A comparison with biological evolution is of a moth, faced with changed material conditions, as trees become darkened with soot. Those within the species with darker colouration were better camouflaged, and avoided predators, whereas those with lighter colouration were not so lucky. The former survived and passed on their genes, whereas the latter did not, resulting in the moth becoming much darker than it was. As Darwin described, this same process of adaptation to changed material conditions leads to a differentiation of species themselves.
In the same way, the adaptation of some, in society, to the changed conditions, of commodity production, leads to them becoming an entirely new species/class of bourgeois producers, whilst the failure of others to do so results in them, also, becoming an entirely new species/class of wage labourers. Those not in these two great class camps, the independent producers, die out.
But, this same process, as Marx describes in Capital I and III, continues, so that the small private capitalists are eaten by the bigger private capitalists, and, then, even the big private capitalists are eaten by the mammoth socialised capitals (expropriation of the expropriators) consisting of cooperatives and joint stock companies, which now form their own monopolies and oligopolies, the most developed form of which, within the constraints of the nation state, is state capitalism. Of itself, this represents a new stage of social evolution, organisation and social relations, a social revolution equivalent to that in which feudal production gave way to capitalist production. As Marx put it 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...
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 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. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. 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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment