pc2 [6]
nd it is _this_ which enables money to turn into _capital_. Insofar as money itself plays a part here, it is only to the extent that it is itself an extremely powerful agent of dissolution which intervenes in the process, and hence contributes to the creation of the _plucked_, objectiveless, _free laborers_. It is certainly not by _creating_ the objective conditions of such laborers' existence, but rather by accelerating their separation from them -- i.e., by accelerating their loss of property. For instance, when the great English landowners dismissed their retainers, who had consumed a share of their surplus produce of their land; when their farmers drove out the small cottagers, etc., then a doubly free mass of living labor power was thrown on to the _labor market_: free from the old relation of clientship, villeinage, or service, but also free from all goods or chattels, from every real and objective form of existence, _free from all property_. Such a mass would be reduced either to the sale of its labor power or to beggary, vagabondage, or robbery as its only source of income. History records the fact that it first tried beggary, vagabondage, and crime, but was herded off this road on to the narrow path which led to the labor market by means of the gallows, pillory, and whip. (Hence the _governments_ of Henry VII, VIII, etc., also appear as conditions of the historic process of dissolution and as creators of the conditions for the existence of capital.) Conversely, the means of subsistence formerly consumed by the lords and their retainers, were now available for purchase by money, and money wished to purchase them in order through their instrumentality to purchase labor. Money had neither created nor accumulated these means of subsistence. They were already present, consumed, and reproduced, before they were consumed and reproduced through the intervention of money. The only change was that these means of production were now thrown on to the _exchange-market_. They had now been detached from their immediate connection with the mouths of the retainers, etc., and transformed from use-values into exchange-values, thus falling under the government and sovereignty of monetary wealth. The same applies to the instruments of labor. Monetary wealth neither invented nor manufactured spinning wheel and loom. But once spinners and weavers had been separated from their land, they and their wheels and looms came under the sway of monetary wealth, etc. _Capital unites the masses of hands and instruments which are already there. This and only this is what characterizes it. It brings them together under its sway._ This is its _real accumulation_; the accumulation of laborers plus their instruments at given points. We shall have to go into this more deeply when we come to the so-called accumulation of capital. Admittedly, monetary wealth in the form of merchants' wealth had helped to accelerate and dissolve the old relations of production, and had, e.g., enabled the landowner to exchange his corn, cattle, etc., for imported use-values, instead of squandering his own production with his retainers, whose number, indeed, was to a large extent taken as the measure of his wealth. (This point has already been neatly made by A. Smith.) Monetary wealth had given greater significance to the exchange-value of his retinue. This was also true of his tenants, who were already semi-capitalists, though in a rather disguised manner. The evolution of exchange-value is favored by the existence of _money_ in the form of a social order of merchants. It dissolves a production whose object is primarily immediate use-value, and the forms of property which correspond to such production -- the relations of labor to its objective conditions -- thus giving an impetus to the creation of a _labor market_ (not to be confused with a slave market). However, even this effect of money is possible only if we presuppose the existence of _urban craft activity_, which rests _not_