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altered; and with the alteration in the relations through which individuals form an army, and are enabled to work together as an army, there was a simultaneous alteration in the relations of armies to one another.
Thus with an alteration and development of the material means of production, i.e., the powers of production, there will also take place a transformation of the social relations within which individuals produce, that is of the social relations of production. The relations of production collectively form those social relations which we call a society, and a society with definite degrees of historical development, a society with an appropriate and distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society, are instances of these sums-total of the relations of production, each of which also marks out an important step in the historical development of mankind,
Now capital also is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a condition of the production of a bourgeois society. Are not the means of subsistence, the implements of labor, and the raw material, of which capital consists, the results of definite social relations; were they not produced and stored up under certain social conditions? Will they not be used for further production under certain social conditions within definite social relations? And is it not just this definite social character that transforms into capital that product which serves for further production?
