The change of private property includes the change from slavery to feudalism to the "historical replacement" of capitalist private property, as well as the change in feudal land ownership from subordination to peasantry, serfdom to self-employment, and the "historical change" of capitalist private property from simple cooperative handicraft industry to large-scale production of machines. In the final analysis, these changes are all "permissible changes" in the development of material production conditions, "changes in requirements" in the development of material productive forces, and "changes in testing" in the development of material production.
Although private property arouses "the most despicable motives and lusts of men", and is motivated by despicable greed, with personal wealth as "the only and decisive end", at the expense of "the destruction of all other endowments of man", and even denounced by Engels as "simply a degeneration", this does not in any way prevent private property from opening up the "age of civilization". Unlike the era of obscurantism and barbarism, in the "age of civilization", the division of labor and exchange, as well as the full development of commodity production combined with the two, "completely changed the whole society that preceded it" and "accomplished what the ancient clan society could not do at all." Compared with the primitive tribes, clans, and commune communities, whose economy is essentially common production, common consumption, and common ownership, the production process in the civilized era "loses the commonality of production and possession under the slow intrusion of the division of labor", and also makes individual appropriation and exchange "dominant rules", and commodity production becomes the form of domination. With this, on the one hand, wealth accumulates rapidly and is concentrated in the hands of the aristocracy; on the other hand, production continues to develop, the productivity of labour and the value created by labour are constantly increasing, and the labour of the people has been able to produce a product which far exceeds that which is necessary for the maintenance of labour-power, and the labour of man has been able to produce a significant balance in excess of the costs of maintaining it. Thus, the aristocratic classes that wielded vast amounts of wealth became profitable by absorbing new labor and forcing captives into slavery. The phenomenon of slavery, which had been occasional, scattered and hidden, had now become an inevitable, universal, and open system of slavery; slaves, who had served only as assistants to simple labour, had now become the protagonists of labour in large farms and handicraft workshops; and slave labour, which had been scattered and individualized, had now become slave labour on a centralized scale. This society, in which "wealth is the sole purpose" and "wealth is praised, revered and justified as the highest welfare," not only accelerates the accumulation of property in patriarchal families, intensifies wars among tribes over slave property, opens up the prospect of more enslaved captives and tribesmen to make them slaves, but also achieves the scale efficiency and comparative advantage of slave labor on the basis of division of labor and exchange, as Morgan put it: "Since the beginning of civilization, wealth has grown so greatly, and it has taken so many forms, Its uses are so widespread, and its management for the benefit of its owners is so ingenious that wealth becomes an uncontrollable force for the people. ”
However, "success is also Xiao He, and defeat is also Xiao He." Large estates and handicraft workshops, made by slaves who used slaves on a large scale, also decayed in the development of slavery. In Italy, large estates at the time of the decline of the Roman republic were operated in two ways: either as pastures, where the inhabitants were replaced by cattle and sheep, for they were guarded by only a few slaves, or as farms, where large numbers of slaves were used to run large-scale horticultural industries to meet the needs of the lords' lavish life and the sale of them in the city market. But with the decline of the cities, the disappearance of the markets, and the ruin of the lords, the slavery village estates and the urban handicraft workshops gradually lost their comparative advantage because the large-scale use of slave labor could not provide sufficient benefits to compensate for the labor consumed. On the one hand, because slaves, as the property of others, have no personal freedom and no property rights, and their labor is completely passive under high-pressure compulsion, without autonomy, enthusiasm, creativity, and efficiency to speak of; on the other hand, many oppressed slaves work together, not only have the difficulty of centralized management, but also have the risk of "uncovering the pole". In this way, economies of scale, in which large estates and handicraft workshops concentrated on large numbers of slaves, would become lackluster and more than worth the losses in the face of these increasing management costs. Now slavery has become a superfluous burden, slavery has no economic advantages to speak of, no profits to be gained, has become obsolete, and can only perish.
