Engels quotes Duhring.
“This historical sketch” (of the genesis of the so-called original accumulation of capital in England) “is relatively the best part of Marx's book, and would be even better if it had not supported itself with the dialectical crutch in addition to the scholarly crutch. In default of anything better and clearer, the Hegelian negation of the negation has in fact to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past. The abolition of ‘individual property’, which has been effected in the way indicated above since the sixteenth century, is the first negation. It will be followed by a second, which bears the character of a negation of the negation and hence of a restoration of ‘individual property’, but in a higher form, based on the common ownership of land and of the instruments of labour”. (p 164)
As set out previously, Duhring presents this as Marx setting out a Hegelian negation of the negation, and, then, fitting material reality to it, whereas Marx's method is entirely the reverse of that. He examines, and sets out the material reality, and the historical process leading to it, and, then, sets that, into, the the context of the dialectic. Moreover, as I have set out, before, in precisely this context, and as Lenin, also, sets out in his polemics against Mikhailovsky and the Narodniks, Marx, in talking about this negation of the negation, of the “expropriation of the expropriators”, was not making a speculative prediction of something to come at some future date, but was describing what had already happened, and was continuing to unfold. Engels also makes that clear in this chapter, and later.
The “expropriation of the expropriators” had already happened, as private capital was expropriated by large-scale, socialised capital, whether in the form of the cooperative or the joint stock company, both of which, Marx describes as the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. It is capital that is already the collective property of the “associated producers”, i.e. workers within the company. This change in the form of property, also, did not arise as a result of any conscious will, but simply from the processes and dynamic of capital itself, of the need to produce on an ever larger scale, a scale that could no longer be achieved within the fetters of private capital. As Marx described 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.”
The first negation is the expropriation of the individual commodity producers by the private capitalists. The second negation, the negation of the negation, or “expropriation of the expropriators”, is not some future event that is, often, equated with the socialist revolution, but had already happened by the late 19th century – and continues to unfold – when the process of concentration and centralisation of capital means that, first, the small private capitals are expropriated by the bigger private capitals, and, then, when even these were not big enough, they were, in turn, expropriated, not by private capitals, but by socialised capital, particularly, after 1855, by the joint stock companies.
In The Critique of The Erfurt Programme, Engels notes,
“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.”
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