pc2 [2]
North, among the Greeks and in Asia. The right of the creditor to take the defaulting debtor into servitude, and to redeem the debt either by his labor or by the sale of his person, was almost equally widespread." (Neibuhr, I, 600) [In another passage, Niebuhr explains the difficulties and misunderstandings of Greek writers of the Augustan period over the relationship between Patricians and Plebians and their confusion of this relationship with that between Patrons and Clients, as being due to the fact that "they were writing at a time when rich and poor constituted the only real classes of citizens; where the man in need, no matter how noble his origins, required a Patron and the millionaire, even though only a freedman, was sough after as a Patron. They could find scarcely a trace of inherited relations of attachment". (I.620)] "Artisans were to be found in both classes (resident aliens and freedmen together with their descendants), and plebians who abandoned agriculture passed into the limited citizen status enjoyed by these. Nor did they lack the honor of legally recognized gilds, and these were so highly respected that Numa was supposed to have been their founder. There were nine such gilds; pipers, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, harness-makers, tanners, saddlers, coppersmiths, and potters, the ninth corporation embracing the rest of the crafts.... Those among them were independent citizens, or who enjoyed a status equivalent to citizenship, independent of any patron (supposing such status was recognized); or those who were descendants of dependent men whose bond had lapsed with the extinction of their patrons' families: these undoubtedly remained as remote from the quarrels of ancient citizens and the commons [der Gemeinde] as the Florentine gilds remained outside the feuds of the Guelf and Ghibelline families. It is probable that the population in servitude were still as a whole at the disposal of the patricians." (I,623) On the one hand, we presuppose historical processes which transform a mass of individuals of a nation, if not perhaps immediately into genuine free laborers, then at any rate into potential free laborers, whose property is their labor-power and the possibility of exchanging it for the existing values. Such individuals confront all objective conditions of production as _alien property_, as their own _non-property_, but at the same time as something which can be exchanged as _values_ and therefore to some extent appropriated by living labor. Such historic processes of dissolution are the following: -- the dissolution of the servile relationship which binds the laborer to the soil, and to the lord of the soil, but in fact assumes his property in the means of subsistence (which amounts in truth to his reparation from the soil); -- the dissolution of relations of property which constitute a laborer as yeoman, or free, working, petty landowner or tenant (colonus), or free peasant [note by Marx: We take for granted the dissolution of the even more ancient forms of communal property and real community]; -- the dissolution of gild relations which presuppose the laborer's property in the instrument of production and labor itself, as a certain form of craft skill [handwerksmassig bestimmte Geschicklichkeit] not merely as the source of property but as property itself; -- also the dissolution of the relation of clientship in its different types, in which _non-proprietors_ appear as co-consumers of the surplus produce in the retinue of their lord, and in return wear his livery, take part in his feuds, perform real or imaginary acts of personal service, etc. Closer analysis will show that what is dissolved in all these processes of dissolution are relations of production in which use-value predominates; production for immediate