The solution, as Owen et al realised, was that the large-scale production, in each enterprise, which necessitated high levels of regulation and planning to standardise and coordinate each phase and element of production, had to be extended to the whole of society. In fact, as Marx and Engels note, in Capital III, Chapter 27, the large-scale, socialised capitals, be they cooperatives or joint stock companies, by the end of the 19th century, were themselves driven down that path. They formed monopolies, cartels and trusts, and the capitalist state, itself, was led to nationalise some of these industries. Increasingly, the capitalist state had to operate on behalf of capital in general, to standardise production – as for example railway gauges – to regulate, coordinate and plan the national economy, in the same way that production was organised in each enterprise. As Engels put it in his Critique of The Erfurt Programme,
“I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capitalist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”
The problem with the Utopian ideas of Saint Simon and Fourier, in particular, for developing such cooperative commonwealths was that they relied on the existing owners of capital – the bourgeoisie – simply being converted to this view on the basis of its superior rationality and morality. Whilst some individual capitalists did so, whether on the basis of foresight, or often religious/moral conviction, there was no reason why the vast majority would do so. On the contrary, everything drove them in the opposite direction.
They, increasingly, saw the need for regulation and planning of production, for standardisation and so on, not for the benefit of society, and certainly not for the benefit of workers, but for the benefit of expanding the market, for ensuring that they could reduce their costs, ensure that they could sell all their output, and maximise their profits.
The development of monopolies, trusts and cartels was the bourgeois form of that rationality. And, as this large-scale socialised capital, intimately tied to the state (imperialism) grows ever larger, it bursts out of the fetter of the nation state, which had, previously, been its product. Just as the monopoly of private capital had become a fetter on the further development of capital, by the middle of the 19th century, a fetter burst asunder by the development of socialised capital, and the expropriation of the expropriators, so too, by the start of the 20th century, the nation state had become a reactionary fetter on the rational development of capital that had to be removed, and replaced by, ever larger, multinational states, and, even, global para-state bodies and institutions.
Imperialist war and annexations were the inevitable bourgeois form of that progressive development. As Trotsky put it,
“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers...
The right of national self-determination cannot he excluded from the proletarian peace programme; but it cannot claim absolute importance. On the contrary, it is delimited for us by the converging, profoundly progressive tendencies of historical development. If this “right” must be – through revolutionary force – counter-posed to the imperialist methods of centralization which enslave weak and backward peoples and mush the hearths of national culture, then on the other hand the proletariat cannot allow the “national principle” to get in the way of the irresistible and deeply progressive tendency of modern economic life towards a planned organization throughout our continent, and further, all over the globe. Imperialism is the capitalist-thievish expression of this tendency of modern economy to tear itself completely away from the idiocy of national narrowness, as it did previously with regard to local and provincial confinement. While fighting against the imperialist form of economic centralization, socialism does not at all take a stand against the particular tendency as such but, on the contrary, makes the tendency its own guiding principle.”
No comments:
Post a Comment