It is only with the development of these larger markets, and the potential to produce on a larger scale, thereby obtaining the benefits of economies of scale, that capitalist production becomes possible. Now, the owner of capital can use it to employ several wage labourers, so as to produce at scale; now it becomes possible to introduce a division of labour, and then to utilise machinery, so that this capitalist production undercuts the production of the individual producer, thereby ruining more of them, and driving them into the ranks of the industrial proletariat, as wage labourers.
“... if we consider the historical foundation on which this process develops, from which manufacture arises, the industrial mode of production whose characteristic feature is the division of labour, then this concentration can only take place in the form that these workers are assembled together as wage-workers, that is, as workers who must sell their labour-power because their conditions of labour confront them as alien property, as an independent, alien force. This implies that these conditions of labour confront them as capital; in other words, these means of subsistence and means of labour (or, what amounts to the same thing, the disposal of them through the intermediary of money) are in the hands of individual owners of money or of commodities, who, as a result, become capitalists. The loss of the conditions of labour by the workers is expressed in the fact that these conditions become independent as capital or as things at the disposal of the capitalists.”
(Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, Chapter 21, p 271)
Once again, Marx's scientific method, here, is not concerned as to whether this is a “good thing” or a “bad thing”, whether it has disastrous consequences for the individual producer or not. He simply observes that it is a fact, just as much as it is a fact that a caterpillar metamorphoses into a moth or butterfly. But, he goes further, and analyses the trajectory of this same process of the concentration and centralisation of capital, as it becomes socialised capital, which itself represents the abolition of capital as private property within the capitalist system itself. It results in the development of this socialised capital on a global basis, with the development of a global market and global economy – imperialism – which itself, as Lenin set out, is the economic basis of Socialism. This is the historic mission of capital.
But, as Lenin describes, in Left-wing Childishness, it is not just this concentration and centralisation of the scattered means of production, into capital, and the development of the productive forces, on the basis of capitalism, that is required. It also requires that capitalism creates a world market and world economy – imperialism. It requires that capital goes beyond its original form as privately owned industrial capital, and becomes large-scale socialised capital, operating across this global economy, thereby breaking down national borders, and creating a global working-class capable of waging a global class struggle. Even within the confines of the nation state, this large scale socialised capital had to go beyond the limitations of free market competition. It had to begin to plan and regulate production, and that planning and regulation had to be extended to the economy itself, via the role of the state as a social-democratic state, using macroeconomic planning and regulation to create the environment in which the huge scale of investment could now take place in a stable long-term environment. As Engels put it,
“Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”
(Critique of The Erfurt Programme)
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