One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for enjoyment, but as use value for money. Another prerequisite is the separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its realization -- from the means and material of labor. This means above all that the workers must be separated from the land, which functions as his natural laboratory. This means the dissolution both of free petty landownership and of communal landed property, based on the oriental commune.
In both these forms, the relationship of the worker to the objective conditions of his labor is one of ownership: this is the natural unity of labor with its material prerequisites. Hence, the worker has an objective existence independent of his labor. The individual is related to himself as a proprietor, as master of the conditions of his reality.
The same relation holds between one individual and the rest. Where this _prerequisite_ derives from the community, the others are his co-owners, who are so many incarnations of the common property. Where it derives from the individual families which jointly constitute the community, they are independent owners co-existing with him, independent private proprietors. The common property which formerly absorbed everything and embraced them all, then subsists as a special _ager publicus_ [common land] separate from the numerous private owners.
In both cases, individuals behave not as laborers but as owners -- and as members of a community who also labor. The purpose of this labor is not the _creation of value_, although they may perform surplus labor in order to exchange it for foreign labor -- i.e., for surplus products.
Its purpose is the maintenance of the owner and his family as well as of the communal body as a whole. The establishment of the individual as a _worker_, stripped of all qualities except this one, is itself a product of _history_.
The first prerequisite of this earliest form of landed property appears as a human community, such as emerges from spontaneous evolution [naturwuchsig]: the family, the family expanded into a tribe, or the tribe created by the inter-marriage of families or combination of tribes. We may take it for granted that pastoralism, or more generally a migratory life, is the first form of maintaining existence, the tribe not settling in a fixed place but using up what it finds locally and then passing on. Men are not settled by nature (unless perhaps in such fertile environments that they could subsist on a single tree like the monkeys; otherwise they would roam, like the wild animals). Hence the tribal community, the natural common body, appears not as the consequence, but as the precondition of the joint (temporary)appropriation and use of the soil.
Once men finally settle down, the way in which to a smaller degree this original community is modified, will depend on various external, climatic, geographical, physical, etc., conditions as well as on their special natural make-up -- their tribal character. The spontaneously evolved tribal community, or, if you will, the herd -- the common ties of blood, language, custom, etc. -- is the first precondition of the appropriation of the objective of life, and of the activity which reproduces and gives material expression to, or objectifies [vergegenstandlichenden] it (activity as herdsmen, hunters, agriculturalists, etc.). The earth is the great laboratory, the arsenal which provides both the means and the materials of labor, and also the location, the _basis_ of the community. Men's relations to it is naive;they regard themselves as its _communal proprietors_, and as those of the community which produces and reproduces itself by living labor.
Only in so far as the individual is a member -- in the literal and figurative sense -- of such a community, does he regard himself as an owner or possessor. In reality, appropriation by means of the process of labor takes place under these preconditions, which are not the _product_ of labor but appears as its natural or _divine_ preconditions.
Where the fundamental relationship is the same, this form can realize itself in a variety of ways. For instance, as is the case in most Asiatic fundamental forms, it is quite compatible with the fact that the _all-embracing unity_ which stands above all these small common bodies may appear as the higher or _sole proprietor_, the real communities only as _hereditary_ possessors. Since the _unity_ is the real owner, and the real precondition of common ownership, it is perfectly possible for it to appear as something separate and superior to the numerous real, particular communities. The individual is then in fact propertyless, or property -- i.e., the relationship of the individual to the natural conditions of labor and reproduction, the inorganic nature which he finds and makes his own, the objective body of his subjectivity --appears to be mediated by means of a grant [Ablassen] from the total unity to the individual through the intermediary of the particular community. The despot here appears as the father of all the numerous lesser communities, thus realizing the common unity of all. It therefore follows that the surplus product (which, incidentally, is legally determined in terms of [infolge] the real appropriation through labor) belongs to this highest unity. Oriental despotism therefore appears to lead to a legal absence of property, in most cases created through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining and contains within itself all conditions of production and surplus production.