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 [vergegenständlichenden]
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 occasionally
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 ruralisation of the city.
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 occasional 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 molding, 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 plateaus.
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 wagons 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.
