In the era of the monopoly of private capital, the capitalists, as industrial capitalists, obtained their revenues, initially, in the form of profit, even if, as with the self-employed producer, they notionally consider part of it as interest on the money they loan to their business, part rent on any property used by the business, and part wages for the supervisory labour they undertake. But, in the era of socialised capital, the capital itself is no longer privately owned. It is the collective property of the “associated producers”, i.e. the workers and managers within the company. In the same way we talk of a company of actors, of musicians and so on – the actual composition of which continually changes – a company never can be anything other than the actual people that, at any one time, comprise it. It is no longer any private capitalist that owns the company, or, therefore, obtains its profit as revenue, but the company itself.
That is most apparent when the socialised capital takes the form of a worker cooperative, but it is true of all socialised capital, even if the legal and political superstructure does not reflect it. Even in a joint stock company (corporation), the functioning capitalist/professional manager is not the owner of the capital. It is the company that buys it and owns it. They simply manage it on the company's behalf, and are paid wages for doing so, thereby, reinforcing the notion that profit of enterprise – the profit left over after interest and rent is deducted – is merely a return this entrepreneurial labour.
The company borrows money – from a bank, or by issuing bonds or shares – so as to acquire the actual capital/industrial capital it requires, and it is this money, which, now, becomes viewed as actual capital, and the return to it is interest, whether paid as bank interest, coupon, or dividends. The whole reason it can expropriate the expropriators, and mobilise capital on such a mammoth scale, is because it can mobilise the savings of the whole society to finance its endeavours. But, this loaned money, and the paper assets that are its equivalent – loan and mortgage certificates, bonds, shares – are not real capital, even though bourgeois ideology converts them into being its exclusive form.
The money loaned is not different money to that borrowed, and used to buy real capital by the company. Its only when used to buy real capital, that the money actually becomes money-capital. Money has no means of creating a self-expansion of value, even though the payment of interest creates that illusion. The interest does not represent any self-expansion of value from the standpoint of society, it is merely a transfer of existing value from one person to another, as, indeed, is the case with rent and taxes.
It is only labour that creates new value and surplus value, and which, then makes possible the payment of rent, interest and taxes, without a diminution of society's productive capacity, i.e. without consuming a part of society's existing means of production, like a farmer consuming their own seed corn. In other words, the only way that interest, rent and taxes can be paid, without surplus value having first been produced, is by asset stripping, converting capital/means of production into revenue/means of consumption.
The ruling class, in the era of socialised capital/imperialism, owns its wealth, then, in the form of this fictitious-capital, not the industrial capital that was the case in the era of the monopoly of private capital, and, because the former obtains its revenues in the form of interest, whereas the latter obtained their revenue in the form of profit, this implies completely different conditions of distribution arising from it, as Marx describes in Capital III. The interests of the ruling class, as owners of fictitious-capital, are antagonistic to the interests of industrial capital, be they the associated producers who collectively own socialised capitals, or the smaller capitalists and petty-bourgeois producers, who represent the remnants and relics of the era of private capital.
The ruling class, therefore, occupy the same position as the landlords, after the rise of the capitalist farmer. They continue to occupy the position of ruling-class, and the legal and political superstructure, i.e. the state, reflects that fact, but, in reality, they have become socially redundant, as the social revolution has already changed the productive and social relations of society. They represent simply a parasitic excrescence on society, summed up by Marx and Engels description of them as mere “coupon clippers”.
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