Of course, slavery was only the first form of exploitation in the ancient world, and only the first form of private property. As the massive production of the Roman Empire's boom years shrank to small agriculture and small handicrafts, small-scale operations once again became the only favorable form of farming. Now the farms are now divided into small plots of land, which are rented to hereditary sharecroppers who pay a certain amount of money, or to the divided peasants. Some of the "free small peasants" who existed, in order not to be brutally abused by officials, judges and usurers, voluntarily sheltered the powerful for protection. They transferred ownership of their land to the magnates, who promised them that they would lease the land back to farming for the rest of their lives, on the condition that they pay the rent in the form of labor, in kind, in currency, etc. Although this tenancy relationship between the lord and the serfs and subordinate peasants was not completely freed from the super-economic personal dependency relationship, it was still a form of ownership that took possession of the surplus products of others without compensation. However, for the serfs and subordinate peasants, the rent-fine relationship of the sharing system had some advantages of "giving enough to the lord, and the rest are their own". Thus, in contrast to the complete supra-economic coercion of slavery, there are some economic mechanisms and comparative advantages that motivate the labor of serfs. If we consider the following factors, it is easier to understand the historical inevitability behind the historical alternation of slavery to feudalism. On the one hand, the feudal ownership structure is often determined by narrow relations of production, crude and primitive land cultivation and handicraft industry, and the social differentiation and property distribution in the period of the fall of the Roman Empire are exactly corresponding to the level of agricultural and industrial production based on manual labor at that time, and are therefore inevitable, which is probably what Marx called "the society led by feudal lords produced by hand grinding". On the other hand, as long as there is no substantial change in this productive force marked by hand tools, so that the "hand mill" still does not become a "steam mill", then this situation, premised on the low degree of agricultural and industrial development, will inevitably reproduce the feudal property system and ownership relations repeatedly, and it will also repeatedly reproduce the dominant large landlords, the dependent small peasants and the feudal or hierarchical ownership. In Europe, this level of production did not fundamentally decline or rise for the next 400 years.
Not only that, but in contrast to the ancient starting point of the city and its small territory, the medieval starting point was the countryside. This change in the starting point stems from the sparsely populated and scattered natural conditions of medieval Europe, coupled with the invasion of conquerors, which not only greatly destroyed the productive forces, but also the decline of agriculture, the collapse of industry due to the lack of marketing channels, and the stagnation or forced interruption of commerce, resulting in a decrease in urban and rural residents. Thus, in contrast to Greece and Rome, the development of feudalism in Europe began on a much wider territory prepared precisely by the Roman conquest and the agricultural popularization associated with it in the first place. And the feudal ownership formed on this basis, although it is based on a certain community, like tribal ownership and commune ownership, this "community" is no longer a tribe, clan and commune based on blood relations, but an economic and political "association" formed by the landowners to deal with the ruled production class; the direct production class opposed to the community is no longer the slaves of ancient times, but the small serfs of the present. In this new type of relationship, the hierarchical structure of land ownership and the associated system of armed subordination gave the lords and nobles the power to dominate the serfs; the serfs succumbed to this pressure and could only attach themselves to the lords and contribute surplus labour in the form of rent. Of course, the labour of the estates and the serfs bound to the estates was initially accompanied by its own labour, which had a small amount of capital and dominated the labour of the helpers. When serfdom gradually disintegrated by constraining the productive forces, the peasants began to gain the upper hand. In England, serfdom ceased to exist at the end of the fourteenth century, and the vast majority of the population that was replaced by free peasants were freeholders, and by the last decades of the seventeenth century freeholders had made up the vast majority of the population, even more independent peasants than peasants on leased land, although their ownership was still hidden behind feudal signs. This quiet change has adapted to both "manual grinding" and "steam milling". Now, the last role of private ownership is finally coming, this role is notorious, called "capital"!
