The means of ending that conflict was the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, a victory by which it would exercise control over its collective property, in the form of the large-scale, socialised capital, a capital, which, in the age of imperialism, had itself grown to such proportions that it necessarily had broken out of the fetters imposed on it by the nation state, and had become multinational, and transnational, in the form of the multinational corporations. It stands in opposition to the attempts to pursue the idea of national independence, national self-determination, the independent nation state, which are utopian, and reactionary ventures, as much as the attempts of the old moral socialists to hold back capitalist development in favour of small, independent commodity producers.
“The earlier Socialism certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain this mode of production, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of it. It could only simply reject it as evil. [The more violently it denounced the exploitations of the working-class, which is inseparable from capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consists and how it arises.” (p 33-4)
Similarly, the more violently today's moral socialists decry the evils of “imperialism”, and argue for the self-determination of nation states, and national independence, the more it shows that they have not grasped the nature of imperialism, the less able are they to explain the basis of it, and to understand why the self-determination of the nation state, national independence and so on, are not only impossible, but are, now reactionary.
“But for this it was necessary, on the one hand, to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical interconnection and its necessity for a particular historical period, and therefore, also, the necessity of its doom; and, on the other, to lay bare its essential character, which was still hidden, as its critics had hitherto attacked its evil consequences rather than the process as such.” (p 34)
And, so too for imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism. As Trotsky set out in The Program of Peace, imperialism represents the progressive development of capitalism, on an international scale, as it requires ever larger single markets for its scale of production, and consequently ever larger states, which must, necessarily, be multinational rather than nation states. Just as the moral socialist demands of the Sismondists and Narodniks, to hold back large-scale capitalist development were utopian and reactionary, so too, in the age of imperialism, the demand for a continuation of, or return to the nation state, for national independence, and national self-determination is both utopian and reactionary.
Marx showed that the fundamental contradiction between wage-labour and capital rested upon the production of surplus value by the labourer, and its appropriation by the industrial capitalist. This fundamental, scientific discovery, by Marx, swept away all of the previous notions about profits and exploitation based upon cheating, unequal exchange, monopoly and so on, all of which reside within the realm of distribution rather than production.
“It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the basic form of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker effected by it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his worker at the full value it possesses as a commodity on the market, he still extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the last analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which there is heaped up the constantly increasing mass of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The process both of capitalist production and of the production of capital was explained.” (p 34)
Moreover, because capitalist production is the production and sale of commodities, which implies the existence of markets and competition, that competition necessitates the maximisation of profits, so as to maximise capital accumulation, because it is that accumulation that enables each capital to grab market share, to produce on a larger scale, and, thereby to reduce its costs, so as to undercut its rivals. Even when capital takes the form of socialised capital, collectively owned by the workers, therefore, this fundamental requirement remains.
The idea that this exploitation and antagonism was driven by “greedy capitalists”, was, thereby, demolished, and its actual objective, material basis exposed. Similarly, the idea of the mercantilists, based on the previous domination of merchant and interest-bearing capital, that saw profits as deriving from unequal exchange and monopoly, was also demolished by Marx. Unfortunately, in the latter half of the 20th century, many of these idealist and reactionary ideas re-emerged, on the back of the role of Stalinism, and of a resurgence of the petty-bourgeoisie, most notably in relation to petty-bourgeois nationalism, and “anti-imperialism”, as well as a reactionary, petty-bourgeois “anti-capitalism”.
Stalinism sought, via the popular front to ally itself with various reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist movements and regimes, as the anti-colonial revolutions took place. Much as with the Sismondists, and Narodniks, the idea was put forward that capitalism/imperialism represented some divergence from a natural path, imposed on these developing economies by “imperialism”, and that some alternative, “non-capitalist” path of development was possible. But, as Trotsky pointed out, in relation to Mexico, even for state capitalism, capital is required, and the source of much of that capital is from the multinational corporations.
As Stalinism and this reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalism sought to distract from the vicious exploitation of the masses by these nationalist regimes, and their domestic ruling classes, so they reverted, also, to those old mercantilist explanations of profit as deriving from cheating, monopoly, and unequal exchange by imperialism. A petty-bourgeois, studentist, New Left that grew amidst the proliferation of these ideas, alongside those “anti-imperialist” struggles, also enabled these reactionary notions, and made them its own. That degeneration of socialist ideas to the level of pre-Marxist, moral socialism, makes an examination of Anti-Duhring, more important, now, than ever.
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