A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, Preface - Part 7 of 8

A social revolution has occurred, and continues to unfold, as the contradictions within these transitional forms of property become reflected in ideas, and class struggle around “the property question”. When Marx says that Socialism is inevitable, it is this reality of this social revolution that he is describing. And, it is not just this change from the monopoly of private capital to the domination of collectively owned, socialised capital that constitute this social revolution. The mammoth scale of the socialised capital means that they must now also borrow other features of the encroaching socialist society. Monopoly/oligopoly dominates, and with it planned production replaces the domination of production by the market. As Engels put it in his Critiqueof The Erfurt Programme,

“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.”

And, this planning and regulation extends into the planning and regulation of the economy itself by the state, which itself must increasingly become international in scope. The social function of the private capitalist disappears, as they become mere coupon clippers, lenders of money-capital to corporations and the state. Meanwhile the actual role of functioning capitalist passes to a middle class army of professional managers, administrators and technicians drawn from the working-class, and paid wages. This is Socialism in all but name, all but for the democratic control over this collectively owned capital by the workers themselves, control that rests, instead with its non-owners – share-owners. As Marx and Engels put it in Anti-Durhring,

“In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the Capitalists.

But, the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers...

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...

All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.”

(Anti-Duhring, p 358-60)

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