pc2 [3]
use. Exchange-value and its production presuppose the predominance of the other form. Thus in all the above circumstances, deliveries in kind and labor services [Naturaldienste] predominate over money payments and services remunerated by money. But this is only incidental [or this could be translated as "But this observation is by the way"]. Again, closer examination will also reveal that all the dissolved relations were rendered possible only by a certain degree of development of the material (and therefore also of the mental) productive forces. What concerns us at this point is the following. The process of dissolution which turns a mass of individuals in a nation, etc., into potential free wage-laborers -- individuals obliged merely by their lack of property to labor and to sell their labor -- does _not_ presuppose the _disappearance_ of the previous sources of income or (in part) of the previous conditions of property of these individuals. On the contrary, it assumes that _only_ their use has been altered, that their mode of existence has been transformed, that they have passed into other people's hands as a _free fund_, or perhaps that they have partly remained in _the same hands_. But this much is evident. The process which has in one way or another separated a mass of individuals from its previous affirmative relations to the _objective conditions of labor_, which negated these relations and thereby transformed these individuals into _free laborers_, is also the same process which has liberated these _objective conditions of labor_ potentially from _their previous ties_ to the individuals which are now separated from them. (These conditions of labor comprise land, raw material, means of subsistence, instruments of labor, money or all of these.) They are still _present_, but present in a different form, as a _free fund_, one in which all the old political, etc., relations are obliterated, and which now confront those separated, propertyless individuals merely in the form of _values_, of values maintaining themselves and each other [an sich festhaltenden Werten]. The same process which counterposes the masses of free laborers to the _objective conditions of labor_, has also counterposed these conditions to them as _capital_. The historic process was one of the separation of hitherto combined elements; its results is therefore not the disappearance of one of these elements, but a situation in which each of them appears negatively related to the other: the (potentially) free laborer on one hand, (potential) capital on the other. The separation of the objective conditions from the classes which are now transformed into free laborers, must equally appear at the opposite pole as the establishment of independence by these very conditions. Let us consider the relationship of capital and wage labor not as something which has already reached decisive importance, and encroaches on production as a whole (Marx note: For in this case capital, presupposed as the condition of wage-labor, is the product of labor, and established as condition by labor itself, created by labor as its own presupposition), but as something which is still in the process of historical formation. We consider the original transformation of money into capital, the process of exchange between capital existing only potentially on one hand, and the free laborers existing potentially on the other. We then find ourselves naturally making the simple observation, with which the economists make great play -- namely, that the side which appears as capital must possess raw materials, tools, and food enough to enable the worker to live before production is completed. Moreover, it would appear that accumulation -- an accumulation prior to labor and not arising from labor -- must have taken place on the part of the capitalist, which enables him to set the laborer to work and to maintain him in activity, as living labor power. (Marx note: Once capital and wage labor have been established