This socialised capital is not only the form that corresponds to production based upon large-scale, cooperative labour, and the use, by that labour, of means of production that are so large that they are beyond the means of individuals, including even the biggest private capitals, but, thereby, imminently becomes social property.
The productive-capital – buildings, machines etc. – in the joint stock company or cooperative, belongs to the company itself, as a corporate entity. But, in practice, what does that mean other than that this corporate entity is comprised of real human beings – workers and managers (associated producers) – engaged in its activities? After all, the corporate entity must make decisions on its operations. Moreover, in order to obtain the money-capital required to purchase the commodities that comprise this capital, the companies borrow, and this money, too, is now required on such a scale that it can only come from the mobilisation of funds from society itself, rather than the individual.
The borrowing comes from banks that mobilise the scattered savings of millions of people, and from financial institutions that mobilise the savings of millions in pension funds and so on, as well as coming from the issuing, directly of bonds and shares. As Marx sets out in Capital III, this process of “the expropriation of the expropriators” of private capital by socialised capital, represents the “abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself”. The socialised capital, be it a cooperative or a joint stock company/multinational corporation, is still capital, but it is, now, no longer privately owned capital. It is the collective property of the associated producers, and so, already, a fundamental change, a social revolution, in the relations of production has occurred, but is not yet completed. A chrysalis is not a caterpillar, but is not yet a butterfly.
As Marx notes, therefore, this socialised capital represents the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism.
“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.”
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