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These pamphlets, excerpted from the final chapters of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume I, describe how independent peasants were segregated in the late feudal era. * Over hundreds of years, their sources of livelihood were lost and they were transformed into a class that had nothing to sell except its labor power, which is the modern working class. This was not an automatic process, but was violently imposed on people whose lands had been illegally taken from them, and when they were impoverished they were forced into slavery. The punishment for resisting or fleeing was to be branded with a V for vagrancy and an S for slavery, having their ears cut off, or being hanged for multiple crimes. Marx shows how the creation of the working class as a source of surplus value was necessary for the expansion of capital. It also shows how European voyages of discovery opened an intense period of brutal exploitation and destruction of colonized peoples in order to amass the fortunes of early capitalist centers where the creation of enormous wealth coincided with the impoverishment of Europe's workers.