The fundamental role of class struggle is established, here, as is its revolutionary rather than evolutionary content. The dynamic of change is not some teleological process, in which the “good” side of phenomena prevails and expands, whilst the “bad” side is removed by palliative measures or reforms. It is precisely the act of struggle by the “bad” side of phenomena, to create new forms of property that brings about a revolutionary change. So, for example, note that its not a struggle of serfs for less harsh terms of their servitude that is revolutionary, or a manifestation of this class struggle, but the struggle to end serfdom altogether, but serfdom cannot be ended, if the serf, as a free peasant, is also, thereby, freed from the land, with no means of subsistence. Its only as an independent commodity producer, as a bourgeois, that they can be freed, and its this new form of property, and their struggle for it, as against feudal property that is revolutionary.
Similarly, it is not the wage labourer's struggle for higher wages that constitutes class struggle, however much it is necessary. It constitutes only a bourgeois distributional struggle, no different to the struggle of different firms for market share, or share of total surplus value, and so on. So long as workers only engage in such struggle, they remain within and dominated by the confines of bourgeois ideology and society, simply reproducing it and reinforcing it, no different than a slave who only demands less harsh treatment by the slave owner. It means accepting existing property relations, the ownership of capital and labour-power, and so the social relations that derive from them. Its only when the wage-labourer struggles, instead, for the new forms of property that develop out of capitalist production, i.e. the socialised capital of the cooperative and corporation, which is their collective property, and their control over it, that they can become liberated and establish new social relations based on this new form of property. It is only that, which constitutes class struggle.
“If, during the epoch of the domination of feudalism, the economists, enthusiastic over the knightly virtues, the beautiful harmony between rights and duties, the patriarchal life of the towns, the prosperous condition of domestic industry in the countryside, the development of industry organized into corporations, guilds and fraternities, in short, everything that constitutes the good side of feudalism, had set themselves the problem of eliminating everything that cast a shadow on the picture – serfdom, privileges, anarchy – what would have happened? All the elements which called forth the struggle would have been destroyed, and the development of the bourgeoisie nipped in the bud. One would have set oneself the absurd problem of eliminating history.” (p 113)
The bourgeoisie, under feudalism, begins, first, in the towns, to develop commodity production and exchange, and the development of the productive forces that goes with it. Given the small scale of production, individual bourgeois can develop this new form of property, effectively, in opposition to feudal production, though the feudal rulers attempt to thwart them. For workers, the scale of production has already taken on mammoth proportions, by the time they posit their new form of property in opposition to bourgeois property. The worker cooperative must operate on, at least, the minimum scale as a capitalist firm.
The corporation/joint stock company, as socialised capital, is the collective property of its workers, but not under their control, a condition which the ruling class, who have become a class of coupon clippers, owners of fictitious capital, ensures persists with laws that vest control in their hands, as shareholders, instead, just as, for a time, the old feudal class benefited from drawing larger rents from the greater productivity of capitalist production, and from the role of merchant capitalists in establishing colonial empires.
As Lenin and Trotsky point out, by the time a workers' state arises, such as that in Russia, imperialism has already created a world economy, with the vast exchanges of international trade being the basis of the large-scale capitalist production. So, it is impossible for the productive relations, in the workers' state, to rise above those already existing in imperialist states, on any other basis. Hence the utopian and reactionary nature of the Theory of Socialism In One Country.
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