The shift from feudal ownership to capital ownership, although only a change in the form of private property, slavery and exploitation, is also a kind of "historical change" and "political revolution". Just as Solon cleared the land of indebtedness and allowed those who had been betrayed and fled abroad because of their debts to return to their homes, so all so-called political revolutions were expropriations of property for the protection of one property, of supporting one property against another, of defending one property against another, of protecting one kind of property and of another. The difference is that the "Solon Revolution" was to damage the property of creditors in order to protect the property of debtors; the "French Revolution" was to sacrifice feudal ownership to save bourgeois ownership.
Capitalist private property arose in the disintegration of feudal private property and was also accomplished through the primitive accumulation of capital. In the "Prelude to the Change That Laid the Foundations for the Capitalist Mode of Production", which was staged in the last 30 years of the 15th century and the first decades of the 16th century, the expropriation of the peasants' land and the separation of the producers from the means of production constituted the whole essence, the whole basis, the whole movement of the history of the primitive accumulation of capital. This "essence", "foundation", "movement", on the one hand, the emancipation of the producer from the bondage of subordination and guilds as free men, on the other hand, the deprivation of all means of production by the producer and the proletarian; on the other hand, the transformation of the means of subsistence and production of society into capital, on the other hand, the transformation of the direct producer into a wage-worker; on the other hand, the owner of capital who wants to buy the labour-power of others in order to increase his own value. On the other hand, free labourers sell their labour-power to obtain wages at the cost of creating surplus prices.
Although this historical movement, whether it is the enclosure movement of "sheep eating people" or the "territorial sweeping" of the peasants' land on a large scale for the last time; whether it is the use of "bloody legislation" to force workers to accept the minimum wage and abide by factory discipline, or the use of brutal and terrorist means to turn feudal property into modern private property; whether it is the promotion of overseas colonial system, the slave trade, the issuance of state bonds, the establishment of a modern tax system and tariff system, and so on, all use the most cruel and ruthless barbaric means, in the most vulgar, dirty, Driven by the most despicable and hateful greed, they are recorded in the annals of mankind in words of blood and fire, and are also filled with violent means of conquest, enslavement, plunder, killing, etc., "all shed with blood and filth." However, it is still a historical necessity, a historical requirement, and a historical progress. Of course, this lies in the emancipation of serfs, the rise of the self-employed peasants and the polarization of the commodity market, which has prepared for capitalist ownership relations the free wage-labourers who have lost their means of production and the owners who have accumulated more and more wealth, thus creating the basic conditions for capitalist production and forming the basic premise of capitalist relations of production, so that even without the "midwives" and "accelerators" of the primitive accumulation of capital, the "black whirlwind" of capitalist private property will sooner or later sweep through Europe and even the whole world. At the same time, it is precisely because of the existence of these basic conditions and the creation of basic premises that not only the workers, their means of subsistence and labor materials are freed up for urban industrial capital, but also the domestic market and the "united" workshop handicraft industry, which is more economical and more productive than the scattered workshops. Capitalist production actually begins with the simultaneous employment of more workers in the same capital. It is precisely this united workshop handicraft that forms new productive forces of scale, collective productivity, division of labor productive forces, and competitive productive forces, adapts to the increasingly prosperous commodity economy, increasingly fierce free competition, and the expanding world market, and also gives birth to the industrial revolution and large-scale machine industry. The bloody primitive accumulation of capital, on the other hand, has taken advantage of the trend and gone with the flow to greatly accelerate the process of this historical replacement and greatly raised the level of development of the material productive forces.
This is reminiscent of the positive appraisal made by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of the bourgeoisie, the "spell played by capitalist property": "The productive forces created by the bourgeoisie in its less than a hundred years of class rule are more and greater than all the productive forces created by all previous generations." The conquest of the forces of nature, the adoption of machines, the application of chemistry in industry and agriculture, the movement of ships, the passage of railways, the use of the telegraph, the reclamation of the whole continent, the navigation of rivers, as if by magic to call out a large number of people from the underground,—— which century in the past could have expected such productive forces in social labor? ”