In this appendix, Lenin turns his attention to a critique of the Legal Marxists, who confined their presentation of Marxism to a banal formulation that removed all conceptions of the role of class struggle and class antagonisms from the theory. This enabled them to present their ideas within the limits imposed by Tsarist censorship, but meant that Marxism was portrayed in the very narrow terms that also enabled the Narodniks to criticise it.
But, Lenin's presentation itself bends the stick too far in the other direction. He says,
“Marxism, as they expound it, is practically reduced to the doctrine of how individual property, based on the labour of the proprietor, undergoes its dialectical development under the capitalist system, how it turns into its negation and is then socialised.” (p 326)
Lenin himself has misunderstood and misrepresented this process, as outlined by Marx in Capital I, Chapter 25 and Capital III, Chapter 27, as well as by him and Engels elsewhere. Lenin interprets the “expropriation of the expropriators” as being synonymous with the proletarian revolution, but it isn't. He presents Marx's description of private capital being a fetter, as being a description of a fetter represented by capital itself, a fetter that can only be “burst asunder” by the proletarian revolution, but that is clearly not what Marx and Engels say, and that fact is reinforced by what he and Engels say in Anti-Duhring, and by what Engels says in his Critique of the Erfurt Programme.
When Marx talks about the monopoly of private capital what he means is that form of capital that exists and accumulates on the basis of the private ownership of means of production themselves, i.e. by individual capitalist families, i.e. prior to the growth of the joint stock company, and socialised capital. These are the kinds of business that predominate prior to the development of socialised capital, and Marx describes their evolution as the small capital expropriates the small producer, then the development of larger private capitals owned by millionaire capitalists sees them expropriate the small and medium capitalists. It is these latter that represent the fetter, because even these richest of families could not mobilise the capital on the scale required for the new mammoth businesses that developed on the basis of the new productive forces. As Engels put it,
“Many of these means of production and of communication are, from the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic exploitation. At a certain stage of development this form, too, no longer suffices: [the large-scale producers in one and the same branch of industry in a country unite in a “trust”, an association for the purpose of regulating production.”
(Engels, Anti-Duhring, p 358)
It is the individual families that own these means of production that constitutes the monopoly of private capital, and which, because of its limits now constitutes a fetter that must be burst asunder, and it is burst asunder not by the proletarian revolution, but by the development of socialised capital, of the cooperative and corporation, the trust and so on. The expropriation of the expropriators is not a consequence of the proletarian revolution, but of this development of socialised capital, as the transitional form of property, as Marx describes it, as the destruction of capital as private property within the confines of capitalism itself.
And, its odd that Lenin makes this error, because he has earlier set out that Marx does not make predictions about the future, but only describes reality as it has already unfolded, and is continuing to unfold. The “expropriation of the expropriators” was not, and could not be, for Marx, a prediction of the future, of the proletarian revolution, because that is antithetical to Marx's method of historical materialism. It was a description of what had already occurred, and was continuing to unfold.
In Capital III, Chapter 27, Marx describes the process of socialised capital as arising naturally from the laws of capitalist development, and the concentration and centralisation of capital itself. It is a process which itself results in new forms of class antagonisms, and class struggle. For example, socialised capital, in the form of the worker owned cooperative, is not only constrained to continue to operate as capital, because it must compete within the capitalist economy, on the basis of continued commodity production, it is also faced with attempts by the owners of money-capital to extract surplus value from it in the form of interest. Private ownership of capital now takes the form of the ownership of loanable money-capital, and consequent ownership of fictitious capital, in the shape of shares, bonds, property and their derivatives. The interests of the ruling class, as owners of this fictitious capital, is centralised in the institutions of the banks, central banks, stock exchanges, the financial media, as well as in the state itself.
Consequently, the growth of the worker owned cooperative is itself constrained by law, for example, competition law that prevents workers creating cooperative monopolies. But, it is also represented in company law relating to the other form of socialised capital, the join stock company. The shareholders of these companies do not own their productive capital. That is owned by the company itself, which, as Marx says, can only be considered as the associated producers within it. The shareholders are only creditors of the company, who lend money-capital to it, in the same way as does a bank, via credit, or a bondholder, or in the same way a landowner loans land to the company for it to use. But, company law gives shareholders a right to control this collective capital they do not own.
New social relations, and new antagonisms, thereby, develop as a result of socialised capital expropriating private capital, and as a result of the capitalists having abandoned their ownership of means of production, and their social role in production, in favour of the ownership of fictitious capital, and a life as mere “coupon clippers”.
A clear manifestation of this is that there is no limit to the interest that shareholders can receive on the money they lend to a company, via the purchase of shares, in the form of dividends. However, the liabilities these shareholders have for losses incurred by the company is limited to the same money they have paid for the shares. This is an early example of privatised gains alongside socialised losses being incorporated into bourgeois property law. There is no problem with shareholders liability being limited, provided they do not expect to exercise control of the capital they do not own. That control can only legitimately be exercised by the associated producers that comprise the firm.
Its for these reasons, as Marx sets out, in his Inaugural Address, to the First International that the class struggle must assume the form of a political struggle waged by a Workers Party. That political struggle must translate the actual changes in the social relations that have occurred that now posits socialised capital in antagonistic opposition to fictitious capital, into its appropriate legal and political reflection.
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