So, contrary to Duhring, but also to those who interpret the “expropriation of the expropriators” as meaning some single event, i.e. the socialist political revolution, as characterised by the October Revolution, Engels makes clear that Marx does not mean by it some such future event, made necessary as a consequence of an Hegelian dialectical law, but is describing a process that had already occurred and was continuing. The failure to understand this, and, instead, the success of the statists, in presenting it as meaning some single, revolutionary event, has held back the development of the working-class for a century. It facilitates and fuels the reactionary petty-bourgeois ideology of “anti-capitalism”, and “anti-imperialism” that equates the large corporations with “the monopoly of private capital”, whereas that was not at all what Marx and Engels were referring to. On the contrary, these large monopolistic corporations are the socialised capitals that Marx and Engels identify as the “expropriators of the expropriators”, the means by which the monopoly ownership of capital by private individuals was ended.
As Marx and Engels describe, in these huge monopolistic, socialised capitals, it is not the ownership of capital that is monopolised, which was the case with the previous condition of the monopoly ownership of private capital, but the monopolising of production, of the market. In fact, this is the opposite of the condition in the period of the monopoly of private capital. In that period, the capital itself was monopolised by a relatively few individuals, but production was still characterised by a plethora of such private capitals, each competing against each other in the market, which, as Marx describes in Capital III, Chapter 15, is one of the reasons that crises of overproduction erupt.
“The so-called plethora of capital always applies essentially to a plethora of the capital for which the fall in the rate of profit is not compensated through the mass of profit — this is always true of newly developing fresh offshoots of capital — or to a plethora which places capitals incapable of action on their own at the disposal of the managers of large enterprises in the form of credit. This plethora of capital arises from the same causes as those which call forth relative over-population, and is, therefore, a phenomenon supplementing the latter, although they stand at opposite poles — unemployed capital at one pole, and unemployed worker population at the other.”
Relative surplus population is created by capital in response to a shortage of labour in the crisis phase of the long wave cycle. The rise in relative wages squeezes profits, as, for example, described by Glyn & Sutcliffe (Workers and The Profits Squeeze), in relation to the 1960's, and early 70's. For the less efficient (generally smaller) capitals, operating on already small profit margins, this means that they become prone to those margins disappearing altogether. Capital is only capital if it produces profit, and so, this is the basis of an overproduction of capital, i.e. it is overproduced relative to the labour supply/social working day. Capital responds by technological innovation. It replaces labour with fixed capital, thereby, raising social productivity. The same level of output can now be produced with less labour, creating a relative surplus population.
In the era of imperialism/large-scale monopoly capital, it is not the individual capitalists, therefore, that have to be, now, expropriated, because that has already been accomplished. The socialised capitals are, already, the collective property of the associated producers within them. It is one reason that the attacks on these companies, by the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists” are reactionary, because what they are attacking is the collective capital of the working-class and material basis of the new society. That is the basis of Lenin's argument in Left-Wing Childishness. What they should be attacking is the continued role of the ruling class of speculators and coupon-clippers, in controlling those companies, and the denial of the legitimate right of the workers to do so.
“It is therefore once again a pure distortion of Herr Dühring's when he declares that the negation of the negation has to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past, or that Marx wants anyone to be convinced of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital (which is itself a Dühringian contradiction in corporeal form) on the basis of credence in the negation of the negation.” (p 171)
Engels contrasts dialectics with formal logic. Duhring's argument had Marx “predicting” the “expropriation of the expropriators”, and socialism, solely on the basis of the playing out of a dialectical law – the negation of the negation. As set out, that is not what Marx's theory does, nor what he did in practical application of that that theory in analysing the development of capital. Marx's materialist method is not speculative nor deductive. It is based on analysis of what exists, and analysis, thereby, of the laws of motion that created what exists. As Engels sets out, this is different to formal logic, upon which Duhring based his argument.
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