What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e.,
 its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate
 transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a
 mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers,
 i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of
 its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property,
 exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour
 belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals
 are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character.
 The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the
 intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property
 of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry,
 whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is
 an essential condition for the development of social production and of
 the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode
 of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence.
 But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate
 classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own
 means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which
 he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.
 This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering
 of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these
 means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour
 within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive
 application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development
 of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of
 production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive
 bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree
 universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth
 the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces
 and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social
 organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated;
 it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised
 and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the
 pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation
 of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence,
 and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of
 the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It
 comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review
 only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation
 of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished
 with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous,
 the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private
 property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated,
 independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted
 by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally
 free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour. [1]