and guards depends on the willingness of producers to continue returning to their jobs. The power of the producer to determine the shape of the material and social environment is not a distant dream but a daily fact.
If the producers appear unruly even to themselves it is because they continue to internalize the prevailing rules. While they cannot avoid exercising their own self-powers in situations which demand them, and do not always desist from exercising them in situations which do not demand them, producers continue to internalize official power as the only legitimate power and to experience their own power as illegitimate. If the consciousness of human beings determined their social existence, the hegemony of the dominant social relations would remain secure. However, if it is social existence that determines consciousness, then the modern social order rests on a foundation as secure as the rocks of ages of social orders that have long been defunct. Capitalism itself developed its peculiar forms of social power with a consciousness that was unfavorable to this development. The forerunner of the capitalist, the merchant, could not acknowledge the existence of his activity, even to himself, since he appeared to himself as a pious and useful member of a community in which his special callings, usury and extortion, were officially branded as sins. Yet even while he internalized the authoritative negation of his activity, the merchant continued to practice his increasingly profitable calling in a situation where the powers of authorities, of monarch, nobility and Church, increasingly depended on the fruit of the merchant's sin, on money. When the merchant's activity of buying and selling was combined with the artisan's commodity production, money became Capital and the merchant became a personification of means of production, a capitalist—centuries before the development of economics, middle class morality, or the modern State. Without political representation in the monarchy or the feudal estate, and with a consciousness cemented to the morality of the Church, upholding the temporal and spiritual powers materially as well as spiritually, condemning the sins of usury and extortion with an overly zealous piety, early capitalists nevertheless accumulated a social power which restricted and finally challenged the ruling spiritual and temporal powers. Only then did usury become banking and extortion, marketing. What developed within feudalism was not a consciousness, an ideology, or even an organized revolutionary movement, but rather a practice, a form of social behavior which undermined and ultimately overthrew the piety, the gallantry and the sovereignty of the earlier form.
Contemporary producers develop the power of the productive forces, the means for the universal development of human capacities, with a consciousness unfavorable to this development. Just as the feudal merchants viewed the profits of trade, not as means for accumulating social productive forces but as means for purchasing estates and
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