Predictions For 2026 - Prediction 3 - Inflation Returns - Part 4

The 2008 global financial crash showed that the limiting role of surplus-value on the continued expansion of revenues derived from assets had asserted itself. In Capital III, Marx notes,

“It would be still more absurd to presume that capital would yield interest on the basis of capitalist production without performing any productive function, i.e., without creating surplus-value, of which interest is just a part; that the capitalist mode of production would run its course without capitalist production. If an untowardly large section of capitalists were to convert their capital into money-capital, the result would be a frightful depreciation of money-capital and a frightful fall in the rate of interest; many would at once face the impossibility of living on their interest, and would hence be compelled to reconvert into industrial capitalists.” (p 378)

Marx and Engels noted that a social revolution had already occurred by the latter part of the 19th century. Private ownership of industrial capital had already become an anachronism. Capital was, even by then, socialised capital, the collective property of the “associated producers” within each large company, be it a cooperative or a joint stock company.

“This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property. On the other hand, the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions...

This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. It manifests itself as such a contradiction in its effects. It establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property...

The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

(Capital III, Chapter 27)

When Marx and Engels say that socialism is inevitable, this is not a prediction of the future, but a statement of the facts that already existed at the time they said it. This social revolution had already occurred. Production had been socialised, and industrial-capital had, then, been socialised along with it. The collective owners of industrial-capital – at least of large-scale industrial capital, monopoly-capital – were the workers (associated producers), but they did not yet exert control over their own property. The ruling-class, had become a class of rentiers, owners of fictitious-capital, not industrial capital, and they, now, obtained their revenues, not from profits but from interest/dividends as well as rents from the ownership of financial and property assets.

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