CHAPTER XV.

What Capitalist Accumulation leads to,
a-ted from vol. II, ch. 32.)
What docs the primitive accui;.. capital, /
its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into
.ipital is said to fly turbulent o be timid, which
very iticnin.
was formerly said ry bold. A
vent will ensure II 'in will.
Hi. will make
•i ample on all htminn laws; '300 per cent., ami at which it will
, profit, it will
::ply proved .all that ,i>ns and Strikes, London, 1860, p. 36.)
WHAT CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION LEADS TO.
wage-labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, /. e., the dissolution of private jproperty based on the .labour, of Jts owner.
The private jjto^3ei4}u^Q^jhe_j£^^ of
production 'tS the foundation of petty industry; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production presupposes par- celling of the soil, and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over and the productive application of the forces of nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it, would be to decree universal mediocrity. At a certain stage of devel- opment it brings ' forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forcfes and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated.
Its annihilation, the transformation of the individuali- sed and scattered means of production into socially concen- trated ones, of the pigmy property "of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of people forms the prelude to the history of capital. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labourer with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property,
176
which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour oi others, /. e., on wageS'labour.
As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means o! labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of pro- duction stands on its own feet, then the further social! > of labour and the further transformation of the land and other means of production, as well as the further ^expro- priation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but lhe__£apitaJist exploiting, many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the . of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. ""
Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expro- priation of many capitalists by few, develops, on an extending scale, the cooperative 'toTffl of the labour-process, the conscious technical application of science, the economising or all means of production by combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the market, and with this, the international character capitalistic regime.
Along with the constantly diminishing number of ilu- magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advan- tages of this process of transformation, grows ll; misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, i with this too grows the revol^o^hj^-wru^mff-class, always increasing in iminbi
the very mechanism of the process of capitalist prod' itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flou along with, and under it. Centralisati production and socialisation of lab-, where cTpme incompatible with
tegument. This integument is burst asuu of capitalist private ; proprialc..
expropriated.
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private propen
\\ll.\l CAI'IIALIST ACCU^\LI.\ll()^ /±A1>S IO. \JJ
founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist pro duction begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. This does not re-establish private pro- perty, but individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: /. e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production produced by labour itself.
The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, i n to cap_Halis .Lju: LY ^te^J^ogerty was, naturally, a process incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurper^ in" the latter, we have the expropriation of .a f 1 \ Hie mass pf fh