The analysis of landed property in its various historical forms is beyond
 the scope of this work. We shall be concerned with it only in so far as a
 portion of the surplus-value produced by capital falls to the share of the
 landowner. We assume, then, that agriculture is dominated by the capitalist
 mode of production just as manufacture is; in other words, that agriculture is
 carried on by capitalists who differ from other capitalists primarily in the
 manner in which their capital, and the wage-labour set in motion by this
 capital, are invested. So far as we are concerned, the farmer produces wheat,
 etc., in much the same way as the manufacturer produces yarn or machines. The
 assumption that the capitalist mode of production has encompassed agriculture
 implies that it rules over all spheres of production and bourgeois society,
 i.e., that its prerequisites, such as free competition among capitals, the
 possibility of transferring the latter from one production sphere to another,
 and a uniform level of the average profit, etc., are fully matured. The form of
 landed property which we shall consider here is a specifically historical one a
 form transformed through the influence of capital and of the
 capitalist mode of production, either of feudal landownership, or of
 small-peasant agriculture as a means of livelihood, in which the
 possession of the land and the soil constitutes one of the
 prerequisites of production for the direct producer, and in which his
 ownership of land appears as the most advantageous condition for the
 prosperity of his mode of production. Just as the capitalist mode of
 production in general is based on the expropriation of the conditions of labour
 from the labourers, so does it in agriculture presuppose the expropriation of
 the rural labourers from the land and their subordination to a capitalist, who
 carries on agriculture for the sake of profit. Thus, for the purpose of our
 analysis, the objection that other forms of landed property and of agriculture
 have existed, or still exist, is quite irrelevant. Such an objection can only
 apply to those economists who treat the capitalist mode of production in
 agriculture, and the form of landed property corresponding to it, not as
 historical but rather as eternal categories.