M — L. The wage-laborer lives only by the sale of his labour-power.
 Its preservation — his preservation — requires daily consumption. Hence
 payment for it must be continuously repeated at rather short intervals in order that he may be able to repeat acts L — M — C or C — M — C, repeat
 the purchases needed for his self-preservation. For this reason the capitalist
 must always meet the wage-laborer in the capacity of a money-capitalist,
 and his capital as money-capital. On the other hand if the wage-labourers,
 the mass of direct producers, are to perform the act L — M — C, they must
 constantly be faced with the necessary means of subsistence in purchasable
 form, i.e., in the form of commodities. This state of affairs necessitates
 a high degree of development of the circulation of products in the form
 of commodities, hence also of the volume of commodities produced. When
 production by means of wage-labour becomes universal, commodity production
 is bound to be the general form of production. This mode of production,
 once it is assumed to be general, carries in its wake an ever increasing
 division of social labour, that is to say an ever growing differentiation
 of the articles which are produced in the form of commodities by a definite
 capitalist, ever greater division of complementary processes of production
 into independent processes. M — MP therefore develops to the same extent
 as M — L does, that is to say the production of means of production is
 divorced to that extent from the production of commodities whose means
 of production they are. And the latter then stand opposed to every producer
 of commodities which he does not produce but buys for his particular process
 of production. They come from branches of production which, operated independently,
 are entirely divorced from his own, enter into his own branch as commodities,
 and must therefore be bought. The material conditions of commodity production
 face him more and more as products of other commodity producers, as commodities.
 And to the same extent the capitalist must assume the role of money-capitalist,
 in other words there is an increase in the scale on which his capital must
 assume the functions of money-capital.