pc1 [14]
specific relations of these subjects with each other and with nature. Up to a certain point, reproduction. Thereafter, it turns into dissolution. _Property_ -- and this applies to its Asiatic, Slavonic ancient classical and Germanic forms -- therefore originally signifies a relation of the working (producing) subject (or a subject reproducing himself) to the conditions of his production or reproduction as his own. Hence, according to the conditions of production, property will take different forms. The object of production itself is to reproduce the producer in and together with these objective conditions of his existence. This behavior as a proprietor -- which is not the result but the precondition of labor, i.e., of production -- assumes a specific existence of the individual as part of a tribal or communal entity (whose property he is himself up to a certain point). Slavery, serfdom, etc., where the laborer himself appears among the natural conditions of production for a third individual or community -- and where property therefore is no longer the relationship of the independently laboring individual to the objective conditions of labor -- is always secondary, never primary, although it is the necessary and logical result of property founded upon the community and upon labor in the community. (This character of slavery does _not_ apply to the general slavery of the orient, which is so considered _only_ from the European point of view.) It is of course easy to imagine a powerful, physically superior person, who first captures animals and them captures men in order to make them catch animals for him; in brief, one who uses man as a naturally occurring condition for his reproduction like any other living natural thing; his own labor being exhausted in the act of domination. But such a view is stupid, though it may be correct from the point of view of a given tribal or communal entity; for it takes the _isolated_ man as its starting-point. But man is only individualized through the process of history. He originally appears as a _generic being, a tribal being, a herd animal_ -- though by no means as a "political animal" in the political sense. Exchange itself is a major agent of this individualization. It makes the herd animal superfluous and dissolves it. Once the situation is such, that man as an isolated person has relation only to himself, the means of establishing himself as an isolated individual have become what gives him his general communal character [sein Sich-Allgemein-und-Gemeinmachen]. In such a community, the objective existence of the individual as a proprietor -- say a landed proprietor -- is presupposed, though he is a proprietor under certain conditions which chain him to the community, or rather constitute a link in his chain. In bourgeois society, e.g., the worker exists purely subjectively, without object; but the thing which _confronts_ him has now become the _true common entity_ which he seeks to devour and which devours him. All the forms in which the community imputes to the subjects a specific objective unity with the conditions of their production, or in which a specific subjective existence imputes the community itself as condition of production, necessarily correspond only to a development of the forces of production which is limited both in fact and in principle. (These forms are of course more or less naturally evolved, but at the same time also the results of a historic process.) The evolution of the forces of production dissolves them, and their dissolution is itself an evolution of the human forces of production. Labor is initially undertaken on a certain basis -- first primitive -- then historical. [Es wird erst gearbeitet von gewisser Grundlage aus -- erst naturwuchsig -- dann historische Voraussetzung_. The sentence is elliptic and open to various possible interpretations.] Later, however, this basis or presupposition is itself cancelled, or tends to disappear, having become too narrow for the development