How Capital Produces Capitalists and Capitalism, and Then Socialism - Part 13 of 13

Its, not literally true, therefore, that capital creates Socialism. It creates capitalists, and capitalism, and it also creates socialised capital, which is the material economic basis of Socialism. In the process, it creates a large, educated working-class, and, thereby creates the social agent required to bring about historical change. By socialising production, and socialising capital itself, it creates all of the material conditions from which this educated working-class should be able to develop the ideas required for Socialism. It should be able to recognise this socialised capital as its property, not the property of shareholders, or the capitalist state, for example. Consequently, it should be able to recognise the requirement to demand to exercise its rightful democratic control over its collective property. 

But, as the saying goes, you can take a horse to water. Unfortunately, the working-class, in the main, does not automatically arrive at these ideas. A minority retain an essentially peasant mindset. They see the attractions of exercising control over means of production, rather than being a dependent wage worker, but only in the context of wanting individual ownership and control. Some rise above this level, and recognise the need to create worker owned cooperatives, and although the number of cooperatives continues to grow, and in some spheres they play an important, even dominant role, in terms of capital overall, they continue to be subordinated. It is only in respect of the giant corporations that workers control over their socialised capital can play a decisive role, but, here, the demands of workers are more or less entirely missing. Workers, misled by their own social-democratic leaders, continue to accept the lie that this capital is owned by shareholders, and so fall into the trap of believing that before they can exercise control, those shareholders must first be deprived of such ownership, either by confiscation, or by being bought out. 

That facilitates the other lie purveyed by the social-democrats that to move forward one form of socialised capital, that of the corporation, must be replaced by another form of socialised capital, that of the nationalised industry. This Lassallean/Fabian statist ideology has misled the working-class for a century, and more. It was rejected by Marx in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, and the reason that simply looking to nationalisation as a step forward, is a dead end, was given long ago by Kautsky, who set out that the state never nationalises things in the interests of workers. 

“If the modern state nationalises certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, it can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.

The state has never carried on the nationalising of industries further than the interests of the ruling classes demanded, nor will it ever go further than that. So long as the property-holding classes are the ruling ones, the nationalisation of industries and capitalist functions will never be carried so far as to injure the capitalists and landlords or to restrict their opportunities for exploiting the proletariat.”

(Erfurt Programme) 

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that the most important thing, at every stage, is for the communists to raise the property question. The dominant form of property is socialised capital. It is that property which is progressive, and is the basis of forward movement. The owners of that capital are the “associated producers”, i.e. the workers and managers. However, the associated producers do not exercise control over this their collective property. The way forward, the basis of the property question is not the transference of this socialised capital to the capitalist state, but is the demand for the owners of that socialised capital, i.e. the working-class, to exercise their rightful control over it. 

A political struggle is required to change the law so as to enforce that right of control by the workers. It is that, which constitutes the class struggle that must be conducted.

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