Free Stuff
Paul gives a graph of per capita GDP over the last 2000 years, for the world. The point being made is that, from around 1950, the lines for the developed economies go almost perpendicular, and the lines for the developing world look set to now follow a similar path. However, it's been 70 years since that line went almost perpendicular for the UK, US and so on, but even now I doubt large numbers of people living in those countries feel they are living even in conditions of relative abundance. The recipients of the 1 million parcels handed out by food banks, in the UK, certainly received “free stuff”, but it was not the consequence of abundance!
In a free moment, recently, I was walking around Curry's, and was cornered by an enthusiastic young salesman who spent 10 minutes explaining all of the benefits of one of the new TV's that are one of the emblems of the new info-capitalism, complete with its android technology and so on. However, at £3,500, it didn't seem to me an indication that we would all be consuming abundant free stuff any time soon. That's, literally, nearly as much for a TV as I paid for my first house, and twice as much as I paid for my first new car!
Paul sets out what he says are the causes of the collapse of feudalism, ranging from its reaching the limits of its ability to increase production, the role of the Black Death in raising wages, the development of banking, to the printing press. But, as said earlier, none of these things caused a collapse of feudalism. On the one hand, the method of expanding production for feudalism had always been to expand the area under cultivation, and this creates the drive for colonisation.
These various factors create conditions whereby merchant capital and usurers capital can expand. But, that in itself is not the same as causing a collapse of feudalism. On the contrary, as stated earlier, these antediluvian forms of capital enter into a symbiotic relation with the feudal aristocracy. The Spanish aristocracy sends out Columbus, the Portuguese DeGama, and the English Raleigh, Drake etc. These merchant adventurers and those that followed in behind them, establishing plantations, trade routes and vast movements of money, ushered in a golden era of enrichment and growth of this commercial and financial bourgeoisie, but it also represented one of the most affluent eras for the landed aristocracy too, as it took hold of vast rents and taxes from these colonial possessions.
Feudalism did not collapse, but was supplanted, and it was not supplanted by the commercial bourgeoisie with which it was enmeshed, but by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie, which subordinates merchant and money-capital to it. Having done so, it first engages in a political revolution that secures the dominance of the whole bourgeoisie over the feudal aristocracy (1832 Reform Act), and then asserts its own political domination over all other forms of capital (Repeal of the Corn Laws).
And, this has similarities with the transition from capitalism to socialism. Engels nots in his Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England, that the middle class recognised that they could only hold power with the support of the working-class. In the cooperatives, the workers represent the personification of the socialised capital, but they employ managers whose function is to be the actual personification of that capital as capital. That is, it is their function to ensure that the capital is used most effectively, and that profit is maximised.
In a joint stock company, the same objective relation between the middle-class managers, i.e. the functioning capitalists, and the workers exists. In other words, objectively, as socialised capital, the business belongs to its associated producers – the workers and managers – but, in practice, the capital is under the control of the shareholders, and they appoint Boards of Directors to represent their interests as against the interests of the firm. In other words, their interests are contradictory to the interests of the socialised capital.
As with the cooperative, the personification of the socialised capital as capital, is the middle class professional manager, but they can only fulfil that role with the support of the working-class, because it requires a political struggle to overcome the control over the capital exercised by the shareholders and their representatives. This is the distinction made by Marx, in relation to these different forms of socialised capital. The more worker owned cooperative capital develops, and the more workers are able to introduce industrial democracy, the weaker becomes private capital, and the stronger becomes socialised capital, and this provides the basis not for a collapse of capitalism, but for it to be transcended, and replaced by a higher form of society.
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