Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 19

A century later, it is even more apparent, and the scale of production is such that even that idea of nationalised industries in each nation state is consigned to history. The EU, 80 years ago, began as its original member states created the European Coal and Steel Community to regulate and plan production on a multinational scale. The atomic energy industry in Europe, from the start, was set up as a planned and regulated, European industry. The idea that a puny and rapidly declining British nation state can compete, globally, in steel production is risible. The British coal industry has already gone, but, similarly, if the British state seeks to continue a British steel industry, by nationalising it, separate from an EU steel industry, it will just throw potential money-capital down the drain that could have been better used in some other industry. British steel production could only continue if it was part of a large-scale EU steel industry, which itself requires EU wide planning and regulation of production.

“In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the Capitalists.

But, the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers.” (p 358)

Here, clearly can be seen the vision of Marx and Engels, and just how markedly it differs from that of the petty-bourgeois socialists and nationalists, including those who, for much of the last century, masqueraded as Marxists. In contrast to the “anti-capitalists”, and opponents of globalisation, Marx and Engels, as well as their early adherents such as Kautsky, Pannakoek, Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky, saw this development of ever larger-scale capitals, and the consequent destruction of nation states by this “imperialist” capital, not just as inevitable and unstoppable, but as, partly for that reason, also progressive. Today's “anti-capitalists”, “anti-globalists”, and “anti-imperialists” are like the petty-bourgeois moral socialists and Luddites who responded to the form and not the content of that development.

The Luddites saw machinery destroying their petty-bourgeois, handicraft production, and responded by breaking into the factories and breaking the machines, or setting fire to the factories, much as previous peasant rebellions responded by burning the barns and manor houses of the landlords. But, Marx and Engels point out in The Communist Manifesto, it was not the machines that were the cause of that misery but the social context in which those machines were employed, as capital, not simply as means of production. The machines were actually a powerful basis upon which the lives of the labourers could be hugely improved, if they were used as means of production, instruments of labour, not as capital. It is what the labourers in the Lancashire textile cooperatives and the agricultural cooperative at Ralahine discovered.

Of course, as described previously, the centralisation of the means of production and the development of machine production itself could not have arisen without the existence of the private industrial capitalists. The first conscious response to that, of course, is, therefore, the creation of worker cooperatives, such as those described above. In Marx's Inaugural Address to the First International, in 1864, he not surprisingly highlights the huge significance of the cooperatives. But, he, also, sets out the constraints on their ability to simply expand without the working-class doing what the bourgeoisie had previously done, which is to wage a political struggle to remove all of the political fetters on their continued expansion. In Capital III, Chapter 27, he sets out, in that regard, also, the role of credit, in facilitating the extension of this cooperative production.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 18

Engels notes, as he and Marx, also, describe in Capital III, Chapter 27, this process whereby even the planning and regulation of production by these oligopolies breaks down, and leads to even greater socialisation of production.

“They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. Since such trusts usually go to pieces as soon as business becomes bad, for this very reason they push towards a still more concentrated socialization. The whole branch of industry is converted into one big joint-stock company, and internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company; this happened as early as 1890 with English alkali production, which, after the fusion of all the forty-eight large works, is now carried on by a single company, under centralized direction with a capital of £6 million.” (p 358)

It became part of ICI in 1926, which, in turn, was taken over by Tata Chemicals, as part of the Indian Tata industrial empire.

Nearly 40 years ago, Simon Clarke wrote,

“Indeed it would be fair to say that the sphere of planning in capitalism is much more extensive than it is in the command economies of the soviet bloc. The scope and scale of planning in giant corporations like Ford, Toyota, GEC or ICI dwarfs that of most, if not all, of the Soviet Ministries. The extent of co-ordination through cartels, trade associations, national governments and international organisations makes Gosplan look like an amateur in the planning game. The scale of the information flows which underpin the stock control and ordering of a single Western retail chain are probably greater than those which support the entire Soviet planning system.”

(Capital and Class, Winter 1990)

In “The Poverty of Philosophy”, Marx makes the same point against Proudhon. Bourgeois commodity production engenders competition, which “breaks down the Chinese walls” of feudal monopoly. That competition, then, leads to a huge expansion of production, as the bourgeoisie become the ruling-class and create bourgeois nation states, which they use to remove the remaining fetters on bourgeois production. Competition means winners and losers. The winners get bigger, the losers disappear. The advantages of the winners increase, as they get bigger, because of economies of scale etc. They become monopolies, but not like the those of the feudal regime, based on patronage and protection. They are monopolies arising naturally out of the process of competition, and laws of capital accumulation.

The capitalist nation state is, then, led to involve itself, not as the feudal state did to create monopolies, but, now, to regulate them in the interest of capital as a whole. But, Marx notes that this, then simply raises this competition to a higher level. It becomes a competition of national capitals backed by capitalist nation states. Even by WWI, this became apparent, as Trotsky put it in The Program of Peace.

“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers... The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 17

Even in Marx and Engels time,

“It is this counterpressure of the productive forces, in their mighty upward growth, against their character as capital, this increasingly compulsive drive for the recognition of their social nature, which forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, as far as this is at all possible within the framework of capitalist relations. The period of industrial boom with its unlimited credit inflation no less than the crash itself operating through the collapse of large capitalist establishments, drives towards that form of the socialisation of larger masses of means of production which we find in the various kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and communication are so colossal from the outset that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic exploitation. At a certain stage of development this form, too, no longer suffices; [the large-scale producers in one and the same branch of industry in a country unite in a “trust”, an association for regulating production.” (p 357-8)

Within the confines of capitalism, even this increasing regulation, planning and monopoly of production continually, and cyclically hits the buffers, because commodity production implies continued competition, even if it is, now, monopolistic/oligopolistic competition. To overcome that requires an ever larger single market, regulated by an ever larger state. Either the nation state annexes other nation states – resulting in imperialist wars – or else those states voluntarily associate. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx noted that private industrial capital was the inevitable means, the historically necessary condition for the centralisation of the means of production, because, although considered abstractly, there was no reason why the independent commodity producers could not have done so, by forming a cooperative, in reality, no such development was possible.

