So long as the implements of production were small and simple, and such that each could be used by one man or family, the divorce between the labourer and his implements was not easy to accomplish; but in proportion as these simple implements were developed into the aggregated mechanisms of the factory, each of which aggregates was used in common by hundreds and even by thousands of labourers, the link between the implement and the user was broken by an automatic process; for a single organised mechanism used by a thousand men could not, in the nature of things, be owned by each one of the thousand individually, and collective ownership by all of them was an idea as yet unborn.

Under these circumstances, with the growth of modern machinery, the ownership of the implements of production passed, by what Marx looked upon as a kind of historical fatality, into the hands of a class whose activities were purely acquisitive, and had no true connection with the process of production at all; and this class, he said, constitutes the capitalists of the modern world.
The results of this process have, according to him, been as follows: Society has become divided into two contrasted groups--an enormous group, and a small one.

The enormous group--the great body of every nation--the people--the labouring mass--the one true producing power--has been left without any implements by means of which its labour can exert itself, and these implements have been monopolised by the small group alone.

The people at large, in fact, have become like the employes of a single mill-owner, who have no choice but to work within the walls of that mill or starve; and the possessing class at large has become like the owner of such a single mill, who, holding the keys of life and death in his hands, is able to impose on the mill-workers almost any terms he pleases as the price of admission to his premises and to the privilege of using his machinery; and the price which such an owner, so situated, will exact (such was the contention of Marx) inevitably must come, and historically has come, to this--namely, the entire amount of goods which the labouring class produces, except such a minimum as will just enable its members to keep themselves in working order, and to reproduce their kind.

Thus all capital, as at present owned, all profits, and all interest on capital, are neither more nor less than thefts from the labouring class of commodities which are produced by the labouring class alone.
The argument of Marx is not, however, finished yet.