Wednesday 27 May 2020

What The Friends of the People Are, Part I - Part 20 of 31

This is the process of primary capital accumulation, which, in turn, leads to the concentration and centralisation of capital, the expropriation of the expropriators, via the creation of socialised capital, which establishes the transitional form of property, prior to Socialism. Lenin later quotes Engels from Anti-Duhring

““Thus, by characterising the process as the negation of the negation, Marx does not intend to prove that the process was historically necessary. On the contrary: only after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law. That is all. It is therefore once again a pure distortion of the facts by Herr Dühring when he declares that the negation of the negation has to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past, or that Marx wants anyone to be convinced of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital . . . on the basis of credence in the negation of the negation” (p. 125).” (p 173) 

And, returning to the description above, what this process also reveals is that the number of branches of industry increases. This is simultaneously a manifestation of the social division of labour, and of the broadening of the market. The peasant producer who previously produced most of their own food, and who also produced their own clothes, now must buy their clothes in the market, because they do not have the time to produce them, whilst they sell their labour-power, for the time they would previously have been engaged in that activity. The market is already expanded in consequence. But, the task of spinning and weaving that formed one industry, for the peasant producer, now becomes separated into two for the capitalist producer, with the spinning industry finding a market for its commodities in the weaving industry. The market is expanded again. 

“... this very division and the concentration of production give rise to new branches—machine building, coal mining, and so forth.” (p 176) 

Lenin describes the change in the social relations this brings about. The individual producers all produced simultaneously, but separately. They are all atomised, and in competition with each other. It is the condition that Marx describes in The Poverty of Philosophy of explaining why the peasantry, with its heterogeneous conditions, and ideas, could never form into a class for itself. The same applies today to the plethora of small private capitalists, and is why such social layers can only hold political power indirectly via some form of Bonapartist regime. By contrast, this process of concentration and centralisation, combined with a socialisation of production, creates a much smaller, tighter-knit class of larger capitalist producers, with a community of ideas, and common conditions, as well as each depending on the other. 

“The case is entirely different under the socialisation of labour that has been achieved due to capitalism. The manufacturer who produces fabrics depends on the cotton-yarn manufacturer; the latter depends on the capitalist planter who grows the cotton, on the owner of the engineering works, the coal mine, and so on and so forth. The result is that no capitalist can get along without others. It is clear that the saying “every man for himself” is quite inapplicable to such a regime: here each works for all and all for each (and no room is left for God—either as a super-mundane fantasy or as a mundane “golden calf”). The character of the regime changes completely.” (p 176) 

And, as I have pointed out previously, in discussing crises of overproduction, under pre-capitalist production, if any individual producer faced a crisis, or their production came to a standstill, this had no impact on all the others. Under capitalism, if production comes to a standstill for any large producer, or for several smaller producers, this has immediate consequences for all other producers. And, that applies inside the factory too. A lack of any component, the breakdown of an assembly line, stops the production throughout the factory, affecting all its workers. 

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