Alongside this growing monopoly of private capital comes all of the iniquities of capitalist development that the petty-bourgeois, moral socialists such as Sismondi, Proudhon, and the Narodniks railed against, in which they could, as Marx puts it in The Poverty of Philosophy, “only see in poverty poverty”. But, the revolutionary aspect of this, as Marx sets out against Proudhon, is precisely that it arises as part of the creation of an ever growing industrial proletariat, alongside ever-growing socialised production, which provides all the requirements for the creation of socialism. Where the petty-bourgeois moral socialists seek to hold this process back, or reverse it, i.e. “anti-capitalism”, and, later, “anti-imperialism”, Marx seeks to drive it forward, to speed up the maturing of the contradictions, as, for example, he described in his Speech On Free Trade. The same approach was taken by Lenin and Trotsky, in relation to imperialism.
“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Concentration of the means of production and socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (p 169-70)
Note that what Marx says is that it is for “capitalist private property” that the knell sounds, not for capitalist property, or capitalism itself. As Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 27, and, as Engels sets out in The Critique of the Erfurt Programme, it was that private capitalist property that was no longer compatible with the conditions, and became a fetter on their development. Indeed, in this same passage, Marx makes that clear, because he notes, “The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.” In other words, Marx is saying, clearly, that the capitalist mode of production is itself being fettered by that privately owned capital, that fetter is burst asunder, by the expropriation of these big private capitals by socialised capital, as the basis of its further development, which occurs in the era of imperialism, starting at the end of the 19th century.
The expropriation of the expropriators, accomplished by large-scale socialised capital, from the second half of the 19th century, is a process, not an event, and continues to unfold. It is, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 27, the dissolution of the capitalist mode of production within capitalism.
“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.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
Engels confirms this view.
“It is only at this point, after Marx has completed his historico-economic proof, that he proceeds:
“The capitalist mode of production and appropriation, and consequently capitalist private property, is the first negation of individual private property based on one's own labour. The negation of capitalist production is begotten by itself with the inexorability of a natural process.” (p 170)
And, he continues,
“After he has proved from history that in fact the process has in part already occurred, and in part must occur in the future, he also characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law. That is all.” (p 171)
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