The Rise and Fall of Economic Systems — Das Kapital

Marx stops to ask what all the robbery of the earlier chapters adds up to. Apart from slaves and serfs simply becoming wage workers, it means one thing: the end of private property that rests on the owner's own labour. That older property belongs to the peasant on his own land and the artisan with the tool he handles like a virtuoso. It gives the worker freedom and lets loose his whole energy. But it also keeps the soil in parcels and the tools scattered, so it shuts out cooperation, division of labour and the use of science by society. To keep it going, he says with Pecqueur, would be to decree universal mediocrity. At a certain stage it breeds the forces that dissolve it. The old social order holds them down until it is annihilated, and it was annihilated with merciless vandalism: the small property of the many became the huge property of the few.

Then the process turns on itself. The one now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself but the capitalist who exploits many labourers. The laws of capitalist production do this work on their own, through the centralisation of capital: one capitalist always kills many. As the owners dwindle, the labour process becomes more cooperative, science is applied on purpose, the soil is farmed by method, tools can only be used in common, and all peoples are caught in the net of the world market. The few magnates who keep the gains see misery, oppression and exploitation grow beneath them. So does the revolt of a working class that the factory system itself trains, unites and organises.

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the very mode of production that grew up under it. Centralised production and socialised labour reach a point where they no longer fit their capitalist shell. The shell bursts, the knell of capitalist private property sounds, and the expropriators are expropriated. Marx calls this the negation of the negation. It does not give the producer his scattered private plot back. It gives him individual property built on cooperation and the common possession of land and tools. The first change was slow, violent and hard. In it, a few usurpers expropriated the mass of the people. In the second, the mass of the people expropriate a few usurpers.