There was no reason such producers would do so, and their individual relation to their own means of production engendered a powerful, individualist and competitive mindset within them that precluded it. Kautsky found the same thing. It is only when wage-workers, who have developed a collectivist ideology emerge that they are able to bring about the creation of such producer cooperatives. When peasant farmers create cooperatives, faced with competition from large capitalist farms, they usually establish marketing cooperatives and cooperatives for the shared use of very expensive machinery, rather than voluntarily turning themselves into an agricultural cooperative.

Fairly equal nation states are unlikely to voluntarily merge for similar reasons. Each one believes it will come out on top in the global competitive struggle, including when it becomes a military struggle. Only when a series of smaller nation states realise that their only hope is to combine, if they are to compete with larger states, are they likely to do so, as with the creation of the EU. Even then, formerly dominant nation states seek to assert themselves within the bloc. One reason the EU has not moved more quickly to the creation even of a centralised federal state is the continued protection of existing interests by national elites. The working-class has no reason to constrain its voluntary association across existing national borders, which have become an outdated anachronism, not just holding back human progress, but threatening humanity itself, as those national borders form the basis around which wars are fought, wars which, now, lead to thermonuclear destruction.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 16

But, of course, Marx and Engels did not end their analysis of capitalist development at the point of the dominance of the private industrial capitalist (the monopoly of private capital), and the nation state. Those were simply moments in the process of development of capitalism as a necessarily global system in which, also, the free market competition it had been based around becomes a regulated and planned production, even within the capitalist system itself. They set out how capitalism itself evolved in the 19th century, so that what had once been a progressive development in the form of the private industrial capitalist and the nation state, became a fetter on its further development, and that fetter was burst asunder, by the development of large-scale, socialised capital, state-monopoly capitalism/imperialist capital.

In other words, all of those things that the moral socialists and petty-bourgeois nationalists see as an evil that must be resisted in the name of their “anti-capitalism” and “anti-imperialism”, Marx and Engels saw as the fundamental, progressive signs of the metamorphosis of this mode of production into Socialism. Moreover, as I have set out, elsewhere, Lenin, also, makes this point, as against the petty-bourgeois, ultra-Lefts of his time.

“This is precisely the case with our “Left Communists”, who in words (and of course in their deepest convictions) are merciless enemies of the petty bourgeoisie, while in deeds they help only the petty bourgeoisie, serve only this section of the population and express only its point of view by fighting—in April 1918!!—against . . . “state capitalism”. They are wide of the mark!

… the continuation of the anarchy of small ownership is the greatest, the most serious danger, and it will certainly be our ruin (unless we overcome it), whereas not only will the payment of a heavier tribute to state capitalism not ruin us, it will lead us to socialism by the surest road. When the working class has learned how to defend the state system against the anarchy of small ownership, when it has learned to organise large-scale production on a national scale, along state capitalist lines, it will hold, if I may use the expression, all the trump cards, and the consolidation of socialism will be assured...

To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content—a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.

… socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC. And history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other.

“… socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly.

“. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs ”.

(Lenin – Left-Wing Childishness)

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 15

Globalisation has been a powerful and progressive development that reduced circulation costs and so raised profits, without the need for a corresponding investment of capital. The creation of large single markets, like the EU, is integral to that process. But, the large growth of the petty-bourgeoisie in the same period, as part of that process, engendered all of those old reactionary, individualist ideas of the past. It not only fuelled the reactionary notions of trying to turn the clock back to the days of the nation state, but, inevitably, was forced to go beyond that to a return to the old provincialism and regionalism.

However, each time petty-bourgeois populism attempts to implement these utopian and reactionary schemas, as with Brexit, Trump etc., they quickly fail, and are forced to confront the reality, just as much as the ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital have been forced to recognise the reality that their dividends/interest are a deduction from profits, and, in the end, profits only grow by an expansion of capital, an expansion of the quantity of labour exploited.

“... the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing recognition that existing social institutions are irrational and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and kindness a scourge, is only a sign that changes in the mode of production and exchange have silently been taking place with which the social order adapted to earlier economic conditions is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of eliminating the abuses that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed relations of production themselves. These means are not to be invented out of one's brain, but discovered by the brain, in the existing material facts of production.” (p 343-4)

Marx and Engels set out, already, in Capital III, and, here, in Anti-Duhring, what these changed conditions were, and that had become dominant by the end of the 19th century.  I have set them out again, in summary. But, I have also set out, here, how the most recent development of those, now, over-ripe conditions means that the irrationality has reached a crescendo.

The ruling capitalist class is, now, the immediate, mortal enemy of capital.

Engels sets out the state of play at that time.

“It is now pretty generally conceded that the existing social order is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, which since Marx has been called the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the local privileges and the privileges of estate as well as with the reciprocal personal ties of the feudal system. The bourgeoisie shattered the feudal system and on its ruins built the bourgeois social order, the realm of free competition, of freedom of movement, of equal rights for commodity owners and all the glories of capitalism.” (p 344)

For petty-bourgeois socialism, it is as though Marx and Engels analysis ends there. This bourgeois development created all those bourgeois rights and freedoms and created the bourgeois nation state. They want to leap from there to Socialism, treating the modern economy and bourgeois society as though it is essentially no different to this era of private industrial capitalism. It justifies their hostility to imperialism both in the form of state-monopoly capital, and its concomitant the destruction of the old bourgeois nation states.

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