Classes in Capitalism and Pre-Capitalism

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. The owners merely of labour-power, owners of capital, and landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent, in other words, wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners, constitute then three big classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production. In England, modern society is indisputably most highly and classically developed in economic structure. Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself.