Jim.+483-502

pp 483-502 Notebook V

The city, the commune, communal property vs. individual family property

among Germanic tribes: hunting, grazing, timber land

People lived spread out and only came together temporarily under special circumstances. No permanent city. No state. People’s individual property existed as part of the communal relation. Communal land was complementary. People came together for war, to defend their land against other tribes, to increase land by waging war on other tribes.

Different forms of communal property, Asiatic form, all land belongs to commune

“landed property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order”

production of use values

485: “An isolated individual could no more have property in land and soil than he could speak”

compare to Antiquity

487: “wealth does not appear as the aim of production... Wealth appears as an end in itself only among the few commercial peoples--monopolists of the carrying trade--who live in the pores of the ancient world, like the Jews in medieval society.”

488: seems to be saying that Bourgeois society is better because there is the potential for maximizing human capabilities. Path to socialism?

all production is social production, which we call economic relations

490: “Language s the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property.”

491: “Property thus originally means no more than a human being’s relation to his natural conditions of production...”

property is originally mobile (fruits of land)

492: “Even when the only task is to find and to discover, this soon requires exertion, labor--as in hunting, fishign, herding--and production (i.e. development) of certain capacities on the part fo the subject.”

Conquest makes another clan propertyless -> slavery

496: “But human beings become individuals only through the proce3ss of history.”

“but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him.”

Communal property in land is historical condition I Historical condition two is artisans who are independent of the land and who own their tools