pc1 [13]
destruction of the conditions upon which it rests, and turns into its opposite. Suppose, for instance, that productivity could be increased without increase in territory, by means of a development of the forces of production (which in agriculture, a most traditional occupation, are the slowest of all). This would imply new methods and combinations of labor, the high proportion of the day which would then have to be devoted to agriculture, etc., and once again the old economic conditions of the community would cease to operate. The act of reproduction itself changes not only the objective conditions -- e.g., transforming village into town, the wilderness into agricultural clearings, etc. -- but the producers change with it, by the emergence of new qualities, by transforming and developing themselves in production, forming new powers and new conceptions, new modes of intercourse, new needs, and new speech. The more traditional the mode of production itself, i.e., the more the _real process_ of appropriation remains the same, the more unchanging will the ancient forms of property be and therefore also the community as a whole. (Note that the traditional mode persists for a long time in agriculture and even longer in the oriental combination of agriculture and manufacture.) Where the members of the community have already acquired separate existence as private proprietors from their collective existence as an urban community and owners of the urban territory, conditions already arise which allow the individual to _lose_ his property -- i.e., the double relationship which makes him both a citizen with equal status, a member of the community, and a _proprietor_. In the central form this _loss_ is hardly possible, except as a result of entirely external influences, for the individual member of the community never establishes so independent a relation to it as to enable him to lose his (objective, economic) tie with it. He is firmly rooted. This is also an aspect of the union of manufacture and agriculture, of town (in this instance the village) and country. Among the ancients, manufacture already appears as corruption (fit business for freedmen, clients, and foreigners), etc. Productive labor is freed from its pure subordination to agriculture, where it is the domestic labor of free persons, destined only for the purpose of farming, and war or religious observance and communal tasks such as the construction of houses, roads, or temples. This development, which necessarily arises from intercourse with foreigners, from slaves, the desire to exchange the surplus product, etc., dissolves the mode of production upon which the community rests, and with it the _objectively individual man_ -- i.e., the individual determined as a Greek, a Roman, etc. Exchange has the same effect, and so has indebtedness, etc. We have an original unity between a specific form of community or tribal unit and the property in nature connected with it, or the relation to the objective conditions of production as naturally existing, as the objective being of the individual by means of the community. Now this unity, which in one sense appears as the particular form of property, has its living reality in a specific _mode of production_ itself, and this mode appears equally as the relationship of the individuals to one another and as their specific daily behavior towards inorganic nature, their specific mode of labor (which is always family labor and often communal labor). The community itself appears as the first great force of production; special kinds of conditions of production (e.g., animal husbandry, agriculture) lead to the evolution of a special mode of production and special forces of production, both objective and subjective, the latter appearing as qualities of the individuals. In the last instance, the community and the property resting upon it can be reduced to a specific stage in the development of the forces of production of the laboring subjects -- to which correspond