Firstly, capitalism has never developed on the basis of a completely free market. British capitalism developed with the support of the capitalist state, and the initial means of accumulating the capital required for the development of British capitalism, via the piracy of people like Drake and Raleigh, of the slave trade, and of the old colonial empires created in the 17th and 18th centuries, had nothing to do with a free market. That most liberal of free markets, the USA also relied on the state. It was the US state that threw up a huge protective wall, so as to enable US capital to develop behind it, in the middle of the 19th century; it was the same state, via Sherman, that carried out genocidal attacks on Native Americans, so as to make way for the transcontinental railway. In Europe, given the need to catch up with an already industrialised Britain, France and Germany, under Louis Bonaparte and Bismark, respectively, used the state as a means of bringing about the industrialisation of the economy, and growth of capitalism.
And, in all these countries, the capitalist state initially acted to ensure that the owners of capital had privileges over the owners of labour-power. As Marx sets out in Capital I, for example, if an employer breached a contract of employment, it was considered only a civil matter, leaving the employee to seek legal redress at their expense, whereas if a worker was deemed to have broken a contract of employment, it was a criminal matter that frequently led to the worker being imprisoned. Only when capital itself realised that unrestricted competition was killing the goose that laid the golden egg, did it also then use the state to limit its own actions via the Factory Acts, and so on. In similar vein, when it saw workers starting to create co-operatives, and to establish, via them, their own education, and social insurance, capital used its state to undermine that provision by introducing compulsory national insurance, and the creation of a welfare state, under the direct control of its state, and as a transmission mechanism for its needs and ideology.
And the originators of the ideology of the free market never believed that it could be allowed free rein either. Bohm-Bawerk, for example, argued that he feared that unbridled free competition would lead to "anarchism in production and consumption."
In the post-war period all capitalist economies relied on the state to a significant degree. Even the US, in the 1960's, in Johnson's “Great Society” introduced its own welfare state. Indeed, the US had been one of the first states to provide free state education, as its young economy required technologically educated workers to meet its needs. The space technology industries that today offer such massive potential for profits and capital accumulation, would never have existed if it were not for the US state establishing its space programme, and the same is true of many of the commodities such as mobile phones, which play such a large part in the modern capitalist market place.
The idea that capitalism equates to the free market is then a nonsense. It has never been the case. And, across the globe we have examples of state capitalism. In Capital, and “Anti-Duhring”, in fact, Marx and Engels explained why the natural progress of capital accumulation, which results in a process of concentration and centralisation, finds its expression not in competition via the free market, but in monopoly, whose ultimate expression is state capitalism, the ownership and control of capital, by the capitalist state, with the individual private capitalists obtaining their revenues in the form of interest payments, on the government bonds they buy, to finance the government's activities.
Capitalism does not at all imply a free market, it simply implies that capital employs wage labour, and appropriates surplus value from that wage labour, in the form of profits, which are then accumulated as additional capital. It does not matter whether this capital is owned by individual private capitalists, collectives of capitalists (even if as with a co-operative those capitalists are themselves workers), or by the state.
As Engels put it in Anti-Duhring,
“But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists.
The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.” (p 360)
It is then neither the case that capitalism implies the free market, nor that state ownership is synonymous with socialism, or socialism with state ownership. The other implication is that socialism is synonymous with the absence of the free market. This is normally taken as meaning that along with state ownership comes the planning of the economy. But, this equation is false too, certainly as far as Marxists are concerned.
Marx's primary concern was neither with state ownership, which as illustrated in his Critique of the Gotha Programme he opposed, nor with planning. Marx and Engels proposed not state ownership, but direct workers ownership and control of the means of production, as represented by the worker-owned co-operatives. The only role they saw for the state was that in a workers state, it would act as a sort of holding company, holding legal title so as to prevent that co-operative property being privatised for individual gain. Prior to that, they saw the same role being undertaken by a co-operative federation. As their confidant Ernest Jones proposed,
“Then what is the only salutary basis for co-operative industry? A NATIONAL one. All co-operation should be founded, not on isolated efforts, absorbing, if successful, vast riches to themselves, but on a national union which should distribute the national wealth. To make these associations secure and beneficial, you must make it their interest to assist each other, instead of competing with each other—you must give them UNITY OF ACTION, AND IDENTITY OF INTEREST.
