Wage-Labour, Capital and Landed Property

We must bear in mind that new productive forces and new relationships of production do not evolve from nothing, nor from the air or the womb of the self-positing idea; they evolve inside, and in opposition to, an already present stage in the development and inherited, traditional property relationships. If, in the completed bourgeois system, every economic relationship presupposes another in a bourgeois economic form so that every factor posited is at the same time a presupposition, then this is no different from any other organic system. This organic system itself as a totality has its own presuppositions and its development to a totality consists precisely in its subordinating all elements of society to itself or creating out of society the organs that it is still lacking. It thus becomes historically a totality. Its becoming this totality constitutes a moment of its process, of its development. On the other hand when, inside a society, modern relationships of production, i.e. capital, have developed to their totality and this society then conquers a new terrain (as, for example, in colonies), its representative, the capitalist, finds that his capital can no longer be capital unless there is wage-labour and that a precondition of this is not only landed property in general, but modern landed property the expense of whose capitalised rent excludes as such the direct exploitation of the earth by individuals.