The Rule of Unelected Ruling Class Judges - Part 2 - Reaction v Conservative Social-Democracy (2)

Reaction v Conservative Social-Democracy (2)

Paul Mason and others have described what is going on in traditional Arendtian terms as an alliance of the super rich with the mob. That is a similar analysis as provided by Trotsky in relation to the rise of fascism in Germany. That description is wrong, for what is currently going on. In Germany, what we had was a conservative Bonapartism, in the shape of Hitler, whose function was to act in the interest of the dominant section of the ruling class – the super rich, comprised of the owners of fictitious capital – against a rising and revolutionary proletariat that threatened to remove control, and their dominant position from them. Today, what we have is a very weak, disorganised and poorly led proletariat that poses no such threat, but where the threat to the dominant section of the ruling class comes rather from the forces of reaction, who want to overturn the current polity, and, via a political counter-revolution, take capitalism back to a less mature form, based upon the dominance of the plethora of small capital, rampant free market competition, and a minarchist state. Unlike the 1930's, today the super rich are in the same class camp as the working-class and the middle class managers of socialised capital. Its not the super rich that are backing Brexit, or Trump, other than for a few mavericks like the Kochs, or the mafia capitalists that comprise Putin's oligarchy. The super rich, the multi-billionaires, like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, or George Soros are, generally, in the camp of conservative social-democracy (what others call neo-liberalism), in opposition to the camp of reaction. People like Aaron Banks cannot be counted as part of the super rich, they are really just jumped up barrow boys and chancers, and ideally, therefore, reflect precisely that ideology, culture and mindset of the small capitalist.

What we have, then, is this division between reaction representing that class of small private capitalists, and the ideology that flows from it, as against conservative social-democracy, based upon large-scale, socialised industrial capital.  In these socialised capitals, the function of capitalist in production is now undertaken by workers drawn from the working-class and paid wages.  They form a middle-class because of their contradictory role in production, which flows from the contradictory nature of socialised capital as a transitional form of property.  As the personification of this form of capital, they are at one and the same time labourers, and at the same time the representative of capital, and its objective requirement to accumulate, and so to maximise profit. In confronting the owners of fictitious capital they are workers, in confronting workers they are capitalists.  As Marx continues, 

“In stock companies the function is divorced from capital ownership, hence also labour is entirely divorced from ownership of means of production and surplus-labour. This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property. On the other hand, the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions.” 

(Capital III, Chapter 27) 

In other words, the capital here is not owned by anyone. It is owned by the firm itself, as an independent legal entity in its own right. The function that was previously undertaken by the private capitalist is now undertaken, in the firm, by dozens or even hundreds of professional managers, technicians, administrators, accountants and so on, and these are now drawn from the working class, and paid workers' wages. In a worker owned cooperative, as Marx says, this is particularly apparent. It is the workers and managers within the cooperative that exercise control over the capital. No individual worker or manager owns this capital. If any of them leave they do not take a proportionate share of the capital with them. It is the associated producers, employed by the firm, at any one time, that exercise this control of the socialised capital of the firm. Objectively, this should also be the case with the other form of socialised capital, the joint stock company. Neither a cooperative nor a joint stock company, for example, gives control or any say to a bank from which it borrows money-capital, nor does it give any control or say to bondholders from which it borrows money-capital, nor to landowners from which it borrows the use of land, in return for rent. As Kay and Silberston set out, thirty years ago, nor, therefore, is there any reason why they should give such control to shareholders, from whom the firm likewise borrows money-capital. Marx continues, 

“This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production... 

It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter's social property, much as they are their social products... 

They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage... The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.” 

The reason it is resolved positively in the cooperatives, but negatively in the joint stock company, is that, in the worker owned cooperative, the associated producers themselves immediately exercise democratic control over this socialised capital. But, in the joint stock company, that is not the case.

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