Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/42

 vary according to the character of the means of production. With the discovery of a new instrument of warfare, the firearm, the whole internal organization of the army was necessarily altered, the relations within which individuals compose an army and can work as an army were transformed, and the relation of different armies to one another was likewise changed.

We thus see that the a society at a definite stage of historic development, a society with peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois (or capitalist) society, are such totalities of relations of production, each of which denotes a particular stage of development in the history of mankind.

Capital also is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a relation of production of bourgeois society. The means of subsistence, the instruments of labor, the raw materials, of which capital consists—have they not been produced and accumulated under given social conditions, within definite social relations? Are they not employed for new production, under given social conditions, within definite social relations? And does not just this definite social character stamp the products which serve for new production as capital?

Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labor, and raw materials, not only of material products: it consists just as much of exchange values. All products of which it consists are