pc2 [7]
on capital and wage-labor, but on the organization of labor in gilds, etc. Urban labor itself had created the means of production, for which the gilds became as great an embarrassment as were the old relations of landed property in an improved agriculture, which was in turn partly the consequence of the greater sale of agricultural products to the cities, etc. Other circumstances assisted the dissolution of the old relations of production, accelerated the separation of the laborer or the non-laborer capable of work, from the objective conditions of his reproduction, and thus advanced the transformation of money into capital. Such were, e.g., the factors which in the 16th century increased the mass of commodities in circulation, the mass of currency in circulation, creating new needs and consequently raising the exchange value of native products, raising prices, etc. Nothing can therefore be more foolish than to conceive the _original formation_ of capital as if it meant the accumulation and creation of the _objective conditions of production_ -- food, raw materials, instruments -- which were then offered to the _dispossessed_ workers. What happened was rather that monetary wealth partly helped to detach the labor power of the individuals capable of work from these conditions. The rest of this process of separation proceeded without the intervention of monetary wealth. Once the original formation of capital had reached a certain level, monetary wealth could insert itself as an intermediary between the objective conditions of life, now "liberated" and the equally liberated, but now also _unfettered and footloose_, living labor powers, buying the one with the other. As to the _formation of monetary wealth_ itself, before its transformation into capital: this belongs to the prehistory of the bourgeois economy. Usury, trade, the cities and government finance which arise with them, play the chief parts in it. Also _hoarding_ by tenant farmers, peasants, etc., though to a smaller extent. Trade is everywhere the intermediary for exchange value, or alternatively, the transfer of exchange value can be described as trade -- for just as circulation acquires an independent existence in commerce, so does money in the social stratum of the merchants. We may see that the development of exchange and exchange-value brings about both the dissolution of labor's relations of property in its conditions of existence and also of labor as something which is itself part of the objective conditions of production. All these are relations which express both a predominance of use-value and of production directed towards immediate consumption, and also the predominance of a real community which is still present as an immediate prerequisite of production. Production based on exchange-value and a community based on the exchange of these exchange-values, and labor as the general condition of wealth, all presuppose and produce the separation of labor from its objective conditions. Though, as we saw in the last chapter on money, production for exchange and community based on exchange may appear to posit property as deriving solely from _labor_, and private property in the production of one's labor as a precondition, this appearance is deceptive. The exchange of equivalents occurs (but it is merely) the surface layer of a production which rests on the appropriation of other people's labor _without exchange_, but under the _guise of exchange_. This system of exchange has _capital_ as its basis. If we consider it in isolation from capital, as it appears on the surface, as an _independent_ system, this is mere _illusion_, though a _necessary illusion_. It is therefore no longer surprising to find that the system of exchange-values -- the exchange of equivalents measured in labor -- turns into the _appropriation of other people's labor without exchange_, the total separation of labor and property, or rather that it reveals this appropriation as its concealed background. For the rule