Marx repeats the point made in Capital III, that, whilst a contradiction exists between the worker and industrial capital, and a contradiction exists also between industrial capital and rentiers, there is no relation between the rentiers and the workers. It is not the workers that the rentiers exploit, but the industrial capitalists. However, contrary to Ramsay's lumping together of all the recipients of revenue from the industrial capitalist, into one class camp, there is no shared interest between the workers and the exploiters of the rentier classes. On the contrary, with the development of socialised capital, as the effective property of the associated producers, a direct contradiction between the interests of these associated producers, i.e. the workers and managers, as against the rentiers is established. Its for that reason that the rentier capitalists – shareholders – demand the right to exercise control over property they do not own, and to appoint their own Boards of Directors, and executives, to promote their interests as against the interests of the industrial capital.
“The whole contradiction between industrial profit and interest only has meaning as a contradiction between the rentier and the industrial capitalist, but it has not the slightest bearing on the relationship of the worker to capital, the nature of capital, or the origin of the profit capital yields.” (p 359)
We have seen that Ramsay correctly identifies constant and variable-capital, though he wrongly calls them fixed and circulating capital, respectively.
““Revenue,” says Ramsay in the final chapter, “differs from the annual gross produce, simply by the absence of all those objects which go to keep up fixed capital” (by which he means constant capital, raw materials in all stages of production, auxiliary materials and machinery, etc.) (op. cit., p. 471).” (p 359)
We have also seen that he correctly argues that variable-capital does not take part in the production process. As Marx describes in The Grundrisse, the commodities that comprise the variable-capital act rather to reproduce labour-power outside the production process. But, Ramsay goes further, and claims, therefore, that the variable-capital is superfluous, required only because of the poverty of the labourers who cannot provide their own means of subsistence during the production process.
““circulating capital”—that is his term for capital laid out in wages—is superfluous, it is “… not an immediate agent in production, nor even essential to it at all…” (loc. cit., p. 468). (p 359)
As set out earlier, this is quite clearly wrong. It arises because of Ramsay's failure to understand the historically specific nature of capital and wage labour. If the workers could provide their own means of subsistence, they would not be wage labourers. As wage labourers it follows that, in order to labour, they must consume, and the means for that consumption is the wage. The wage is the money form of the variable-capital. So, the existence of wage labour itself determines the necessity of variable-capital, not as part of the production process itself, but as part of the production of the labour-power that engages in that production process.
“But he does not draw the obvious conclusion that by denying that wage-labour and capital laid out in wages are essential, the necessity for capitalist production in general is denied and the conditions of labour consequently cease to confront the workers as “capital” or, to use Ramsay’s term, as “fixed capital”. One part of the conditions of labour appears as fixed capital only because the other part appears as circulating capital. But once capitalist production is presupposed as a fact, Ramsay declares that wages and gross profits of capital (industrial profit or, as he calls it, profit of enterprise included) are necessary forms of revenue (loc. cit., pp. 478, 475).” (p 359)
In fact, it is these two forms of revenue – wages and profit of enterprise – that characterise the capitalist mode of production, and the two main classes – proletariat and bourgeoisie – on which it is based. Ramsay also says that rent is also superfluous, but fails to recognise that capitalist rent arises as a consequence of the capitalist mode of production, which turns land into a commodity, and enables landed property to appropriate surplus profits.
Ramsay makes a similar comment in relation to interest.
“[In case of a sharp reduction in gross profits] it would only be necessary for the rentiers to become industrial capitalists. As regards national wealth this makes no difference… The gross profit need certainly not be so high as to afford separate incomes to the owner and the employer (pp. 476-77).” (p 360)
But, as Marx notes, Ramsay has himself commented that, with the development of society comes a growing number of rentiers prepared to live off the interest on their capital. As Marx describes in Capital III, only if interest rates fell to such a level that rentiers could no longer sustain their lifestyle from the interest they received would they be led to turn their money-capital directly into productive-capital, and themselves from rentiers into industrial capitalists.
“Thus, the conclusion at which Ramsay arrives is, on the one hand, that the capitalist mode of production based on wage-labour is not really a necessary, i.e., not an absolute form of social production (which Ramsay himself expresses only in a rather limited form by stating that “circulating capital” and “wages” [would be] superfluous if the mass of the people were not so poor that they had to receive their share of the product in advance, before it was completed). On the other hand, he concludes that interest (in contrast to industrial profit) and rent (that is the form of landed property created by capitalist production itself) are superfetations which are not essential to capitalist production and of which it can rid itself. If this bourgeois ideal were actually realisable, the only result would be that the whole of the surplus-value would go to the industrial capitalist directly, and society would be reduced (economically) to the simple contradiction between capital and wage-labour, a simplification which would indeed accelerate the dissolution of this mode of production.” (p 360)
In fact, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 27, this fundamental contradiction between wage labour and capital reaches maturity, and is negated, as the monopoly of private capital is replaced by socialised capital, in the form of cooperatives and corporations. These are the transitional forms of property between capitalism and socialism. As set out earlier, the antagonism of the rentier capitalists is not with labour but with industrial capital. However, with the development of socialised capital, the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour is dissolved. Socialised capital is the property of the associated producers. The workers, therefore, are the owners of the industrial capital, even though, other than in the worker-owned cooperative, they do not exercise control over it.
Once socialised capital becomes the dominant form of capital, therefore, the major contradiction in society becomes that between the associated producers – not as workers but as owners of the industrial capital – and money-lending capital, primarily in the shape of the shareholders.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels set out that the class struggle, is manifest in the raising of the property question. Once socialised capital becomes dominant, the class struggle is exemplified precisely in the raising of the property question. Specifically, the property question is who has control over the socialised capital, the associated producers who are the owners of that capital, or the shareholders, the owners of fictitious capital? The class struggle takes the form of an extension of the struggle for democracy in society to a struggle for industrial democracy. The two main forms of property that confront each other are then socialised capital and fictitious capital.
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