Further, the capitalist tries from the beginning to create docile and
unresisting masses of workers, and yet unites and combines them by the
creation of large centres of production; the factories become centres
for the organisation of the workers, and for the welding of the
individual wills of the proletarians into a class will; they abolish
the scattered and antagonistic interests of single sections of the
workers, and consolidate them into a unified class interest. Finally,
the whole economic process, which began by resting on individualist
principles, has assumed a common character; thousands upon thousands
of hand and brain workers engage in production in economic
undertakings upon a single and uniform plan, with the aid of
productive implements which can only be used in common.
The significance and tendency of these contradictions are sketched by
Marx in the great finale, which properly belongs to the concluding
chapter of the third volume:
"As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed
the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are
turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon
as the capitalist means of production stands on its own feet, then the
further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land
and other means of production into socially exploited, and therefore
common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of
private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be
expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the
capitalist employing many labourers. This expropriation is
accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist
production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist
always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this
expropriation of many capitalists by a few, develop on an
ever-extending scale the co-operative form of the labour process, the
conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation
of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into
instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all
means of production by their use as the means of production of
combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the
net of the world market, and with this, the international character of
the capitalist regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number
of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of
this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression,
slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this, too, grows the
revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and
disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of
capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter
on the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along
with it, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and
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