Engels uses an unfortunate phrase, which itself needs to be contextualised. He says,
“Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree” (p 13)
This word “collapse” is used by catastrophists to support claims of some ultimate crisis of capitalism, leading to its denouement, this crisis itself being the culmination of a series of previous crises, each more severe than the one before. This last contention is easily disproved, because it has not been the case that capitalist crises have increased in severity, nor frequency, over time. The idea of some such ultimate crisis is itself rejected by Marx, who wrote in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17,
“A distinction must he made here. When Adam Smith explains the fall in the rate of profit from an over-abundance of capital, an accumulation of capital, he is speaking of a permanent effect and this is wrong. As against this, the transitory over-abundance of capital, over-production and crises are something different. Permanent crises do not exist.”
Engels' own words, here, “daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree”, show that collapse cannot be understood in that catastrophist way. What it means, as Marx describes, in Capital III, Chapter 27, and as he and Engels set out in Anti-Duhring, is that, on a daily basis, the capitalist mode of production is forced to utilise the methods of the invading socialist society. Already, in the second half of the 19th century, “the expropriators were expropriated”, as the monopoly of private capital gave way to socialised capital, in the form of the cooperative and joint stock company, corporations and trusts. As Marx put it, all of this socialised capital, collectively owned (even if not controlled) by the associated producers, represented the overcoming of capitalist production within 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...
It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter's social property, much as they are their social products.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
It is still capital, rather than simply means of production, but it is now socialised capital, the property of the associated producers, even though only under their control in the worker cooperatives. Its dynamic necessarily leads to its dissolution as capital itself, and marks it as a transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism.
“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.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
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