The idea that the bourgeois social revolution, the expropriation of the small producers, is more violent and prolonged than the transformation of that private capital into socialised property, of course, contrasts with the view equating the latter with the socialist revolution itself. The period of the first negation, began in the 15th century, and continued for 400 years, with millions thrown forcibly from the land, and so on. But, the transformation of this large-scale private capital into socialised capital, i.e. the second negation, began in earnest only in the middle of the 19th century, and was, more or less, completed by the end of that century.
Private capitals continue to exist, and to be created, but, as Marx set out, in Capital I, they are subordinated to that large-scale, socialised capital. The large majority that come into existence quickly go out of existence again. They depend, as a whole, on the economy created by the large-scale, socialised capital, and its state.
But, this socialised capital, as a transitional form of property, is still capital, whether the capital of a worker cooperative, or a multinational corporation. The difference between these two, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 27, is that, in the former, the workers exercise control over their collective property, whereas in the latter they, currently, do not. Yet, inevitably, this latter form of of socialised capital predominates. The matter, once the workers become a class for themselves, and consciously address this “property question”, as Marx and Engels call it in The Communist Manifesto, should, prima facie, be a simple matter. It requires only that the workers/associated producers assert their legitimate right to control their collective capital, which could be simply legislated, just as, in the 19th century, they asserted their political rights.
Of course, this simply legislated is not so simple at all, just as the demand to simply legislate to provide workers with their political rights required a prolonged struggle. Any such attempt would be met with the determined and violent opposition of the ruling class of speculators and coupon clippers, and their state. It would require the active mobilisation of the working-class, now, fully conscious of its role, to put down such a slave-holders rebellion, arms in hand.
If we move forward to this further development of the socialised capital, therefore, to this period after the slave-holders rebellion has been put down, i.e. to the first period of socialism, we can contrast Marx's description of it to the version presented by Duhring. Engels quotes Marx.
“In order to make the matter comprehensible even to children of six, Marx assumes on page 56 “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community”, that is, a society organised on a socialist basis; and he continues: “The total product of the community is a social product. One portion of this product serves as fresh means of production again. It remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members of the community as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion among them is consequently necessary.”” (p 166)
In other words, at this initial stage of Socialism, as set out in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, the means of production are socialised – the socialised capital, which presumes continued commodity production and exchange, and so competition, has metamorphosed into socialised means of production, on the basis of the gradual withering away of commodity production, based on competition, and its replacement by an organic development of planned production that arises naturally from the planned production of the existing monopolies, and planning and regulation of the economy itself by the bourgeois, social-democratic/imperialist state. Trotsky made a similar assessment in talking about the way commodity production and competition would not be abolished straight away, but would pass through various stages of the workers state seeking to increasingly utilise the market, whilst regulating it, through to the replacement of commodity production and competition, as the state increasingly took production out of the realm of exchange-value, and into the realm of the production of use-value, and real wealth.
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