Almost at the end of the volume, in a very brief
chapter, called ``Historical Tendency of Capitalist
Accumulation,'' Marx allows one moment's glimpse
of the hope that lies beyond the present horror:--
As soon as this process of transformation has
sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom,
as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their
means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist
mode of production stands on its own feet, then the
further socialization of labor and further transformation
of the land and other means of production into so-
cially exploited and, therefore, common means of production,
as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors,
takes a new form. That which is now to be
expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself,
but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This
expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent
laws of capitalistic production itself, by the
centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills
many, and in hand with this centralization, or this
expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on
an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the
labor-process, the conscious technical application of
science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the
transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments
of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all
means of production by their use as the means of production
of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement
of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with
this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.
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