To effect this, every local association should be the branch of a national one, and all profits, beyond a certain amount, should be paid into a national fund, for the purpose of opening fresh branches, and enabling the poorest to obtain land, establish stores, and otherwise apply their labour power, not only to their own advantage, but to that of the general body.
This is the vital point: are the profits to accumulate in the hands of isolated clubs, or are they to be devoted to the elevation of the entire people? Is the wealth to gather around local centres, or is it to be diffused by a distributive agency?”
And, as Hal Draper says, nor was Marx that concerned with planning.
“He has so often been denounced (by other Marx-critics) for failing to draw up a blueprint of socialism precisely because he reacted so violently against his predecessors’ utopian “plannism” or planning-from-above. “Plannism” is precisely the conception of socialism that Marxism wished to destroy. Socialism must involve planning, but “total planning” does not equal socialism just as any fool can be a professor but not every professor need be a fool.”
Marx was concerned neither with state ownership nor with planning, but with workers ownership and control, because he recognised that it was from such ownership and control of the means of production that distribution also flows. As soon as workers themselves own and control the means of production, the inequality of income that derives from the ownership of capital by a tiny minority ends along with it. Once that inequality of income ends, so the various distortions of the market that goes along with it also ends.
So, he writes,
“Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?”
But, Marx was well aware that simply by establishing these worker-owned and controlled co-operatives, neither the market nor capitalism is ended. The co-operatives and the other forms of socialised capital, such as the joint stock company represent only transitional forms of property between capitalism and socialism.
“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.”
And this transition period between capitalism and socialism would be prolonged. Marx in the Grundrisse wrote,
“As the system of bourgeois economy has developed for us only by degrees so too its negation, which is its ultimate result." (p 712).
And Engels noted,
“Marx and I never doubted that in the transition to the full communist economy we will have to use the cooperative system as an intermediate stage on a large scale.”
(Letter to Bebel)
Not only did Marx and Engels make no fetish of state ownership, they largely opposed it. Both opposed the intervention of the capitalist state to introduce things such as national insurance and a welfare state, preferring instead that the workers organised those things for themselves, as part of their principle of advocating workers self-activity and self-government. Both recognised that this process would require a lengthy transitional period towards socialism. But nor did they fetishise planning either. Indeed they had no need to do so. The very development of capitalism itself was not only creating ever larger socialised capitals in the form of the joint stock companies, the co-operatives, the trusts, and today we would include the multinational corporations, but the fact of concentration and centralisation of that capital itself required that it be accumulated on the basis of the development of business plans. As Engels put it in his critique of the Erfurt Programme,
“Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”
All very large companies plan their production over prolonged periods, and with the development of systems of Just In Time, they have increasingly co-ordinated these plans with those of their suppliers and customers. Such coordination has increased apace over the last twenty years due to the development of computing power, and telecommunications networks, tied together via the internet across the globe. At the same time, the capitalist state plays its part via state intervention and the central banks, as well as para state international bodies to regulate and coordinate the global economy. Its why those that seek to turn the clock back from the potential for such coordination, even within the confines of capitalism, that organisations such as the EU provide, expose themselves as being truly reactionary.
As Simon Clarke wrote nearly thirty years ago,
“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
The attempt to frame a debate in terms of capitalism equals free market, whereas socialism equals statism and planning, is then fallacious from the very start, and indicates just how much the Tories and Liberals and their representatives within the ranks of political punditry do not even understand the terms of that debate, and the debate over the future direction of society.
No comments:
Post a Comment