II. [The Relation of Private Property]

... [XL] forms the interest on his capital. In the worker, then, it exists subjectively that capital is man wholly lost to himself, just as it exists objectively in capital that labour is man lost to himself. But the worker has the misfortune to be a living and therefore needy capital, which loses its interest, and with it its existence, every moment it is not working. As capital, the value of the worker rises according to demand and supply, and physically too his existence, his life, was and is known [as] a supply of commodities like any other commodity. The worker produces capital; capital produces him; he therefore produces himself; and man as worker, as commodity, is the product of the whole movement. To the man who is nothing more than a worker, and as a worker, his human qualities exist only in so far as they exist for the capital that is alien to him. But because the two are alien to each other, and therefore stand in an indifferent, external and accidental relation, this alienness was bound to appear as real too. As soon, then, as it occurs to capital (a necessary or arbitrary notion) no longer to exist for the worker, he himself no longer exists for himself; he has no work, therefore no wages, and since he has existence not as a man but as a worker, he can go and bury himself, starve, etc. The worker exists as a worker only when he exists for himself as capital, and he exists as capital only when some capital exists for him. The existence of capital is his existence, his life, as it determines the content of his life in a manner indifferent to him. Political economy therefore does not know the unemployed worker, the working man in so far as he finds himself outside this labour relation. The rogue, the swindler, the beggar, the unemployed, the starving, the wretched and criminal working man are figures that exist not for it but only for other eyes, for those of the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger and the beadle, etc., ghosts outside its realm. For political economy, therefore, the needs of the worker are only the need to maintain him during work, and so far that the race of workers does not [die] out. Wages therefore have exactly the same meaning as the maintenance and upkeep of any other productive instrument, as the consumption of capital in general, which it needs in order to reproduce itself with interest, like the oil applied to wheels to keep them turning. Wages therefore belong to the necessary costs of capital and of the capitalist, and must not exceed the needs of this necessity. It was therefore quite consistent when English factory owners, before the Amendment Bill of 1834, deducted from the worker’s wages the public alms he received through the poor rate, and treated them as an integral part of his wages.

Production produces man not only as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him, in keeping with this role, as a mentally and physically dehumanised being. Immorality, deformity, stupefaction of workers and capitalists. Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity.... A great advance of Ricardo, Mill, etc., over Smith and Say, to declare the existence of man (the greater or lesser human productivity of the commodity) indifferent and even harmful. Not how many workers a capital maintains, but how much interest it brings, the sum of annual savings, is the true aim of production. It was likewise a great and consistent advance of more recent [XLI] English political economy that, while raising labour to the sole principle of political economy, it at the same time set out with complete clarity the inverse relation between wages and the interest on capital, and that the capitalist as a rule can gain only by pressing wages down, and vice versa. Not the cheating of the consumer, but the mutual cheating of capitalist and worker is the normal relation. The relation of private property contains latent within it the relation of private property as labour, as well as its relation as capital, and the connection of these two expressions with each other. The production of human activity as labour, that is, as an activity wholly alien to itself, to man and to nature, and therefore to consciousness and the expression of life; the abstract existence of man as a mere working man, who can therefore fall any day from his fulfilled nothing into absolute nothing, his social and therefore real non-existence; and on the other hand the production of the object of human activity as capital, in which all natural and social determinacy of the object is extinguished, in which private property has lost its natural and social quality (and so has lost all political and social illusions and is mixed up with no apparently human relations), in which the same capital remains the same in the most various natural and social existences, completely indifferent to its real content: this opposition, driven to its extreme, is necessarily the extreme, the culmination and the downfall of the whole relation.

It is therefore another great achievement of more recent English political economy to have defined ground-rent as the difference between the interest yielded by the worst land under cultivation and by the best cultivated land; to have [exposed] the romantic illusions of the landowner (his supposed social importance and the identity of his interest with the interest of society, which Adam Smith still maintained after the Physiocrats); and to have anticipated and prepared the movement of reality that will transform the landowner into a quite ordinary, prosaic capitalist, and so simplify the opposition, sharpen it and hasten its resolution. The land as land, ground-rent as ground-rent, have thereby lost their distinction of rank and become capital and interest that say nothing, or rather say only money. The distinction between capital and land, between profit and ground-rent, and between both and wages, between industry and agriculture, between immovable and movable private property, is still a historical distinction, not one grounded in the nature of the thing, a fixed historical moment in the formation and origin of the opposition between capital and labour. In industry, etc., as opposed to immovable landed property, only the manner of origin and the opposition in which industry has developed against agriculture are expressed. As a particular kind of labour, as an essential, weighty distinction embracing the whole of life, this distinction exists only so long as industry (town life) develops over against landed property (the noble, feudal life) and still bears the feudal character of its opposition in itself in the form of monopoly, craft, guild, corporation, etc.; within these forms labour still has an apparently social meaning, still the meaning of a real community, has not yet gone on to indifference towards its content and to complete being-for-itself, that is, to abstraction from all other being, and so not yet to emancipated capital.

