The People's Marx, Abridged Popular Edition of the the Three Volumes of Capital, Borchardt 1921
(Extracted from vol. II, ch. 32.)
What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i. e., its historical. genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i. e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner.
The private property of the labourer in his means of production is 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 parcelling 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 development it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces 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 individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated 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 capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i. 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 of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and the further transformation of the land and other means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is 110 longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action 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 expropriation of many capitalists by few, develops, on an ever extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical application of science, the economising of ail means of production by combined,' socialised labour, the entanglement of ail' peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise ail advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and. socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. Bul capitalist pro. duction begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. This does not re-establish private property, but individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i. 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, into capitalist private property 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 usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.