1858: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (II)

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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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