[...] IIXL! forms the interest on his capital.t The worker is the 
subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost 
to himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact 
that labour is man lost to himself. But the worker has the 
misfortune to be a living capital, and therefore an indigent capital, 
one which loses its interest, and hence its livelihood, every moment 
it is not working. The value of the worker as capital rises according 
to demand and supply, and physically too his existence, his life, was 
and is looked upon as a supply of a commodity like any other. The 
worker produces capital, capital produces him—hence he pro- 
duces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of 
this entire cycle. To the man who is nothing more than a 
worker—and to him as a worker—his human qualities only exist 
insofar as they exist for capital alien to him. Because man and 
capital are alien, foreign to each other, however, and thus stand in 
an indifferent, external and accidental relationship to each other, 
it is inevitable that this foreignness should also appear as some- 
thing real. As soon, therefore, as it occurs to capital (whether from 
necessity or caprice) no longer to be for the worker, he himself is 
no longer for himself: he has no work, hence no wages, and since 
he has no existence as a human being but only as a worker, he can 
go and bury himself, starve to death, 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 tenor of his life 
in a manner indifferent to him. 

Political economy, therefore, does not recognise the unemployed 
worker, the workingman, insofar as he happens to be outside this 
labour relationship. The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, 
the starving, wretched and criminal workingman—these are fig- 
ures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, 
those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger, and bum-bailiff, 
etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain. For it, therefore, 
the worker’s needs are but the one need—to maintain him whilst he 
is working and insofar as may be necessary to prevent the race of 
labourers from [dying] out. The wages of labour have thus exactly 
the same significance as the maintenance and servicing of any other 
productive instrument, or as the consumption of capital in general, 
required for its reproduction with interest, like the oil which is 
applied to wheels to keep them turning. Wages, therefore, belong 
to capital’s and the capitalist’s necessary costs, and must not exceed 
the bounds of this necessity. It was therefore quite logical for the 
English factory owners, before the Amendment Bill of 1834,? to 
deduct from the wages of the worker the public charity which he 
was receiving out of the Poor Rate and to consider this to be an 
integral part of wages.” 

Production does not simply produce man 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, and dulling of the workers and 
the capitalists— Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting 
commodity ... the human commodity.... Great advance of Ricardo, 
Mill, etc., on Smith and Say, to declare the existence of the human 
being—the greater or lesser human productivity of the commodi- 
ty—to be indifferent and even harmful. Not how many workers are 
maintained by a given capital, but rather how much interest it 
brings in, the sum-total of the annual savings, is said to be the true 
purpose of production. 

It was likewise a great and consistent advance of modern |/XL]I| 
English political economy, that, whilst elevating labour to the position 
of its sole principle, it should at the same time expound with complete 
clarity the inverse relation between wages and interest on capital, and 
the fact that the capitalist could normally only gain by pressing down 

wages, and vice versa. Not the defrauding of the consumer, but the 
capitalist and the worker taking advantage of each other, is shown to 
be the normal relationship. 

The relations of private property contain latent within them the 
relation of private property as labour, the relation of private property 
as capital, and the mutual relation of these two to one another. There 
is the production of human activity as labour—that is, as an activity 
quite 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 workman who may therefore daily fall from his filled 
void into the absolute void—into his social, and therefore actual, 
non-existence. On the other hand, there is the production of the 
object of human activity as capital—in which all the natural and 
social characteristic of the object is extinguished, in which private 
property has lost its natural and social quality (and therefore every 
political and social illusion, and is not associated with any apparently 
human relations); in which the selfsame capital remains the same in 
the most diverse natural and social manifestations, totally indifferent 
to its real content. This contradiction, driven to the limit, is of 
necessity the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole 
private-property relationship. 

It is therefore another great achievement of modern English 
political economy to have declared rent of land to be the difference 
in the interest yielded by the worst and the best land under 
cultivation; to have [exposed]? the landowner’s romantic illu- 
sions — his alleged social importance and the identity of his interest 
with the interest of society, a view still maintained by Adam Smith 
after the Physiocrats; and to [have] anticipated and prepared the 
movement of the real world which will transform the landowner into 
an ordinary, prosaic capitalist, and thus simplify and sharpen the 
contradiction [between capital and labour] and hasten its resolution. 
Land as land, and rent as rent, have lost their distinction of rank and 
become insignificant capital and interest—or rather, capital and 
interest that signify only money. 

