pc1 [9]
narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature -- those of his own nature as well as those of so-called "nature"? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution -- i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any _previously established_ yardstick -- an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois political economy -- and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds -- this complete elaboration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is _vulgar_ and _mean_ [gemein]. What Mr. Proudhon calls the _extra-economic_ origin of property -- by which he means landed property -- is the pre-bourgeois relationship of the individual to the objective conditions of labor, and in the first instance to the _natural_ objective conditions of labor. For, just as the working subject is a natural individual, a natural being, so the first objective condition of his labor appears as nature, earth, as an inorganic body. He himself is not only the organic body, but also inorganic nature as a subject. This condition is not something he has produced, but something he finds to hand; something existing in nature and which he presupposed. Before proceeding in our analysis, a further point: poor Proudhon not only could, but ought equally to be obliged, to accuse _capital_ and _wage-labor_ -- as forms of property -- of _extra-economic_ origin. For the fact that the worker finds the objective condition of his labor as something separate from him, as _capital_, and the fact that the capitalist finds the _worker_ propertyless, as abstract laborers -- the exchange as it takes place between value and living labor -- assumes a _historic process_, however much capital and wage-labor themselves reproduce this relationship and elaborate it in objective scope, as well as in depth. And this historic process, as we have seen, is the evolutionary history of both capital and wage-labor. In other words, the _extra-economic origin_ of property merely means the historic origin of the bourgeois economy, of the forms of production to which the categories of political economy give theoretical or ideal expression. But to claim that pre-bourgeois history and each phase of it, has its own _economy_ [Okonomie -- not clear if Marx means "economies" or "economy"] and an _economic base_ of its movement, is at bottom merely to state the tautology that human life has always rested on some kind of production -- _social_ production -- whose relations are precisely what we call economic relations. The original conditions of production cannot initially be themselves produced -- they are not the results are not the results of production. (Instead of original conditions of production we might also say: for if this reproduction appears on one hand as the appropriation of the objects by the subjects, it equally appears on the other as the moulding, the subjection, of the objects by and to a subjective purpose; the transformation of the objects into results and repositories of subjective activity.) What requires