Marx picks up on this in his Address to the First International, but, like Engels, points out that the bourgeoisie are not going to simply sit back and allow such a process to unfold peacefully. For one thing, as Marx points out, although the socialised capital is the collective property of the workers, the bourgeoisie had ensured that they used their political regime to pass company laws that gave control over the joint stock companies, not to those collective owners, but to the shareholders, who were merely creditors of those companies. Even in relation to the workers' cooperatives, wherever they needed to borrow money, they faced higher interest rates than did other companies, as the bourgeoisie sought to continue to extract surplus value from them. In the case of the corporations,
“It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
Consequently, the social revolution taking place in the realm of the productive relations, would require the workers to overcome this political opposition by the bourgeoisie, by themselves creating their own Workers Party, and engaging in a political struggle to form a Workers' Government.
“But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”...
At the same time the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however, excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic middle-class spouters, and even keep political economists have all at once turned nauseously complimentary to the very co-operative labour system they had vainly tried to nip in the bud by deriding it as the utopia of the dreamer, or stigmatizing it as the sacrilege of the socialist. To save the industrious masses, co-operative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour. Remember the sneer with which, last session, Lord Palmerston put down the advocated of the Irish Tenants’ Right Bill. The House of Commons, cried he, is a house of landed proprietors. To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy, and France, there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political organization of the workingmen’s party.”
(Marx – Inaugural Address To The First International)
However, even in the second half of the 19th century, there was a problem in this, because everywhere, other than in Britain, the workers still represented a minority of society. As Marx notes in The Critique of the Gotha Programme,
“In the first place, the majority of the "toiling people" in Germany consists of peasants, not proletarians.”
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