It is this evolution of the productive forces which creates new forms of production and new social relations founded upon it. What appears to be a given set of factor allocations, in any given mode of production, therefore, is only itself the product of a long process of evolution of those forms from what previously existed. So, for example, bourgeois production arises because, as agricultural productivity rose, a surplus product became possible, so that some producers became detached from it. They settle in the towns, where they become artisans, and other such independent, petty-commodity producers. They exchange their products as commodities with others in the towns, and with landlords and peasants.
The towns expand, as do their markets, until they reach a critical mass, at which point some of the more efficient producers can produce on a scale whereby they can profitably employ wage-labour and machines. Some of the less efficient producers go under, but now, rather than becoming slaves, servants, serfs or paupers, as happened previously, they are employed as wage labourers, by the more efficient commodity producers, and their small, scattered means of production are bought up cheap, centralised and, turned into capital by those same larger producers, who become, now, capitalists. Some of that is accomplished by the merchant capitalists, who previously sold material to the producers, and who now employ those failed producers as wage labour, turning themselves from being merchant-capitalists to industrial capitalists.
These industrial capitals now, also, undercut the subsidiary production of peasants, who relied on it to supplement their agricultural production. Previously, their agricultural production was direct production to meet their own consumption needs, whilst their subsidiary production provided them with money required to pay money rents and taxes etc. Deprived of this subsidiary production, they too, now succumb, and must become wage labourers, their land taken over by more prosperous peasants, who become capitalists. Else its taken over by landlords, or bourgeois from the towns, who begin to farm on a capitalistic basis. Capitalist production, which begins in the towns, thereby, moves into the rural areas. Thereby, bourgeois production evolves out of, and then replaces feudal production.
“Production has indeed its conditions and prerequisites which are constituent elements of it. At the very outset these may have seemed to be naturally evolved. In the course of production, however, they are transformed from naturally evolved factors into historical ones, and although they may appear as natural pre-conditions for any one period, they are the historical result of another period. They are continuously changed by the process of production itself. For example, the employment of machinery led to changes in the distribution of both the means of production and the product. Modern large-scale landed property has been brought about not only by modern trade and modern industry, but also by the application of the latter to agriculture.” (p 202)
The same is true with the social revolution that replaces capitalism with socialism. The same process that created capitalism, via the centralisation and concentration of means of production, continues to take effect, so that the smaller, private capitalists are expropriated by the bigger private capitalists, until, eventually, not even these are big enough to produce and compete efficiently. They are themselves then expropriated by giant socialised capitals in the form of cooperatives and corporations. This is the process of the expropriation of the expropriators described by Marx in Capital I, Chapter 35, and in Capital III, Chapter 27.
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