In Part IV, it was shown, how the development of the productiveness of
 social labour presupposes co-operation on a large scale; how it is only upon
 this supposition that division and combination of labour can be organised, and
 the means of production economised by concentration on a vast scale; how
 instruments of labour which, from their very nature, are only fit for use in
 common, such as a system of machinery, can be called into being; how huge
 natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the
 transformation can be effected of the process of production into a
 technological application of science. On the basis of the production of
 commodities, where the means of production are the property of private persons,
 and where the artisan therefore either produces commodities, isolated from and
 independent of others, or sells his labour power as a commodity, because he
 lacks the means for independent industry, co-operation on a large scale can
 realise itself only in the increase of individual capitals, only in proportion
 as the means of social production and the means of subsistence are transformed
 into the private property of capitalists. The basis of the production of
 commodities can admit of production on a large scale in the capitalistic form
 alone. A certain accumulation of capital, in the hands of individual producers
 of commodities, forms therefore the necessary preliminary of the specifically
 capitalistic mode of production. We had, therefore, to assume that this occurs
 during the transition from handicraft to capitalistic industry. It may be
 called primitive accumulation, because it is the historic basis, instead of the
 historic result of specifically capitalist production. How it itself
 originates, we need not here inquire as yet. It is enough that it forms the
 starting point. But all methods for raising the social productive power of
 labour that are developed on this basis, are at the same time methods for the
 increased production of surplus-value or surplus-product, which in its turn is
 the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, at the same time
 methods of the production of capital by capital, or methods of its accelerated
 accumulation. The continual re-transformation of surplus-value into capital now
 appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters
 into the process of production. This in turn is the basis of an extended scale
 of production, of the methods for raising the productive power of labour that
 accompany it, and of accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a
 certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a condition of the
 specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter causes conversely an
 accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital,
 therefore, the specifically capitalistic mode of production develops, and with
 the capitalist mode of production the accumulation of capital. Both these
 economic factors bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they
 reciprocally give one another, that change in the technical composition of
 capital by which the variable constituent becomes always smaller and smaller as
 compared with the constant.