n element of constant capital.

Consider the case of Westphalian peasants who, in the time of Frederic
II., were all spinners of flax, and were forcibly expropriated from the
soil they had owned under feudal tenure. Some, however, remained and
were converted into day-labourers for large farmers. At the same time
arose large flax-spinning and weaving factories in which would work men
who had been "set free" from the soil. The flax looks just the same as
before, but a new social soul has entered its body, for it now forms a
part of the constant capital of the master manufacturer.

The flax which was formerly produced by a number of families, who also
spun it in retail fashion after growing it, is now concentrated in the
establishment of a single capitalist, who employs others to spin and
weave it for him. So the extra labour which formerly realised extra
income to many peasant families now brings profit to a few capitalists.
The spindles and the looms formerly scattered over the country are now
crowded into great labour barracks. The machines and raw material are
now transformed from means of independent livelihood for the peasant
spinners and weavers into means for mastering them and extracting out of
them badly-paid labour.

The genesis of the industrial capitalist did not proceed in such a
gradual way as that of the farmer, for it was accelerated by the
commercial demands of the new world-market created by the great
discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century. The Middle Ages had
handed down two distinct forms of capital--the usurer's capital and the
merchant's capital. For a time the money capital formed by means of
usury and commerce was prevented from conversion into industrial
capital, in the country by feudalism, in the towns by the guilds. These
hindrances vanished with the disappearance of feudal society and the
expropriation and partial eviction of the rural population. The new
manufactures were established at seaports, or at inland points beyond
the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence, in
England arose an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against
these new industrial nurseries.

The power of the state, concentrating and organising the force of
society, hastened the transition, shortening the process of
transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist
mode.

The next development of the capitalist era was the rise of the stock
exchange and the great ban