Engels notes, as he and Marx, also, describe in Capital III, Chapter 27, this process whereby even the planning and regulation of production by these oligopolies breaks down, and leads to even greater socialisation of production.
“They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. Since such trusts usually go to pieces as soon as business becomes bad, for this very reason they push towards a still more concentrated socialization. The whole branch of industry is converted into one big joint-stock company, and internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company; this happened as early as 1890 with English alkali production, which, after the fusion of all the forty-eight large works, is now carried on by a single company, under centralized direction with a capital of £6 million.” (p 358)
Nearly 40 years ago, Simon Clarke wrote,
“Indeed it would be fair to say that the sphere of planning in capitalism is much more extensive than it is in the command economies of the soviet bloc. The scope and scale of planning in giant corporations like Ford, Toyota, GEC or ICI dwarfs that of most, if not all, of the Soviet Ministries. The extent of co-ordination through cartels, trade associations, national governments and international organisations makes Gosplan look like an amateur in the planning game. The scale of the information flows which underpin the stock control and ordering of a single Western retail chain are probably greater than those which support the entire Soviet planning system.”(Capital and Class, Winter 1990)
In “The Poverty of Philosophy”, Marx makes the same point against Proudhon. Bourgeois commodity production engenders competition, which “breaks down the Chinese walls” of feudal monopoly. That competition, then, leads to a huge expansion of production, as the bourgeoisie become the ruling-class and create bourgeois nation states, which they use to remove the remaining fetters on bourgeois production. Competition means winners and losers. The winners get bigger, the losers disappear. The advantages of the winners increase, as they get bigger, because of economies of scale etc. They become monopolies, but not like the those of the feudal regime, based on patronage and protection. They are monopolies arising naturally out of the process of competition, and laws of capital accumulation.
The capitalist nation state is, then, led to involve itself, not as the feudal state did to create monopolies, but, now, to regulate them in the interest of capital as a whole. But, Marx notes that this, then simply raises this competition to a higher level. It becomes a competition of national capitals backed by capitalist nation states. Even by WWI, this became apparent, as Trotsky put it in The Program of Peace.
“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers... The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”
No comments:
Post a Comment