Landed property is based on the monopoly by certain persons over definite
 portions of the globe, as exclusive spheres of their private will to the
 exclusion of all others.[26] With this in mind, the problem is to ascertain the
 economic value, that is, the realisation of this monopoly on the basis of
 capitalist production. With the legal power of these persons to use or misuse
 certain portions of the globe, nothing is decided. The use of this power
 depends wholly upon economic conditions, which are independent of their will.
 The legal view itself only means that the landowner can do with the land what
 every owner of commodities can do with his commodities. And this view, this
 legal view of free private ownership of land, arises in the ancient world only
 with the dissolution of the organic order of society, and in the modern world
 only with the development of capitalist production. It has been imported by
 Europeans to Asia only here and there. In the section dealing with primitive
 accumulation (Buch I, Kap. XXIV [English edition: Part VIII. —
 Ed].), we saw that this mode of production presupposes, on the one
 hand, the separation of the direct producers from their position as mere
 accessories to the land (in the form of vassals, serfs, slaves, etc.), and, on
 the other hand, the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land. To
 this extent the monopoly of landed property is a historical premise, and
 continues to remain the basis of the capitalist mode of production, just as in
 all previous modes of production which are based on the exploitation of the
 masses in one form or another. But the form of landed property with which the
 incipient capitalist mode of production is confronted does not suit it. It
 first creates for itself the form required by subordinating agriculture to
 capital. It thus transforms feudal landed property, clan property, small
 peasant property in mark communes — no matter how divergent their
 juristic forms may be — into the economic form corresponding to the
 requirements of this mode of production. One of the major results of the
 capitalist mode of production is that, on the one hand, it transforms
 agriculture from a mere empirical and mechanical self-perpetuating process
 employed by the least developed part of society into the conscious scientific
 application of agronomy, in so far as this is at all feasible under conditions
 of private property;[27]
 that it divorces landed property from the relations of dominion and servitude,
 on the one hand, and, on the other, totally separates land as an instrument of
 production from landed property and landowner — for whom the land merely
 represents a certain money assessment which he collects by virtue of his
 monopoly from the industrial capitalist, the capitalist farmer; it dissolves
 the connection between landownership and the land so thoroughly that the
 landowner may spend his whole life in Constantinople, while his estates lie in
 Scotland. Landed property thus receives its purely economic form by discarding
 all its former political and social embellishments and associations, in brief
 all those traditional accessories, which are denounced, as we shall see later,
 as useless and absurd superfluities by the industrial capitalists themselves,
 as well as their theoretical spokesmen, in the heat of their struggle with
 landed property. The rationalising of agriculture, on the one hand, which makes
 it for the first time capable of operating on a social scale, and the reduction
 ad absurdum of property in land, on the other, are the great
 achievements of the capitalist mode of production. Like all of its other
 historical advances, it also attained these by first completely impoverishing
 the direct producers.