Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 3

If we consider the further evolution of industrial capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism (imperialism), by the end of the 19th century, we see a further purposive, but unconscious, transformation. Private industrial capitalism comes to an end, except in its reactionary remnants, as small capital, in the hands of the petty bourgeoisie, the precarious self-employed and so on. Industrial capital becomes socialised capital, in the form of the joint stock company and cooperative. This socialised capital is the collective property of the “associated producers”, i.e. the workers and managers employed in the company. The functional role of the private industrial capitalist comes to an end, just as happened previously to the landed aristocracy.

The socialised industrial capital, objectively, the collective property of the associated producers, who merely borrow loanable money-capital, to acquire it, creates new forms of property, new social relations, and new ideas. This is not yet a new mode of production. It is more like a metamorphosis of the existing mode of production, based on capital and commodity production. As Marx notes, in Capital III, Chapter 27, both the joint stock company and the cooperative are “transitional forms of property”, between capitalism and socialism. In the workers cooperatives, Marx notes, the contradiction between capital and labour is resolved by the workers becoming their own capitalist.

In the joint stock company – the modern form of which is the huge multinational corporation – the capital is, objectively, just as much the collective property of the workers employed in the company as is that of the cooperative. But, unlike the workers cooperative, the workers do not exercise control over their collective property. Instead, control is enshrined in law as resting with shareholders, who are not the owners of that capital, but simply creditors of the company, people who lend money-capital to it, in exchange for interest. Just as in the past, even when the landlord class lost all of their social function in production, they used their control of the political regime, not only to obtain rent, as a deduction from profits, but also to control the conditions under which their rents were set, so now, as the private capitalist has lost their social function in production, they have used their control of the political regime, not only to obtain interest/dividends, as a deduction from profits, but, also, to control the conditions under which that interest/dividends is obtained.

These underlying, objective, social elations are obscured, even in the worker cooperative. In the worker cooperative, it is not the fact that the capital is the collective property of the workers that appears as the basis of their control over it, but the fact that they are also shareholders. In other words, in most worker cooperatives, the workers themselves put up a small amount of their own money to finance the company, and, in return, obtain a share, which entitles them to interest/dividends on the money they advance. This gives the appearance of making this no different to any other joint-stock company, except that, whilst the interest/dividends may be proportional to the money loaned to the company, in both cases, the same is not true in relation to the exercise of control.

In a worker cooperative, every worker gets an equal vote. In a joint stock company, the more shares you have the more votes you have. In consumer coops, another variation appears. It is not the workers that get to exercise control over their collective capital – or even, often to be able to become shareholders in it – but those who consume its commodities. They become members, and get a single vote, by buying a single share; but the dividend they receive is proportional to how much they spend, as consumers, with the coop. Where the joint-stock company entrenches control with the existing, bourgeois ruling-class, because they are the ones with vast amounts of loanable money-capital, and able to buy the most shares, the consumer coop tends to entrench control with the permanent upper echelons of the cooperative management. Consumer shareholders have no direct involvement in the day to day operation of the cooperative, as the workers do, and so come to rely on what they are told by the upper management. The shareholders rarely even turn up to meetings, leading the coops permanent bureaucracy to exercise control. Its why the trades union and social-democratic bureaucrats prefer this model as against the worker cooperative.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 2

Moreover, the commercial bourgeoisie prospers, so it is not just the ideas that these new social relations engender that take hold within the state. The commercial bourgeoisie uses its wealth to better educate its children, who, in turn, increasingly take up their positions within the personnel of the state itself. The state, consequently, becomes, objectively, a bourgeois state. Its ideas are bourgeois ideas, its personnel are increasingly bourgeois, and yet this state continues to operate for the benefit of the existing feudal ruling-class, and within the ideological, legal and political framework of the old feudal regime. It is this contradiction that the political revolution has to resolve.

In Britain, this process takes place over a long period, and is correspondingly confused and messy. The bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy inter-marry, and so on. Although the British state becomes, objectively, a bourgeois state, by the time of the Glorious Revolution, the political regime remains firmly in the hands of he feudal aristocracy well into the 19th century. In 1832, the bourgeoisie, in alliance with the petty-bourgeois commodity producers, and a nascent proletariat, carried through the first act of the political revolution. It gets the vote for bourgeois property owners, and abolishes many of the “rotten boroughs”, and so on. By 1848, the industrial bourgeoisie had become the dominant section of the bourgeoisie, and, as Engels describes, in conjunction with the industrial workers, carries through the second stage of the political revolution. But, as Marx notes, as late as 1865, in his Inaugural Address to the First International, the landed aristocracy still accounted for a majority of those sitting in the Commons, let alone the Lords.