The distinction between capital and land, between profit and rent, 
and between both and wages, and industry, and agriculture, and 
immovable and movable private property —this distinction is not 
rooted in the nature of things, but is a historical distinction, a fixed 
historical moment in the formation and development of the 
contradiction between capital and labour. In industry, etc., as 
opposed to immovable landed property, is only expressed the way in 
which [industry] came into being and the contradiction to agriculture 

in which industry developed. This distinction only continues to exist 
as a special sort of work —as an essential, important and life-embracing 
distinction — so long as industry (town life) develops over and against 
landed property (aristocratic feudal life) and itself continues to bear 
the feudal character of its opposite in the form of monopoly, craft, 
guild, corporation, etc., within which labour still has a seemingly social 
significance, still the significance of the real community, and has not 
yet reached the stage of indifference to its content, of complete 
being-for-self,” i. e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence 
has not yet become liberated capital. 

\XLII But liberated industry, industry constituted for itself as such, 
and liberated capital, are the necessary development of labour. The 
power of industry over its opposite is at once revealed in the 
emergence of agriculture as a real industry, while previously it left 
most of the work to the soil and to the slave of the soil, through whom 
the land cultivated itself. With the transformation of the slave into a 
free worker —i. e., into a hireling—the landlord himself is trans- 
formed into a captain of industry, into a capitalist —a transforma- 
tion which takes place at first through the intermediacy of the tenant 
farmer. The tenant farmer, however, is the landowner’s representa- 
tive—the landowner’s revealed secret: it is only through him that the 
landowner has his economic existence—his existence as a private 
proprietor—for the rent of his land only exists due to the 
competition between the farmers. 

Thus, in the person of the tenant farmer the landlord has already 
become in essence a common capitalist. And this must come to pass, 
too, in actual fact: the capitalist engaged in agriculture—the 
tenant—must become a landlord, or vice versa. The tenant’s 
industrial hucksterism is the landowner’s industrial hucksterism, for the 
being of the former postulates the being of the latter. 

But mindful of their contrasting origin, of their line of de- 
scent, the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent, liberated, 
enriched slave of yesterday and sees himself as a captialist who is 
threatened by him. The capitalist knows the landowner as the idle, 
cruel, egotistical master of yesterday; he knows that he injures him as 
a capitalist, but that it is to industry that he owes all his present social 
significance, his possessions and his pleasures; he sees in him a 
contradiction to free industry and to free capital—to capital 
independent of every natural limitation. This contradiction is 
extremely bitter, and each side tells the truth about the other. One 
need only read the attacks of immovable on movable property and 
vice versa to obtain a clear picture of their respective worthlessness. 
The landowner lays stress on the noble lineage of his property, on 

feudal souvenirs or reminiscences, the poetry of recollection, on 
his romantic disposition, on his political importance, etc.; and when 
he talks economics, it is only agriculture that he holds to be produc- 
tive. At the same time he depicts his adversary as a sly, hawking, 
carping, deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless and spir- 
itless person who is estranged from the community and freely 
trades it away, who breeds, nourishes and cherishes competition, 
and with it pauperism, crime, and the dissolution of all social 
bonds, an extorting, pimping, servile, smooth, flattering, fleecing, 
dried-up rogue without honour, principles, poetry, substance, or 
anything else. (Amongst others see the Physiocrat Bergasse, whom 
Camille Desmoulins flays in his journal, Révolutions de France et de 
Brabant”; see von Vincke, Lancizolle, Haller, Leo, Kosegarten* 
and also Sismondi.) 

Movable property, for its part, points to the miracles of industry 
and progress. It is the child of modern times, whose legitimate, 
native-born son it is. It pities its adversary as a simpleton, 
unenlightened about his own nature (and in this it is completely 
right), who wants to replace moral capital and free labour by 
brute, immoral violence and serfdom. It depicts him as a Don 
Quixote, who under the guise of bluntness, respectability, the general 
interest, and stability, conceals incapacity for progress, greedy 
self-indulgence, selfishness, sectional interest, and evil intent. It 
declares him an artful monopolist; it pours cold water on his 
reminiscences, his poetry, and his romanticism by a historical and 
sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, pros- 
titution, infamy, anarchy and rebellion, of which romantic castles 
were the workshops. 

