The Universalist Tendencies Inherent in Capitalism

While on the one hand capital must thus seek to pull down every local barrier to commerce, i.e. to exchange, in order to capture the whole world as its market, on the other hand it strives to destroy space by means of time, i.e. to restrict to a minimum the time required for movement from one place to another. The more developed capital is, and thus the more extensive the market through which it circulates and which constitutes the spatial route of its circulation, the more it will aspire to greater extension in space for its market, and thus to greater destruction of space by time. (If working time is not considered as the working day of the individual worker, but as an indeterminate working day of an indeterminate number of workers, all population relationships come into this; the basic theory of population is thus also included in this first chapter on capital, in the same way as the theory of profit, price, credit, etc.) We see here the universal tendency of capital which distinguishes it from all earlier stages of production. Although it is itself limited by its own nature, capital strives after the universal development of productive forces, and thus becomes the prerequisite for a new means of production.