pc1 [11]
never fixing that property. This is the case with the hunting grounds of the wild Indian tribes of America: the tribe considers a certain region as its hunting territory and maintains it by force against other tribes, or seeks to expel other tribes from the territory they claim. Among the nomadic pastoral tribes the community is in fact always united, a travelling party, caravan, horde, and the forms of higher and lower rank develop out of the conditions of this mode of life. What is _appropriated_ and _reproduced_ is here only the herd and not the soil, which is always used in temporary commonality wherever the tribe breaks its wanderings. Let us pass on to the consideration of settled peoples. The only barrier which the community can encounter in its relation to the natural conditions of production _as its own_ -- to the land -- is some _other community_, which has already laid claim to them as its inorganic body. Was is, therefore, one of the earliest tasks of every primitive community of this kind, both for the defence of property and for its acquisition. (It will be sufficient to speak of original property in land, for among pastoral peoples property in such natural products of the earth as, e.g., sheep, is at the same time property in the pastures they pass through. In general, property in land includes property in its organic products.) Where man himself is captured as an organic accessory of the land and together with it, he is captured as one of the conditions of production, and this is the origin of slavery and serfdom, which soon debase and modify the original forms of all communities, and themselves become their foundation. As a result, the simple structure is determined negatively. Thus originally _property_ means no more than man's attitude to his natural conditions of production as belonging to him, as the _prerequisites of his own existence_; his attitude to them as _natural prerequisites_ of himself, which constitutes, as it were, a prolongation of his body. In fact, he stands in no relation to his conditions of production, but has a double existence, subjectively as himself and objectively in these natural inorganic conditions of his being. The forms of these natural conditions of production have a double character: (1) his existence as part of a community, which in its original form is a tribal community, more or less modified; (2) his relation to the _land_ as _his own_ [als dem seinigen], in virtue of the community, communal landed property, at the same time _individual possession_ for the individual, or in such a manner that the soil and its cultivation remain in common and only its products are divided. (However, _dwellings_ etc., even if no more than the waggons of the Scythians, nevertheless appear to be always in the possession of individuals.) Membership of a _naturally evolved society_, a tribe, etc., is a natural condition of production for the living individual. Such membership is, e.g., already a condition of his language, etc. His own productive existence is only possible under this condition. His subjective existence as such is conditioned by it as much as it is conditioned by the relationship to the earth as to his laboratory. (True, property is originally _mobile_, for in the first instance man takes possession of the ready-made fruits of the earth, including animals and especially those capable of domestication. However, even this situation -- hunting, fishing, pastoralism, subsistence by collecting the fruit of the trees, etc. -- always assumes the appropriation of the earth, whether as a place of fixed settlement or a territory for roaming, a pasture for his animals, etc.) _Property_ therefore means _belonging to a tribe_ (community) (to have one's subjective/objective existence within it), and by means of the relationship of this community to the land, to the external primary condition of production -- for the earth is at the same time raw material, tool, and fruit -- as the preconditions belonging