XLII] It claims to have obtained political freedom for everybody; 
to have loosed the chains which fettered civil society; to have linked 
together different worlds; to have created trade promoting friend- 
ship between the peoples; to have created pure morality and a 
pleasant culture; to have given the people civilised needs in place 
of their crude wants, and the means of satisfying them. Meanwhile, 

* See on the other hand the garrulous, old-Hegelian theologian Funke who tells, 
after Herr Leo, with tears in his eyes how a slave, had refused, when serfdom was 
abolished, to cease being the property of the gentry.°° See also the patriotic visions of 
Justus Moser, which distinguish themselves by the fact that they never for a moment 
[...]* abandon the respectable, petty-bourgeois “home-baked”, ordinary, narrow hori- 
zon of the philistine, and which nevertheless remain pure fancy. This contradiction 
has given them such an appeal to the German heart.— Note by Marx. 

it claims, the landowner—this idle, parasitic grain-profiteer— raises 
the price of the people’s basic necessities and so forces the capital- 
ist to raise wages without being able to increase productivity,’ 
thus impeding [the growth of] the nation’s annual income, the 
accumulation of capital, and therefore the possibility of providing 
work for the people and wealth for the country, eventually cancelling 
it, thus producing a general decline—whilst he parasitically exploits 
every advantage of modern civilisation without doing the least 
thing for it, and without even abating in the slightest his feudal 
prejudices. Finally, let him—for whom the cultivation of the land 
and the land itself exist only as a source of money, which comes 
to him as a present—let him just take a look at his tenant farmer 
and say whether he himself is not a downright, fantastic, sly scoundrel 
who in his heart and in actual fact has for a long time belonged to 
free industry and to lovely trade, however much he may protest 
and prattle about historical memories and ethical or political goals. 
Everything which he can really advance to justify himself is true 
only of the cultivator of the land (the capitalist and the labourers), 
of whom the landowner is rather the enemy. Thus he gives evidence 
against himself. [Movable property claims that] without capital landed 
property is dead, worthless matter; that its civilised victory has 
discovered and made human labour the source of wealth in place 
of the dead thing. (See Paul Louis Courier, Saint-Simon, Ganilh, Ri- 
cardo, Mill, McCulloch and Destutt de Tracy and Michel Chevalier.) 

The real course of development (to be inserted at this point) 
results in the necessary victory of the capitalist over the land- 
owner—that is to say, of developed over undeveloped, immature 
private property—just as in general, movement must triumph 
over immobility; open, self-conscious baseness over hidden, un- 
conscious baseness; cupidity over self-indulgence; the avowedly 
restless, adroit self-interest of enlightenment over the parochial, 
worldly-wise, respectable, idle and fantastic self-interest of superstition; 
and money over the other forms of private property. 

Those states which sense something of the danger attaching to 
fully developed free industry, to fully developed pure morality 
and to fully developed philanthropic trade, try, but in vain, to 
hold in check the capitalisation of landed property. 

Landed property in its distinction from capital is private proper- 
ty — capital — still afflicted with local and political prejudices; it is 
capital which has not yet extricated itself from its entanglement 
with the world and found the form proper to itself —capital not 

yet fully developed. It must achieve its abstract, that is, its pure, 
expression in the course of its cosmogony. 

The character of private property is expressed by labour, capital, 
and the relations between these two. The movement through 
which these constituents have to pass is: 

First. Unmediated or mediated unity of the two. 

Capital and labour are at first still united. Then, though 
separated and estranged, they reciprocally develop and promote 
each other as positive conditions. 

[Second.|] The two in opposition, mutually excluding each other. 
The worker knows the capitalist as his own non-existence, and vice 
versa: each tries to rob the other of his existence. 

[Third.] Opposition of each to itself. Capital=stored-up 
labour=labour. As such it splits into capital itself and its interest, 
and this latter again into interest and profit. The capitalist is 
completely sacrificed. He falls into the working class, whilst the 
worker (but only exceptionally) becomes a capitalist. Labour as a 
moment of capital—its costs. Thus the wages of labour—a 
sacrifice of capital. 

Splitting of labour into labour itself and the wages of labour. The 
worker himself a capital, a commodity. 

Clash of mutual contradictions. |XLI1I]|