pc2 [5]
a certain craft skill, the existence of the instrument as a means of labor, etc. -- is found _ready to hand_ by capital in this preparatory or first period of capital. This is partly the result of the urban gild system, partly of domestic industry, or such industry as exists as an accessory to agriculture. The historic process is not the result of capital, but its prerequisite. By means of this process, the capitalist then inserts himself as a (historical) middleman between landed property and labor. History ignores the sentimental illusions about capitalist and laborer forming an association, etc.; nor is there a trace of such illusions in the development of the concept of capital. Sporadically, _manufacture_ may develop locally in a framework belonging to quite a different period, as in the Italian cities _side by side_ with the gilds. But if capital is to be the generally dominant form of an epoch, its conditions must be developed not merely locally, but on a large scale. (This is compatible with the possibility that during the dissolution of the gilds individual gild-masters may turn into industrial capitalists; however, in the nature of the phenomenon, this happens rarely. All in all, the entire gild system -- both master and journeyman -- dies out, where the capitalist and laborer emerge.) However, it is evident, and borne out by closer analysis of the historic epoch which we are now discussing, that the _age of dissolution_ of the earlier modes of production and relations of the worker to the objective conditions of labor, is _simultaneously an age_ in which _monetary wealth_ has already developed to a certain extent, and also one in which it is rapidly growing and expanding, by means of the circumstances which accelerate this dissolution. Just as it is itself an agent of that dissolution, so that dissolution is the condition of its transformation into capital. But the _mere existence of monetary wealth_, even its conquest of a sort of supremacy, is not sufficient for this _dissolution to result in capital_. If it were, then ancient Rome, Byzantium, etc., would have concluded their history with free labor and capital, or rather, would have entered upon a new history. There the dissolution of the old relations of property was also tied to the development of monetary wealth -- of commerce, etc. However, in fact the result of this dissolution was not industry, but the domination of countryside over city. The _original formations of capital_ does not, as is often supposed, proceed by the _accumulation_ of food, tools, raw materials or in short, of the _objective_ conditions of labor detached from the soil and already fused with human labor. [Marx note: Nothing is more obviously and superficially circular than the reasoning which argues (a) that the _workers_ who must be employed by capital if capital is to exist as such, must first be _created_ and called into life by _its_ accumulation (waiting, as it were, on its "Let there be labor"); while (b) capital could not accumulate without alien labor, except perhaps its own labor. I.e., that capital might itself exist in the form of _non-capital_ and _non-money_, for prior to the existence of capital, labor can only realize its value in the form of handicraft work, of petty agriculture, etc.; in short, of forms, all of which permit little or _no accumulation_, allow for only a small surplus produce, and _consume_ the greater part of that. We shall have to return to the concept of "accumulation" later.] Not by means of capital creating the objective conditions of labor. Its _original formation_ occurs simply because the historic process of the dissolution of an old mode of production, allows value, existing in the form of _monetary wealth_ to _buy_ the objective conditions of labor on one hand, to exchange the _living_ labor o the now free workers for money, on the other. All these elements are already in existence. What separates them out is a historical process, a process of dissolution,