The formula "capital", in which living labor stands in the relation of non-property to raw material, instrument and the means of subsistence required during the period of production, implies in the first instance _non-property in land_ -- i.e., the absence of a state in which the working individual regards the land, the soil, as his own and labor as its proprietor. In the most favorable case, he stands both in relation of landowner to himself in his capacity as a laboring subject.
Potentially, the ownership of land includes both property in raw materials, and in the original instrument of labor, the soil, as well as in its spontaneous fruits. In the most original form, this means that the individual regards the soil as belonging to him, and finds in it raw material, instrument, and means of subsistence not created by labor but by earth itself. Once this relationship is reproduced, then secondary instruments and fruits of the earth produced by labor immediately appear included in the primitive form of landownership. It is this historic situation which is in the first instance negated by the more complete property-relationship involved in the relation of the worker to the conditions of labor as capital. This is historic situation No. 1 which is negated in the new relationship, or assumed to have been dissolved by history.
A second historical step is implied in _property in the instrument_ --i.e., in the relation of the laborer to the instruments as to his own, in which he labors as the owner of the instrument (which assumes that the instrument is subsumed in his individual labor, i.e., which assumes a special and limited phase of development of the productive force of labor). We are considering a situation in which the laborer not only owns the instrument, but in which this form of the _laborer as proprietor_ or of the _laboring proprietor_ is already distinct and separate from _landed property_, and not, as in the first case, an accident of landed property and subsumed under it: in other words, the artisan and urban development of labor. Hence, also, we here find raw material and means of subsistence _mediated_ as the property of the artisan, mediated through his craft, through his property in the instrument. This second historic step now exists distinct and separate from the first, which in turn will appear considerably modified by the mere fact that _this second type of property_ or of _working proprietor_has established its independent existence.