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 co-
operative 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.
2
1
“Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait nouvelle de la societé... nous tendons a séparer toute
espèce de propriété d’avec toute espèce de travail.” [We are in a situation which is entirely new for
society ... we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour] (Sismondi:
“Nouveaux Principes d’Econ. Polit.” t.II, p.434.)
2
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The
development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all,
are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.... Of all the
classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary
class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its
special and essential product.... The lower middle classes, the small manufacturers, the shopkeepers,
the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence
as fractions of the middle class... they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.
Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation
1
Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which
one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It
forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its
tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of primitive
accumulation is more of less accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly
conquered the whole domain of national production, or, where economic conditions are less
developed, it, at least, indirectly controls those strata of society which, though belonging to the
antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay. To this
ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property
inherited from a pre-capitalistic world with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction,
the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It is otherwise in the colonies. There
the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who, as
owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the
capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed economic systems, manifests
itself here practically in a struggle between them. Where the capitalist has at his back the power
of the mother-country, he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and
appropriation based on the independent labour of the producer. The same interest, which compels
the sycophant of capital, the political economist, in the mother-country, to proclaim the
theoretical identity of the capitalist mode of production with its contrary, that same interest
compels him in the colonies to make a clean breast of it, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of
the two modes of production. To this end, he proves how the development of the social
productive power of labour, co-operation, division of labour, use of machinery on a large scale,
&c., are impossible without the expropriation of the labourers, and the corresponding
transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called national
wealth, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic
armor crumbles off, bit by bit, like rotten touchwood. It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to
have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies
2
, but to have discovered in the Colonies
the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of
protection at its origin
3
attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so
Wakefield’s colonisation theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament,
attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic
colonisation.”
First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence,
machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be
wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his
own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons,
established by the instrumentality of things.
4
Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to
Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000.
Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men,
women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to
make his bed or fetch him water from the river.”
5
Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything
except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!
For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks: We
know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the
immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they