Production does not produce man only as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the form of a commodity; it also produces him as a mentally and physically dehumanized being... Immorality, malformation, stupidity of workers and capitalists... the human commodity... A great advance by Ricardo, Mill, etc., on Smith and Say, to declare the existence of the human being -- the greater or lesser human productivity of the commodity -- to be indifferent and even harmful . The real aim of production is not how many workers a particular sum of capital can support, but how much interest it brings in and how much it saves each year. Similarly, English political economy took a big step forward, and a logical one, when -- while acknowledging labor as the sole principle of political economy -- it showed with complete clarity that wages and interest on capital are inversely related and that, as a rule, the capitalist can push up his profits only by forcing down wages, and vice versa. Clearly, the normal relationship is not one in which the customer is cheated, but in which the capitalist and the worker cheat each other. The relation of private property contains latent within itself the relation of private property as labor, the relation of private property as capital, and the connection of these two. On the one hand, we have the production of human activity as labor -- i.e., as an activity wholly alien to itself, to man, and to nature, and hence to consciousness and vital expression, the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who, therefore, tumbles day-after-day from his fulfilled nothingness into absolute nothingness, into his social and, hence, real non-existence; and, on the other, the production of the object of human labor as capital, in which all the natural and social individuality of the object is extinguished and private property has lost its natural and social quality ( i.e., has lost all political and social appearances and is not even apparently tainted with any human relationships), in which the same capital stays the same in the most varied natural and social circumstance, totally indifferent to its real content. This contradiction, driven to its utmost limit, is necessarily the limit, the culmination and the decline of the whole system of private property.
It is, therefore, yet another great achievement of recent English political economy to have declared ground rent to be the difference between the interest on the worst and the best land under cultivation, to have confuted the romantic illusions of the land-owner -- his alleged social importance and the identity of his interest with the interest of society, which Adam Smith continued to propound after the Physiocrats -- and to have anticipated and prepared the changes in reality which will transform the land-owner into a quite ordinary and prosaic capitalist, thereby simplifying the contradiction, bringing it to a head and hastening its resolution. Land as land and ground rent as ground rent have thereby lost their distinction in rank and have become dumb capital and interest -- or, rather, capital and interest which only talk hard cash. The distinction between capital and land, between profit and ground rent, and the distinction between both and wages, industry, agriculture, and immovable and movable private property, is not one which is grounded in the nature of things, it is a historical distinction, a fixed moment in the formation and development of the opposition between capital and labor. In industry, etc., as opposed to immovable landed property, only the manner in which industry first arose and the opposition to agriculture within which industry developed, are expressed. As a special kind of work, as an essential, important, and life-encompassing distinction, this distinction between industry and agriculture survives only as long as industry (town life) is developing in opposition to landed property (aristocratic feudal life) and continues to bear the feudal characteristics of its opposite in the form of monopoly, crafts, guilds, corporations, etc. Given these forms, labor continues to have an apparently social meaning, the meaning of genuine community, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference towards its content and of complete being-for-itself -- i.e., of abstraction from all other being and, hence, of liberated capital.
But, the necessary development of labor is liberated industry constituted for itself as such, and liberated capital. The power of industry over its antagonist is, at once, manifested in the emergence of agriculture as an actual industry, whereas previously most of the work was left to the soil itself and to the slave of the soil, through whom the soil cultivated itself.
With the transformation of the slave into a free worker -- i.e., a hireling -- the landowner himself is transformed into a master of industry, a capitalist. This transformation at first took place through the agency of the tenant farmer. But the tenant farmer is the representative, the revealed secret, of the landowner; only through him does the landowner have his economic existence, his existence as a property owner -- for the ground rent of his land exists only because of the competition between the tenants. So, in the person of the tenant the landowner has already essentially become a common capitalist. And this must also be effected in reality; the capitalist engaged in agriculture -- the tenant -- must become a landlord, or vice-versa. The industrial trade of the tenant is the industrial trade of the landlord, for the existence of the former posits the existence of the latter.
