In Capital III, Marx sets out the laws that determine the average industrial rate of profit that shares out the total surplus value, proportionally, amongst the industrial capitals. Only at that point can the laws determining the division of this profit into rent, interest, taxes and profit of enterprise be considered. These revenues of rent, interest, taxes and profit of enterprise are all derived from the surplus value produced by the workers.
“They are not derived from land as such or from capital as such, but land and capital enable their owners to get their respective shares out of the surplus value extracted by the employing capitalist from the labourer. For the labourer himself it is a matter of subordinate importance whether that surplus value, the result of his surplus labour, or unpaid labour, is altogether pocketed by the employing capitalist, or whether the latter is obliged to pay portions of it, under the name of rent and interest, away to third parties.” (p 67)
That is no longer the case, however, as Marx sets out, in Capital III, Chapter 27, when the era of the monopoly of private capital ends, and the era of socialised capital begins. With socialised capital, it is the collective property of the workers themselves (associated producers), and so how much of their profit is syphoned off as rent to landlords, interest to money-lenders (banks, shareholders, bondholders, the state) or in taxes, becomes of utmost significance to them.
That is most obvious in relation to the worker cooperatives, where the workers see a large part of their profits taken away in rent, interest and taxes. They can reduce the deductions for interest, if they can mobilise their own funds, and retain as much of the profit as possible, to finance capital accumulation, rather than borrowing to finance it. However, as Marx sets out, in Capital III, Chapter 27, the joint stock companies/corporations are socialised capitals just as much a the cooperatives. It is just that bourgeois laws, created by the ruling-class, deny the workers, as collective owners of them, their rightful control over that property, and hand it instead, to shareholders, who do not own it.
It is of utmost importance, therefore, for workers to demand not just consistent democracy, in order to show the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy, but the consistent application of bourgeois property laws, which require the owners of property to be able to exercise control over it. The owners of socialised capital (be it in the form of a cooperative or a joint stock company/corporation) are the workers (associated producers) in the given enterprise, not the creditors of that enterprise, be they landlords, equipment lessors, banks, bondholders, shareholders or the state.
“It is the employing capitalist who immediately extracts from the labourer this surplus value, whatever part of it he may ultimately be able to keep for himself.” (p 67)
And, as Marx sets out in Capital III, this is not changed when the workers become their own capitalist in the shape of the cooperative.
“Upon this relation, therefore between the employing capitalist and the wages labourer the whole wages system and the whole present system of production hinge.” (p 67-8)
It is this fundamental relation between capital and labour that determines the mass and rate of surplus value, and, thereby, the amount of profit that can be shared amongst the various exploiters, be they landlords, industrial capitalists, money lenders or the capitalist state.
“Some of the citizens who took part in our debate were, therefore, wrong in trying to mince matters, and to treat this fundamental relation between the employing capitalist and the working man as a secondary question, although they were right in stating that, under given circumstances, a rise of prices might affect in very unequal degrees the employing capitalist, the landlord, the moneyed capitalist, and, if you please, the tax-gatherer.” (p 68)
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