Marx notes the progressive nature of his law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, because its corollary is an even greater increase in the mass of capital, and this goes along with an increased concentration and centralisation of capital. This process first pushes out the smaller capitalists and concentrates their capital in the hands of a tiny number of capitalist families. But, the process, ultimately, means that even their large private capitals are inadequate, and act as a fetter on the further accumulation of capital. So, then, even these huge expropriators are expropriated, not by other private capitals, but by socialised capital, as the fetters imposed by the monopoly of private capital are burst asunder. It spells the death-knell for private capital, and ushers in the era of socialised capital, in the form of the cooperatives and joint stock companies, corporations etc. These now become the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism, and new, social-democratic social relations are established on the basis of them.
“And if we strip this fact of the contradictory character which, on the basis of capitalist production, is typical of it, what does this fact, this trend towards centralisation, indicate? Only that production loses its private character and becomes a social process, not formally—in the sense that all production subject to exchange is social because of the absolute dependence of the producers on one another and the necessity for presenting their labour as abstract social labour ( [by means of] money)—but in actual fact. For the means of production are employed as communal, social means of production and therefore not [determined] by [the fact that they are] the property of an individual, but by their relation to production, and the labour likewise is performed on a social scale.” (p 447)
It sets the stage for the struggle for political democracy that arose in the 18th century, to now be extended to a struggle for industrial democracy, as the associated producers seek to establish their rightful democratic control over this socialised capital – as they do in the case of the worker owned cooperatives from the start – as against the usurped control exerted by shareholders over that capital.
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