Key Arguments

• Marx claims that ‘The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.’ This suggests an internal contradiction between developed social production and capitalist property forms.
• He declares that ‘This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.’, framing the overcoming of capitalism as a historically necessary outcome of its own development.
• He provides a dialectical account: ‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor.’
• He then states that ‘capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation.’, presenting the transition beyond capitalism as a necessary second negation.
• This second negation ‘does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.’

Source Quotes

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.

The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property.

The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation.

This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself. The transformation of scattered private property resting on the personal labour of the individuals themselves into capitalist private property is naturally an incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult process than the transformation of capitalist private property, which in fact already rests on the carrying on of production by society, into social property.

Key Concepts

• The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.
• This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
• The capitalist mode of appropriation, which springs from the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property.
• This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of its proprietor.
• But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.

Context

Marx draws the historical and dialectical conclusion of his analysis of accumulation: capitalist socialization of production undermines capitalist property relations, leading to their supersession by social property through a dialectical ‘negation of the negation’.