In these new productive and social relations, the laws of capital still apply, because socialised capital is still capital, as Marx describes in Capital III, Chapter 27.
“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.”
A worker cooperative must still try to maximise profit, rather than pay it all as wages, because, otherwise, it cannot expand, and so produce more efficiently, which would spell its demise.
“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories.”
(ibid)
But, these forms of capital are, then transitional, characterised by an even greater degree of contradiction, epitomised by the fact that the ruling capitalist class becomes antagonistic to, and a fetter on, the very industrial capital that brought it into existence, and which it nurtured, and upon which, its own existence continues to depend!
“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. It establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. 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...
The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”
(ibid)
Moreover, these new relations imply other, wider, social changes. The state itself must become a social-democratic state, acting to plan and regulate the economy, not only because that is how this large-scale industrial capital itself operates, and determines the macro-economic environment it requires, but, also, for the reasons set out above by Marx. The interests of capital, as a whole are not served if certain branches of capital exert such a monopoly as to drain surplus value in the form of surplus profits that cannot be competed away, nor from the existence of swindling and cheating.
Nor are the interests of capital in general served by speculative bubbles, be it in property, shares or bonds, that subsequently burst, with an effect on the real economy, as after 2008, even if the ruling class, via its control of the state, has sought to insulate itself from those effects, via QE, and limitation on the real economy via, austerity, again illustrating the heightened contradiction between its short-term interests and the interests of the form of property – fictitious-capital – upon which it rests, that, now, acts as a fetter on the development of real industrial capital.
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