Lenin quotes Marx's famous statement from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which begins “The first work which I undertook...”, and concludes “... economic formation of society”. (p 138-9)
In this passage, Marx says that in his study of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, he concluded that neither legal relations nor forms of state can be explained subjectively, on the basis of their own independent development, or on the basis of the development of ideas in Men's heads, but only from a study of the underlying material conditions, or, in other words, the conditions prevailing in civil society. It is a point that Marx makes again in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx makes his well known comment,
“The general result at which I arrived . . . can be briefly formulated as follows: in the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations . . .relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum-total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
At a certain point the development of these productive forces come into conflict with the social relations, or property forms, and legal forms that have arisen from them. So, for example, as Marx says in Capital I, the process of capital accumulation, which results in the small private capitalists being expropriated by larger private capitalists, eventually reaches a stage where even the largest private capitals are inadequate for the further accumulation of capital. Privately owned capital becomes a fetter, and this fetter is burst asunder, by the development of socialised capital, in the form of the cooperative and joint stock company/corporation.
“Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the conditions of production, which should be established in terms of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological—forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”
As Lenin says, when Marx describes inevitability, he is not speaking about some future event, or making predictions about the future, but is actually describing a material reality that has already unfolded in front of him. The expropriation of the expropriators, the expropriation of private capital by socialised capital was not a prediction of some future event, but a description of what had already happened, and was continuing to happen, most notably, as Engels describes, after 1865, following on from the introduction of the Limited Liabilities Act of 1855. This social revolution, the fundamental change in the economic foundation had already begun to take place, at the time Marx was writing. As he says, in Capital III, Chapter 27,
“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.”
And, this change in the economic foundation, is itself reflected immediately in the social relations that arise on it. The private capitalist is removed from the social function in production, and becomes merely a money-lending capitalist, a shareholder, or bondholder, whilst their social function is taken over by the professional manager, themselves increasingly drawn from the ranks of the working-class, as it is better educated as a consequence of the extension of free public education.
“Transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, administrator of other people's capital, and of the owner of capital into a mere owner, a mere money-capitalist. Even if the dividends which they receive include the interest and the profit of enterprise, i.e., the total profit (for the salary of the manager is, or should be, simply the wage of a specific type of skilled labour, whose price is regulated in the labour-market like that of any other labour), this total profit is henceforth received only in the form of interest, i.e., as mere compensation for owning capital that now is entirely divorced from the function in the actual process of reproduction, just as this function in the person of the manager is divorced from ownership of capital … 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.”
(ibid)
No comments:
Post a Comment