It is, similarly, manifest in the petty-bourgeois notions of the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”, who misunderstand the concept of negation, and turn it into a reactionary, destructive concept, rather than embracing its revolutionary content.
Engels summarises Marx's use of the concept of the negation of the negation, in Capital.
“Before the capitalist era, petty industry existed, at least in England, on the basis of the private property of the worker in his means of production. The so-called primitive accumulation of capital here consisted in the expropriation of these immediate producers, that is, in the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner.” (p 168)
The petty commodity production had only been possible, because production, as a whole, was limited in scale. The direct producers produced only for their own consumption, plus the surplus production appropriated by the landed aristocracy. They engaged in cottage industry, on that basis. In the towns, the former serfs, freed from the land, engage in small-scale, industrial production, alongside the existing, feudal guild production, and in competition with it. So long as the market is small, thereby, constrained, and provincial in nature, there is no basis for, or advantage in, larger-scale commodity production. The growth of the towns, and the expansion of trade, as the merchant adventurers open up the Americas and Asia, changes that condition.
As Engels describes it, this centralisation of these scattered, private means of production form the “pre-history of capital”, as Marx also describes, in Theories of Surplus Value. As Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 24, this centralisation of the scattered means of production could only take place in the form of its conversion into privately owned capital. Considered abstractly, the individual commodity producers could, theoretically, have come together to form a collective/cooperative, so as to produce on a more rational, larger scale, but, in reality, not only did they not do that, but they could not, because they were all driven by their own individualist mindset. Lenin, in his critique of the Narodniks, set out the accounts of the idiotic extent to which that occurred, even when some cooperation between them was required.
Later, Lenin was to quote from Kautsky, the work done by Engelhardt, who found the same obstacle arising from the individualist mindset of the peasant, whereas, every example of a successful cooperative venture, on the land, had come from the joining together, not of peasants, but of agricultural wage-labourers, who had already developed a collectivist ideology.
Once this process of the centralisation and concentration of means of production, as private capital, has been accomplished, it brings about a further change. As Lenin described, for example, in “On The So Called Market Question”, the growth of capital, also, brings about the growth of the market. Producers, who are, now, employed as wage labourers, must buy the consumption goods they once made for themselves, and, so, the demand for commodities itself expands. As the market expands, the potential for larger-scale production grows, and, with it, the scope for a technical division of labour within the workshop/manufactory, and, consequently, the labour process, itself, becomes cooperative. Engels quotes Marx, from Capital,
““That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the worker working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many workers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the concentration of capital. One capitalist kills many. Hand in hand with this concentration, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the work-process, the conscious technological application of science, the methodical collective cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the collective means of production of combined, socialised labour.”” (p 169)
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