In other words, the accumulated stock of fixed capital has assumed mammoth proportions. Any large scale technological revolution that causes a significant moral depreciation of fixed capital brings about a big capital loss for the owners of that fixed capital. At the same time, however, this same fact of the mammoth scale of the fixed capital, relative to the circulating capital, means that, each year, as the fixed capital reduces in value – not from depreciation but from wear and tear – it brings about a corresponding rise in the rate of profit, for the firms using this existing fixed capital.
Large-scale socialised capital, therefore, has an interest in ensuring that this fixed capital can be fully and continuously employed, over a long duration, so that it recover its value in wear and tear, as quickly as possible. So, this socialised capital, whether controlled by workers or shareholders, requires the kind of long-term planning, and attempts to achieve stability, that social-democracy represents. As Engels put it in the Critique of The Erfurt Programme,
“I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capitalist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”
The position of shareholders is, then, typically contradictory. Like the private industrial capitalists, and unlike the workers, they only see a justification in the introduction of machines/technology, where the cost is lower than the wages saved. But, like the worker and unlike the private industrial capitalist, they see the need to plan production, and, via the capitalist state, the economy so as to avoid crises. Publicly, of course, they proclaim their belief in the free market, and opposition to central planning, except, of course, when it comes to the central planning done by central banks, and their belief that such institutions can control the price of capital! In the heyday of imperialist capital in the 1930's to the mid 1970's, the ruling class made no secret of their corporatist belief in such economic planning.
As owners of fictitious-capital, (interest-bearing capital, i.e. shares, bonds etc.) shareholders stand in a contradictory and antagonistic relation to the owners of industrial capital, be they private industrial capitalists or the workers/associated producers as collective owners of socialised capital (again be it in the form of a cooperative, joint stock company/corporation etc.) As Marx notes in Capital III, Chapter 23,
“It is indeed only the separation of capitalists into money-capitalists and industrial capitalists that transforms a portion of the profit into interest, that generally creates the category of interest; and it is only the competition between these two kinds of capitalists which creates the rate of interest...
“The lending capitalist as such faces the capitalist performing his actual function in the process of reproduction, not the wage-worker, who, precisely under capitalist production, is expropriated of the means of production. Interest-bearing capital is capital as property as distinct from capital as a function. But so long as capital does not perform its function, it does not exploit labourers and does not come into opposition to labour.On the other hand, profit of enterprise is not related as an opposite to wage-labour, but only to interest.”
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