corresponded to a pre-industrial level of productive forces—a form of humanity made coherent and meaningful by the reenactment of cycles of social activity which responded to natural cycles: seasons, births, ages and deaths. The accumulation of Capital destroys the static harmony of the community without making the community dynamic. It destroys the necessity of the cycles of social activity without removing the dependence on nature. It destroys a harmonious, ceremonialized, mythologically justified struggle for survival mitigated by traditional feasts and familar festivals, and leaves behind an anachronistic, hard, no longer justified, unmitigated struggle for survival. The oppression of the colonized does not lie in the destruction of the previous form of social relations: this form becomes a local anachronism at the moment when the productive forces of humanity make its transcendence possible. The oppression lies in the exclusion of the colonized from the humanity made possible by the development of productive forces; the oppression is experienced in the gap between the colonized and the "humanity" of the colonizer. The magnitude of the gap between the colonized and the colonizer is determined by the extent to which the colonized are deprived of the productive forces available to the colonizer. In other words, the smaller the Capital of the colonized community and the greater the exclusion from contemporary productive forces, the greater the gap between the situation of the colonized and the "humanity" of the colonizer.
On the other hand, in the case of the industrial workers integrally tied to the contemporary productive forces, the greater the social fund of accumulated Capital, the embodied labor stored in means of production, the greater the power of the social class that controls the accumulated Capital, the productive forces that confront the producer as the property of another class. The portion of expended living labor not necessary for the survival of that labor, the surplus labor, takes the form of Capital, the form of a material force that turns on the producer as the power of another class, as an alien force. Thus the greater the power of the productive forces, the product of labor, the greater the power of Capital, the power of the class that rules, the smaller the power of producers over the product of their labor, their self-powers in the environment their labor creates.
Labor power is estranged under duress; it is sold in exchange for a living wage; its estrangement is a condition for survival. In the form of Capital, the estranged power is appropriated by a class which, by "owning" it, personifies it. The power conferred on this class by the simple formality of "ownership" is the power to decide, and to order or decree, everything that is done with the productive forces which it personifies. Since what is done with these productive forces determines the shape of the environment in which contemporary human beings live and the activities in which they engage, the power of the class that personifies Capital is virtually absolute.
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