Marx describes the stages of this process.
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.” (p 21)
This is precisely what Marx describes in Capital I, Chapter 32, and in Capital III, Chapter 27. First of all commodity production and exchange leads to competition between the small independent producers, leading to a differentiation into bourgeois and proletarians, a process of natural selection as in Nature, and leading to these two entirely new species of social class. The large majority of small producers end up as losers and become proletarians, and a small minority are winners becoming bourgeois. The losers lose their means of production, whilst the winners acquire them, and now use them to employ their former owners as wage labourers.
But, this process of centralisation and concentration does not end there. Now, competition between the capitalists also creates winners and losers. The winners become bigger capitalists, the losers smaller capitalists, and then fall themselves into the ranks of the proletariat. The bigger capitalists get bigger becoming private monopoly owners of capital. But, a point is reached where even these big private monopoly owners are not big enough for the needs of capital. In order to produce competitively it becomes necessary to produce on a mammoth scale, and it is so large than not even the biggest private capitalists can mobilise the required capital for it. The monopoly of private capital has become an obstacle to the accumulation of capital itself.
“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
(Capital I, Chapter 32)
It is expropriated by socialised capital, in the form of the cooperatives and joint stock companies. All of this, as Marx describes in Capital III, Chapter 27, goes on automatically behind men's backs, without any conscious plan to do so. It brings about the demise of private capitalist property within the confines of the capitalist system itself.
“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself...
Transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, administrator of other people's capital, and of the owner of capital into a mere owner, a mere money-capitalist ...This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property. On the other hand, the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions...
This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. It manifests itself as such a contradiction in its effects.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
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