474In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more
 revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for this reason, that it annihilates
 the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him by the wage-labourer.
 Thus the desire for social changes, and the class antagonisms are brought
 to the same level in the country as in the towns. The irrational, old-fashioned
 methods of agriculture are replaced by scientific ones. Capitalist production
 completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture
 and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same time it creates the material
 conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture
 and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have each acquired
 during their temporary separation. Capitalist production, by collecting
 the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance
 of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive
 power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter
 between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its
 elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore
 violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By
 this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer
 and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. [244]
 But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance
 of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration
 as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form
 appropriate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture as
 in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital,
 means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument
 of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing
 the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes
 is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual
 vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural labourers
 over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration
 increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the
 urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour
 set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease
 labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture
 is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the 475 or p 508 in MECW v. 35labourer,
 but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the
 soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources
 of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation
 of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid
 is this process of destruction. [245] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes
 into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the
 soil and the labourer.