no longer be left to the untrammeled functioning of the law of value, to what Economists call supply and demand, to unregulated competition among independent enterprisers at uncontrolled markets. The current historical tasks of Capital are the proper tasks of government; they can only be carried out by the central office of society's Capital, the personification of all estranged human powers, the State. For the sake of stability and order, the development of productive forces must be controlled, obstructed, reversed. The cornucopia of technological progress ceases to give rise to hopes and increasingly spreads vague fears. Behind the productive forces slouches a rough beast, its hour come round at last, ready to loose mere anarchy upon the world. The temporal and spiritual powers of this world hide their terror-stricken grimaces under the masks of complacent grins provided by their offices. Physically removed from the productive forces and the producers, infrequent foreign tourists in the ghettos of the central cities, occasional official visitors to the productive plants, the suburban owners, managers and co-ordinators are menaced by the producers' access to the instruments for their potential development. Geographical segregation from the producers transforms an initial malaise, a vague insecurity, into a fear of physical violence and finally into a fear of contamination. The "heads" of the production process are severed from the body; the pinnacle of history's most developed form of cranium system becomes deranged. Removed by too many mystifications from the perception that it is the estranged power of the producers that the officials personify, the representatives of society's estranged productive power become preoccupied with quarantining themselves yet further from the producers. Under their official masks of complacent calm and childlike innocence, they throw themselves feverishly into the research and development of means of repression, they preside over a proliferation of offices whose single task is to police the producers, further regimenting themselves in the process.
In the regions where the accumulation of Capital began, social relations turn from forms of development of productive forces into their fetters. However, it is erroneous to draw general conclusions from a localized event. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed. In the current situation over half of humanity has been excluded from the material benefits created by the accumulation of Capital and from the social privileges lodged in offices that personify the powers of accumulated Capital. This fact should have moderated the somewhat provincial optimism of those who noticed that Capital had returned to the threshold of the grave where its predecessors lay stone dead. It returned, but not to leap straight in; numerous last breaths remained to it, because Capital had not been provincial. By spreading its world market over the entire globe, it did not discover a fountain of perpetual youth, but it did succeed in prolonging its period of decrepitude.
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