Social-Democracy, Bonapartism and Permanent Revolution - Chapter 2 – Socialised Capital

Chapter 2 – Socialised Capital

The reason that the EU has always posed a problem for the Tories is that, as a party, they are schizophrenic. On the one hand, they are the ideological representatives of those large-scale, private, money-lending capitalists. Immediately, the interests of this money-lending capital contradicts the interests of socialised industrial capital (industrial capital here meaning not just manufacturing industry, but also service industry, commercial capital, and money-dealing capital, i.e. the totality of the three circuits of productive-capital, commodity-capital and money-capital upon which the average rate of profit is determined).

The bond and shareholders seek to maximise their revenues from interest, dividends and capital transfers, whilst the socialised industrial capital seeks to minimise such revenues, so as to maximise its profit of enterprise, and thereby capital accumulation. As Marx points out, the interests of the money-lending capitalists must always be subordinated to the socialised industrial capital, just as are landlords, because it is the socialised industrial capital which produces the profits, on which the money-lending capitalists, and the landlords depend, for the payment of interest and rent.

“On the other hand, profit of enterprise is not related as an opposite to wage-labour, but only to interest.”

(Capital III, Chapter 23)

“It would be still more absurd to presume that capital would yield interest on the basis of capitalist production without performing any productive function, i.e., without creating surplus-value, of which interest is just a part; that the capitalist mode of production would run its course without capitalist production. If an untowardly large section of capitalists were to convert their capital into money-capital, the result would be a frightful depreciation of money-capital and a frightful fall in the rate of interest; many would at once face the impossibility of living on their interest, and would hence be compelled to reconvert into industrial capitalists.” 

(ibid)

That is why, although during fairly lengthy periods, the interest of money-lending capital, the blowing up of asset price bubbles, and the conservative ideas founded upon that may become more influential, they are always constrained within a social-democratic framework. But, on the other hand, the Tories, as a bourgeois-democratic, electoralist party, also rely on a conservative mass, in order to function as a party, and in order to get elected, but as a party of government, they also have to accept the reality that capitalism is dominated by large-scale socialised capital, and its on its fate that the fate of the state and the economy rests.

On the one hand, one force, recognising this reality, pulls in the direction of the EU, on the other hand, the countervailing force emphasises that 87% of the UK economy – that comprising all of those tiny private capitals – has no dealings with the EU, and pulls in the opposite direction.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Brexit

Chapter 3 - Social Democracy