A society is capitalist if most production is carried on by employees working with means of production (equipment and materials) belonging to their employer, producing commodities which belong to the employer. (Employees: those whose services are treated as commodities. 'Labour is a commodity like any other', 'an article of trade' - Edmund Burke, Thoughts on Scarcity, 1795.) By a commodity Marx means something produced for the purpose of being exchanged. Things produced for the producer's use …
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showed last 75 words of 4585 total
…their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.' (Capital Bk 1 ch 32). About the kind of society that would follow the revolution Marx had little to say. It would be one in which the means of production would not be anyone's private property. But beyond that it will be up to those who bring about or experience these events to construct the new society.