As Marx sets out, these means of production, centralised in the hands of the successful producers, and, similarly, removed from the hands of their former owners, become capital. To work, the latter must now sell their labour-power to the new owner of their means of production. But, they must work to live. The successful commodity producer employs them, and pays them the value of their labour-power, i.e. the amount required to reproduce it. But, having bought this labour-power, they employ it for the day or week, and the new value it creates during that time is greater than the value of the labour-power itself. It produces a surplus value appropriated by the capitalist, which they use to buy additional machines and so on, which makes them even more efficient, driving out even more of the independent producers, turning them, also, into wage workers.
So, this process of differentiation does not just create, out of the mass of serfs, a new class in the shape of this industrial bourgeoisie, but a new class, also, in the shape of the urban, industrial proletariat. As Marx, and, later, Lenin describe, this development of capitalist production in the towns is then extended into the rural areas/agriculture. On the one hand, bourgeois industrial production in the towns destroys rural cottage industry, which can't compete. At the same time, this expansion of capitalist production in the towns brings a sizeable increase in demand for primary products, notably for wool. The old feudal production in agriculture could not keep up with these demands. Landlords cleared lands to then turn over to sheep, thereby, dispossessing more peasants, who, now, also flooded into the growing towns, as wage-labourers.
“From the moment when the bourgeois demand for the abolition of class privileges was put forward, there appeared beside it the proletarian demand for the abolition of classes themselves — at first in a religious form, leaning towards primitive Christianity, and later drawing support from the bourgeois equalitarian theories themselves.” (p 134)
The bourgeoisie, starting from a non-existent equality of being, derived the concept of equality of rights, but, these rights were always, for it, limited to its demands for equal political and legal rights. Given these latter rights, the bourgeoisie could fend for itself. Those rights facilitated its own growth, and its exploitation of even greater numbers of wage labourers. But, what about the latter, who saw this exploitation, and saw in it anything but equality? They began, also, to use the ideas about equality put forward by the bourgeoisie, but they also utilised the ideas of the ideologists of the bourgeoisie, such as Smith, and particularly Ricardo, in relation to the essence of value being labour, and the value of commodities being determined by the quantity of that labour.
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