The Political Situation (4/14)
But, again, its necessary to look at what the aims of the capitalists are, here, and how it compares with the current situation. The aim, in the 1920's and 1930's, was not reactionary, in the true sense of that term. In other words, the aim was not to turn back the nature of the productive and social relations, as was the aim, for example, of the Sismondists, or the Narodniks, or as is the case today, with the anarcho-capitalists (Libertarians), and Brexiteers. Quite the opposite. The big capitalists knew that the way out of the crises of overproduction was to develop the forces of production further, to organise production on an even larger, even more rational, planned and regulated scale. Even in the 1890's, Lenin comments that capitalists in the West had recognised the need for that.
“even the bourgeois, realises that the transition of capitalism to a new social-economic formation is inevitable.
The socialisation of labour by capital has advanced so far that even bourgeois literature loudly proclaims the necessity of the “planned organisation of the national economy.””
(The Economic Content of Narodism, p 445-6)
They recognised that the capitalist state would have to intervene in that process to an even greater degree than it had already been doing, and they also recognised that the concomitant of this was the need for a single European market. They had in their view not only the process of creating European nation states, undertaken in the 19th century, but also the US Civil War, which created a federal United States as a huge single market, in which the individual states were subordinated to the Federal State. Of course, the big capitalists, still organised, largely, on a national basis, sought to create this single European market under the domination of their own nation state, as France and Prussia had sought to do in the 19th century, and as they continued to try to do in the 20th century. Meanwhile, the global hegemon of the time, Britain, sought, as it had done during the 19th century, to protect its own dominance, by frustrating any such European union, which would quickly have eclipsed its industrial power. The creation of the multinational corporation after WWII, represents that change in material conditions which undermines this causal link between national capital and nation state.
The problem for these big money-lending capitalists, however, was precisely that which Marx and Engels had outlined clearly in Capital, and in Anti-Durhing. It is that, with the development of socialised capital, the social function of the capitalist becomes redundant, as had the social function of the landlord with the advent of the capitalist farmer. Yet, the private capitalist, reduced now to the role of owner of fictitious capital, of parasitic coupon clipper, continues to exercise considerable power. The amount of fictitious capital also grows massively alongside the growth of real capital, and indeed becomes itself seen as “real capital”, whilst the real capital becomes seen as merely means of production, commodities set in motion by the entrepreneur/functioning capitalist. The state itself continues to be a capitalist state supporting the interests of these big money-lending capitalists. Even in Germany, which had introduced co-determination laws in the 19th century, giving workers right of representation on company boards, it is shareholders that dominate such decision making bodies, and by these means the interests of the shareholders are enforced. The more it becomes obvious that these capitalists have no useful role to play, the more it becomes obvious to workers that they can introduce the technological revolutions in production, all of the results of Taylorism, required to raise productivity, but also that they can do this at the same time as introducing the planning and regulation of production on a scale that goes way beyond what is possible within the confines of capitalism, which continues to organise production on the basis of production of profit, rather than on the basis of human need.
That is what the big capitalists cannot allow, because it means the end of them as ruling class. In other words, when this ruling class fraction, in the shape of the big private money-lending capitalists resorts to fascism, or some other strong state means of suppressing the advance of the workers, it is not reactionary, but conservative. It does not seek to turn the clock back to some less mature stage of capitalist development, but seeks to protect its current stage of development, remaining within the confines of capitalism, and preventing any forward march to the next logical stage of development, which is Socialism. It is conservative not reactionary. As Lenin puts it,
“history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other...
“. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs””
(Left-wing Childishness)
The big money lending capitalists resorted to fascism in order to increase the length of the ladder, rather than allow the step on to the next rung.
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