pc1 [6]
and not as a unity. In fact, therefore, the community has no existence as a _state_, a _political entity_ as among the ancients, because it has no existence as a _city_. If the community is to enter upon real existence, the free landowners must hold an _assembly_, whereas, e.g., in Rome it _exists_ apart from such assemblies, in the presence of the _city itself_ and the officials placed at its head, etc. True, the ager publicus, the common land or peoples' land, occurs among the Germans also, as distinct from the property of individuals. It consists of hunting grounds, common pastures or woodlands, etc., as that part of the land which cannot be partitioned if it is to serve as a means of production in this specific form. However, unlike the Roman case, the ager publicus does not appear as the particular economic being of the state, by the side of the private owners -- who are, properly speaking, private proprietors as such insofar as they have been _excluded_ from or deprived of the use of the ager publicus, like the Plebeians. The ager publicus appears rather as a mere supplement to individual property among the Germans, and figures as property only insofar as it is defended against hostile tribes as the common property of one tribe. The property of the individual does not appear mediated through the community, but the existence of the community and of communal property as mediated through -- i.e., as a mutual relation of -- the independent subjects. At bottom, every individual household contains an entire economy, forming as it does an independent centre of production (manufacture merely the domestic subsidiary labor of the women, etc.). In classical antiquity, the city with its attached territory formed the economic whole. In the Germanic world, the individual home, which itself appears merely as a point in the land belonging to it; there is no concentration of a multiplicity of proprietors, but the family as an independent unit. In the Asiatic form (or at least predominantly so), there is no property, but only individual possession; the community is properly speaking the real proprietor -- hence property only as _communal property_ in land. In antiquity (Romans as the classic example, the thing in its purest and most clearly marked form), there is a contradictory form of state landed property and private landed property, so that the latter is mediated through the former, or the former exists only in this double form. The private landed proprietor is therefore simultaneously an urban citizen. Economically, citizenship may be expressed more simply as a form in which the agriculturalist lives in a city. In the Germanic form, the agriculturalist is not a citizen -- i.e., not an inhabitant of cities -- but its foundation is the isolated, independent family settlement, guaranteed by means of its association with other such settlements by men of the same tribe, and their occassional assembly for purposes of war, religion, the settlement of legal disputes, etc., which establishes their mutual surety. Individual landed property does not here appear as a contradictory form of communal landed property, nor as mediated by the community, but the other way round. The community exists only in the mutual relation of the individual landowners as such. Communal property as such appears only as a communal accessory to the individual kin settlements and land appropriations. The community is neither the substance, of which the individual appears merely as the accident, nor is it the general, which _exists and has being_ as such in men's minds, and in the reality of the city and its urban requirements, distinct from the separate economic being of its members. It is rather on the one hand, the common element in language, blood, etc., which is the premise of the individual proprietor; but on the other hand, it has real being only in its _actual assembly_ for communal purposes; and, insofar as it has a separate economic existence, in the communally-used hunting-grounds,