1858: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (I)

[Zodiac <zodiac@xxxxxx>]

                   PRE-CAPITALIST ECONOMIC FORMATIONS

                                 1857-58

                           this etext based on
                  Jack Cohen's 1964 English translation


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


                                    I


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 It is, therefore, now evident that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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