Even with machines that were still manually powered, the machine replaces the tool, or a modified version of the tool is incorporated in the machine, but what is more replaced is the skill of the labourer. A wood lathe, for example, can be manually powered, by a treadle, but, by fixing the cutting tool in place, the skill of the carpenter, using his eye to guide the chisel is replaced. For the capitalist producer, producing on a larger scale, to meet the needs of these expanding markets, it is this ownership of capital that is no crucial, just as under feudalism it was the ownership of land, and under slavery it was the ownership of slaves.
The capitalist producer only seeks to own land sufficient to produce on a sufficient scale, and they only want to sustain labour-power so long as they employ it profitably. So, they only want to employ labour-power as wage-labour, paying wages only in so far as labour is undertaken, as opposed to the slave owner who must ensure the reproduction of their slaves – the form of their wealth – under all circumstances. The form of wealth of the capitalist producer is capital, in the material form of the physical means of production, and means of subsistence of the worker, which in turn means money which they can pay as wages, which the workers use to buy those means of subsistence.
Once the forces of production have developed to a stage where this method of production becomes possible, and becomes the required means of utilising the forces of production, and when markets have grown and become significantly concentrated to justify production on the larger scale that this new method of production both makes possible, but also requires, in order to be efficient, it only then requires that the means of production become concentrated as capital, in a few hands, and that, alongside it, a reserve of employable wage labourers becomes available.
On the one hand, merchant capital and usury continues to ruin the small independent producers, meaning their means of production can be bought cheaply by those with capital, and, at the same time, the independent producer must now become a wage labourer, and sell their labour-power as a commodity. Peasant producers, for centuries, undertook cottage industry to supplement their agricultural production, but, now, faced with the competition of the capitalist production, from the towns, they were driven out of those spheres. Increasingly, they could not subsist on their agricultural production and had to turn themselves into day labourers, thereby bringing about the kind of differentiation of the peasantry that Lenin describes in detail.
“The worker in capitalist production does not own the means of production, [he owns] neither the land he cultivates nor the tools with which he works. This alienation of the conditions of production corresponds here, however, to a real change in the mode of production itself. The tool becomes a machine, and the worker works in the workshop, etc. The mode of production no longer tolerates the dispersal of the means of production connected with small property, just as it does not tolerate the dispersal of the workers themselves. In capitalist production, usury can no longer separate the conditions of production from the workers, from the producers, because they have already been separated from them.” (p 530)
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