peculiarity--that, being labour in an externalised and also in a
permanent form, it is capable of being detached from the labourers and
appropriated by other people; and the essence of modern capitalism is
neither more nor less than this--the appropriation of the instruments of
production by a minority who are not producers. So long as the
implements of production were small and simple, and such that each could
be used by one man or family, the divorce between the labourer and his
implements was not easy to accomplish; but in proportion as these simple
implements were developed into the aggregated mechanisms of the factory,
each of which aggregates was used in common by hundreds and even by
thousands of labourers, the link between the implement and the user was
broken by an automatic process; for a single organised mechanism used by
a thousand men could not, in the nature of things, be owned by each one
of the thousand individually, and collective ownership by all of them
was an idea as yet unborn. Under these circumstances, with the growth of
modern machinery, the ownership of the implements of production passed,
by what Marx looked upon as a kind of historical fatality, into the
hands of a class whose activities were purely acquisitive, and had no
true connection with the process of production at all; and this class,
he said, constitutes the capitalists of the modern world.

The results of this process have, according to him, been as follows:
Society has become divided into two contrasted groups--an enormous
group, and a small one. The enormous group--the great body of every
nation--the people--the labouring mass--the one true producing
power--has been left without any implements by means of which its labour
can exert itself, and these implements have been monopolised by the
small group alone. The people at large, in fact, have become like the
employés of a single mill-owner, who have no choice but to work within
the walls of that mill or starve; and the possessing class at large has