h
istory
open the national market to flows of manufactured goods, while capital in its infancy sought to protect its monopoly within the national envelope. This conflict arises out of the difference in the property form based on land as opposed to capital, which are qualitatively different kinds of abstractions.
Capital, the more abstract property form, usually gets the
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upper hand in its struggle with the pastoral interest and opens the national envelope to cheap primary produce imports. It reduces the amount of the surplus going to the pastoralist class and secures for itself lower costs of production, thus making its goods more competitive internationally. Struggles of this kind are not uncommon among the otherwise allied ruling classes, and are always worth studying in hacker history with an eye for opportunities presented in these moments of transition that the productive classes may turn to their advantage.
The classes that own the means of
production, be they a pastoralist class in possession of pastures or farmlands, a capitalist class in possession of factories and forges, or a vectoralist class in possession of stocks, flows and vectors of information, everywhere extract a surplus from the productive classes. The extraction of the surplus is the key to the continuity of class society, but the form of the surplus, and the form of the ruling class itself, passes through three historical phases: pastoralist, capitalist, vectoralist; with their corresponding forms of surplus: rent, profit, margin. As each is based on a more abstract form of property, less and less tied to a particular aspect of the materiality of nature,
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