Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

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. Private property, as the antithesis
to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of
labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or
not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first
sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The
private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry,
whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; 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, it attains its adequate classical form,
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, as Pecqueur rightly
says, “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 the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a
series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epochmaking as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate
producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the
most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private
property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring
individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which
rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage 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 further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially
exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of
private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no 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, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the
methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments
of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as
means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all 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 all
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, a 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, produces
capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on
the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of
Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property
for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era:
i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist
private property is, 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.