Even, then, in 1825, therefore, the working-class remained largely enthusiastic about this capitalist development. As Marx and Engels note, in The Communist Manifesto, they tended to see the problem being with the new technologies introduced, i.e. the machines they saw as throwing them out of work, rather than with the capitalistic use of those machines. In so far as it was reflected in socialist ideas, it was a reactionary, moral socialism, such as that of Sismondi. But, again, as Marx and Engels note, in The Communist Manifesto, the workers rejected the siren calls of the old aristocracy, as they offered up their own critique of this capitalist development, and its new distribution relations. On the contrary, as Engels notes, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of The Working Class, the workers became a long tail of the Liberal Party, the party of the industrial bourgeoisie.
If we consider the subsequent developments, the same can be seen. The monopoly of private capital was abolished, as socialised capital expropriated the expropriators. The ruling-class became a class of money-lenders, owners of fictitious capital. Rather than directly exploiting labour, therefore, they, now, indirectly exploit labour, by first exploiting the owners of industrial capital, in the same way that, for example, the old landlord class did, via the extraction of rents. The dominant form of industrial capital is large-scale, socialised capital, in the form of corporations and cooperatives, although some smaller scale, private industrial capital exists in the hands of small capitalists and the petty-bourgeoisie. Indeed, this latter form is, numerically, far greater, but is subordinated to the dominant form of large-scale, socialised capital.
As with Lenin's example, of the middle peasant, these latter tend to be the least affluent and precarious layers of society, apart from the permanently unemployed. As with the middle peasants, they frequently must resort to borrowing, and that of the most expensive kind. The ruling class exploits them via these interest payments.
The socialised capital is, objectively, the collective property of workers in each company (associated producers). In creating profits, they exploit themselves, in the way Marx describes in Capital III, Chapter 27. But, because, other than in the worker cooperatives, they do not, legally, exercise control over their own property, an excessive proportion of those profits, now, goes to the payment of interest/dividends, and to excessive remuneration of the executives appointed by shareholders.
The obvious solution for the workers is to insist on the right to control their own property, as is only consistent with bourgeois property laws. Yet, they have allowed themselves to be duped into believing that their property is not, actually, their collective property, but the property of shareholders, who, like bondholders, are only creditors of the company. What is more, in considering the inequality of distribution relations, they have allowed themselves to be duped into considering only the inequality of earned incomes, i.e. the wages of different sections of the working and middle class, whereas the real inequality, and inequity, resides in the difference between these earned incomes and the unearned incomes of the ruling-class, i.e. its income from interest/dividends, rents and capital gains.
Rather as workers, at the start of the 19th century, saw machines as the source of their problems, whereas those machines were the means of their eventual liberation, so too, in the age of imperialism, the same moral socialism leads them to believe that it is large-scale corporations that are the source of their problems, whereas those corporations are not only the basis of socialism, but are, in fact, already their own collective property. In much the same way that workers focused on raising wages, rather than abolition of the wages system, so too this perpetuation of a moral socialist perspective and economism has led them astray from the real goal, the resolution of the property question, and control over what is already their collective property, and as Marx puts it, in Capital III, Chapter 27, the transitional form between capitalism and socialism.
“From a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morals and law does not help us an inch further; economic science can regard moral indignation, however justifiable, not as an argument, but only as a symptom. Its task is rather to show that the social abuses coming to the fore are necessary consequences of the existing mode of production, but at the same time also indications of its impending dissolution; and to reveal, within the already dissolving form of economic motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses.” (p 190)
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