[XLII] But the necessary development of labour is emancipated industry, constituted for itself as such, and emancipated capital. The power of industry over its opposite shows itself at once in the rise of agriculture as a real industry, whereas formerly it left the main work to the soil and to the slave of this soil, through whom the soil cultivated itself. With the transformation of the slave into a free worker, that is, into a hireling, the landlord has in himself been transformed into a master of industry, a capitalist, a transformation that first takes place through the intermediate link of the tenant farmer. But the tenant is the representative, the revealed secret, of the landowner; only through him does the landowner have his economic existence, his existence as a private owner, for the ground-rent of his land exists only through the competition of the tenants. So in the tenant the landlord has in essence already become a common capitalist. And this must also be carried out in reality: the capitalist who carries on agriculture, the tenant, must become a landlord, or vice versa. The industrial huckstering of the tenant is that of the landowner, for the being of the former presupposes the being of the latter.

But remembering their contrary origin, their descent (the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent, emancipated, enriched slave of yesterday, and sees himself threatened by him as a capitalist; the capitalist knows the landowner as the idle, cruel, egoistic lord of yesterday; he knows that the landowner harms him as a capitalist, yet owes to industry his whole present social importance, his possessions and his enjoyment; he sees in him the opposite of free industry and of free capital independent of every natural determination), this opposition is extremely bitter, and each side tells the other the truth. One need only read the attacks of immovable property on movable property, and vice versa, to get a vivid picture of their mutual worthlessness. The landowner stresses the noble lineage of his property, feudal souvenirs and reminiscences, the poetry of memory, his high-minded nature, his political importance, etc., and, when they speak the language of political economy, that agriculture alone is productive. At the same time he depicts his opponent as a sly, haggling, carping, deceitful, greedy, venal, rebellious, heartless and soulless money-rogue, estranged from the community and freely huckstering it away, usurious, pimping, servile, smooth, flattering, cheating, dry, who breeds, feeds and fondles competition and hence pauperism and crime and the dissolution of all social bonds, a rogue without honour, without principles, without poetry, without substance, without anything. (See among others the Physiocrat Bergasse, whom Camille Desmoulins already castigates in his journal Révolutions de France et de Brabant; see von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, Leo, Kosegarten, and see Sismondi.) Movable property, for its part, points to the wonders of industry and of movement; it is the child of modern times and their legitimate, only-begotten son; it pities its opponent as a dimwit unenlightened about his own nature (and that is perfectly true), who would put crude, immoral force and serfdom in the place of moral capital and free labour; it depicts him as a Don Quixote who, under the appearance of straightforwardness, honesty, the general interest, stability, hides incapacity for movement, greedy love of pleasure, selfishness, particular interest, ill intention; it declares him a cunning monopolist; it dampens his reminiscences, his poetry, his enthusiasm by a historical and sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy and rebellion whose workshops were the romantic castles.

[XLIII] Movable property, it says, has won political freedom for the world, loosened the fetters of civil society, joined the worlds together, created humane trade, pure morality, pleasing culture; it has given the people civilised needs in place of their crude ones, and the means of satisfying them; while the landowner, that idle and merely obstructive grain usurer, makes the people’s first necessities of life dearer, thereby forces the capitalist to raise wages without being able to raise productive power, so hinders the annual income of the nation, the accumulation of capitals, and so the possibility of providing work for the people and wealth for the country, finally abolishes it altogether, brings about a general ruin, and usuriously exploits all the advantages of modern civilisation without doing the least for them and without even giving up his feudal prejudices. Finally, let him only look at his tenant, he for whom agriculture and the land itself exist only as a source of money given to him, and let him say whether he is not an honest, fanciful, sly scoundrel who in his heart and in reality has long belonged to free industry and lovely trade, however much he resists it and however much he prattles of historical memories and moral or political aims. Everything he really brings forward in his favour is true only of the cultivator (the capitalist and the farm labourers), whose enemy the landowner is rather; so he argues against himself. Without capital, landed property is dead, worthless matter. Its civilised victory, says movable property, is precisely to have discovered and created human labour as the source of wealth in place of the dead thing. (See Paul-Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ricardo, Mill, McCulloch and Destutt de Tracy, and Michel Chevalier.)

From the real course of development (to be inserted here) there follows the necessary victory of the capitalist, that is, of developed private property, over undeveloped, half-way private property, the landowner; just as in general movement must win over immobility, open, self-conscious baseness over hidden and unconscious baseness, greed over love of pleasure, the avowedly restless, versatile self-interest of enlightenment over the local, worldly-wise, honest, idle and fanciful self-interest of superstition, as money must win over the other form of private property.

The states that have some inkling of the danger of fully developed free industry, of fully developed pure morality and of fully developed humane trade try, quite in vain, to hold back the capitalisation of landed property.

Landed property, as distinct from capital, is private property, capital, still afflicted with local and political prejudices; capital that has not yet wholly come to itself out of its entanglement with the world; capital still incomplete. In the course of its formation on a world scale it must arrive at its abstract, that is, its pure expression.

The relation of private property is labour, capital and the relation between the two. The movement these terms have to go through is:

First: immediate or mediated unity of the two.

Capital and labour at first still united; then separated and estranged, but each raising and requiring the other as a positive condition.

[Second:] Opposition of the two. They mutually exclude each other; the worker knows the capitalist, and vice versa, as his own non-existence; each tries to tear the other’s existence from him.

[Third:] Opposition of each against itself. Capital = accumulated labour = labour. As such it splits into itself and its interest, as the latter in turn splits into interest and profit. Complete sacrifice of the capitalist. He falls into the working class, as the worker (but only exceptionally) becomes a capitalist. Labour as a moment of capital, its cost. So wages are a sacrifice of capital.

Labour split into itself and wages. The worker himself a capital, a commodity.

Hostile mutual opposition. [XLIII]