain branches of production – such as glassworks, metal works, sawmills etc., which demand a higher concentration of labour powers from the outset, apply more natural energy from the outset, demand mass production, likewise concentration of the means of labour etc. Likewise paper mills. On the other side the rise of the tenant and the transformation of the agricultural population into free day-labourers. Although this transformation in the countryside is the last to push on towards its ultimate consequences and its purest form, its beginnings there are among the earliest. Classical antiquity, which could never get beyond the urban artisanate proper, could therefore never get to large industry. The first presupposition of the latter is to draw the land in all its expanse into the production not of use values but of exchange values. Glass factories, paper mills, iron works etc. cannot be operated on guild principles. They demand mass production; sales to a general market; monetary wealth on the part of their entrepreneur – not that he creates the conditions, neither the subjective nor the objective ones; but under the old relations of property and of production these conditions cannot be brought together. – The dissolution of relations of serfdom, like the rise of manufacture, then little by little transforms all branches of work into branches operated by capital. – The cities themselves, it is true, also contain an element for the formation of wage labour proper, in the non-guild day-labourers, unskilled labourers etc.

* The first glance shows what a nonsensical circle it would be if on the one hand the workers whom capital has to put to work in order to posit itself as capital had first to be created, to be brought to life through its stockpiling if they waited for its command, Let There Be Workers!; while at the same time it were itself incapable of stockpiling without alien labour, could at most stockpile its own labour, i.e. could itself exist in the form of not-capital and not-money; since labour, before the existence of capital, can only realize itself in forms such as craft labour, petty agriculture etc., in short, all forms which can not stockpile, or only sparingly; in forms which allow of only a small surplus product and eat up most of it. We shall have to examine this notion of stockpiling [Aufhäufung] still more closely later on.

While, as we have seen, the transformation of money into capital presupposes a historic process which divorces the objective conditions of labour from the worker and makes them independent of him, it is at the same time the effect of capital and of its process, once arisen, to conquer all of production and to develop and complete the divorce between labour and property, between labour and the objective conditions of labour, everywhere. It will be seen in the course of the further development how capital destroys craft and artisan labour, working small-landownership etc., together with itself in forms in which it does not appear in opposition to labour – in small capital and in the intermediate species, the species between the old modes of production (or their renewal on the foundation of capital) and the classical, adequate mode of production of capital itself.

The only stockpiling presupposed at the origin of capital is that of monetary wealth, which, regarded in and for itself, is altogether unproductive, as it only springs up out of circulation and belongs exclusively to it. Capital rapidly forms an internal market for itself by destroying all rural secondary occupations, so that it spins, weaves for everyone, clothes everyone etc., in short, brings the commodities previously created as direct use values into the form of exchange values, a process which comes about by itself through the separation of the workers from land and soil and from property (even in the form of serf property) in the conditions of production.

With the urban crafts, although they rest essentially on exchange and on the creation of exchange values, the direct and chief aim of this production is subsistence as craftsmen, as master-journeymen, hence use value; not wealth, not exchange value as exchange value. Production is therefore always subordinated to a given consumption, supply to demand, and expands only slowly.

The production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product of capital’s realization process. Ordinary economics, which looks only at the things produced, forgets this completely. When objectified labour is, in this process, at the same time posited as the worker’s non-objectivity, as the objectivity of a subjectivity antithetical to the worker, as property of a will alien to him, then capital is necessarily at the same time the capitalist, and the idea held by some socialists that we need capital but not the capitalists is altogether wrong. It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labour – and these are its own product – take on a personality towards it, or, what is the same, that they are posited as the property of a personality alien to the worker. The concept of capital contains the capitalist. Still, this error is in no way greater than that of e.g. all philologists who speak of capital in antiquity, of Roman, Greek capitalists. This is only another way of expressing that labour in Rome and Greece was free, which these gentlemen would hardly wish to assert. The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour. If the concern is the word, capital, which does not occur in antiquity * then the still migrating hordes with their herds on the Asiatic high plateau are the biggest capitalists, since capital originally means cattle, which is why the métairie contract still frequently drawn up in southern France, for lack of capital, just as an exception, is called: Bail de bestes à cheptel. [14] If one wants to descend to bad Latin, then our capitalists or Capitales Homines would be those ‘qui debent censum de capite’. [15]

* Although ἀρχεῖα among the Greeks, corresponding to the principalis summa rei creditae. [13]

The conceptual specification of capital encounters difficulties which do not occur with money; capital is essentially capitalist; but at the same time again as an element of his existence distinct from him, or production in general, capital. We shall likewise find later that many things are subsumed under capital which do not seem to belong within it conceptually. E.g. capital is lent out. It is stockpiled etc. In all these designations it appears to be a mere thing, and to coincide entirely with the matter in which it is present. But this and other questions will be cleared up in the course of the development. (Noted incidentally as a joke: the good Adam Müller, who takes all figurative ways of speaking as very mystical, has also heard of living capital in ordinary life as opposed to dead capital, and now rationalizes this theosophically. [16] King Aethelstan could teach him a lesson here: Reddam de meo proprio decimas Deo tam in Vivente Capitale (livestock), quam in mortis fructuis terrae (dead fruits of the earth).) [17] Money always remains the same form in the same substratum; and can thus be more easily conceived as a mere thing. But one and the same commodity, money etc., can represent capital or revenue etc. Thus it is clear even to the economists that money is not something tangible; but that one and the same thing can be subsumed sometimes under the title capital, sometimes under another and contrary one, and correspondingly is or is not capital. It is then evident that it is a relation, and can only be a relation of production.

We have seen that the true nature of capital emerges only at the end of the second cycle. What we have to examine now is this cycle itself, or the circulation of capital. Production originally appeared to lie beyond circulation, and circulation beyond production. The circulation of capital – circulation posited as the circulation of capital – spans both moments. Production appears in it as the conclusion and the point of departure of circulation, and vice versa. The independence of circulation is here reduced to a mere semblance, as is the otherworldliness of production.

Exchange of labour for labour rests on the worker’s propertylessness