In the US, the process was more rapid, and less messy. The vast land areas meant no landlord class could be established. The landlord class was represented by the British Crown, which acted to appropriate revenues, and by the slave owners, in the South, who produced cotton and other agricultural commodities that fed the British industrial revolution. The American Revolution swept away the first, and established a bourgeois republic, and the second was swept away by the US Civil War, which asserted the dominance of US industrial capital, and of its centralised, but still federal, state.

In France, the process was more prolonged, as in Britain, due to the existence of established land ownership by the feudal aristocracy. The 1789 Revolution was clearer, establishing the Constitutional Assembly, but, as with the English Civil War, saw an immature bourgeoisie have to cede the political regime to Bonaparte. As Marx notes, in the following decades, there were changes back and forth of the political regime, with Louis Phillippe replacing Bonaparte, and then, in 1848, Louis Bonaparte replacing Louis Phillippe, and yet the objective nature of the state remained that of a bourgeois state.

In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, led to a rapid growth in commodity production and exchange, and consequent rapid growth of the bourgeoisie. As Marx and Engels wrote at the time, this change, itself, was driven by Russia's defeat in the Crimean War by the industrial powers of Britain and France. Similar changes occurred in Japan. By the 1890's, objectively, the Russian state was a bourgeois state. Its actions, as Lenin pointed out to the Narodniks, were geared to a more rapid development of industrial capital in Russia. It was as utopian for the Narodniks to make their appeals to that state, to foster their petty-bourgeois schemes, as it is, today, for statists to appeal to the bourgeois state, in Britain, or elsewhere, to act in the interests of workers, or small business; the latter appeal, itself, being reactionary.

In all these cases, the social revolution, which happens purposively, but unconsciously, behind society's back, transforms social relations and ideas. It changes the ideas and personnel that guide the actions of the state. It does all this, whilst, all the time, the old ruling-class continues to control the political regime/parliament etc., and also, continues, thereby, to expand its own revenues, as deductions from the rapidly expanding industrial profits. A spark for the bourgeois revolutions after all was the demands for yet more revenues. In England, it was Charles I's demand for more taxes to fund his army; in the US, it took the form of “No taxation without representation”.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 1

Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical

“The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of every social order; that in every society that has appeared in history, the distribution of wealth and with it the division of society into classes or estates are dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. Accordingly, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.” (p 343)

In other words, as I set out a long time ago, and contrary to the statist/idealist interpretations of Marxism that became dominant in the last century, the “social revolution” precedes the political revolution. The social revolution, the transformation of the way society produces and exchanges, and so creates new social classes – new forms of property – and new social relations between them, takes place purposively, but unconsciously, behind society's back.

Societies did not, one morning, wake up and decide to produce commodities rather than engage in direct production, any more than, one morning, a plant decides to grow towards the sun, or develops spikes to protect itself from being eaten. There is purpose in the evolution of such characteristics, but not conscious action by the plant or “Nature”. Similarly, a moth does not consciously decide to become darker or lighter, in order to be better camouflaged when it settles on trees, but there is definite purpose in an evolution, over time of such adaptation.  Its not random or inexplicable.

Of course, what makes humans and human societies different to plants or moths is that they do not simply adapt to the given environment, but also do, consciously, change that environment. They do not have to simply accept what Nature provides for them gratis. They learned to utilise fire, for example. That one thing enabled them to cook food, which has been identified as a major factor in enabling humans to more easily obtain the nutrition required to develop larger brains. Fire, also, enabled humans to make pottery, and to smelt metals.

The fact that humans established settled agriculture, rather than remaining as hunter-gatherers, has, also, been mentioned in enabling a large rise in agricultural production, which, also, facilitated the release of labour for other activities, not just for the production of new use-values, such as the pottery and metals referred to above, but, also, to engage in mental labour. It creates the material basis for a social division of labour, and specialisation, which, in turn, creates the conditions for new forms of property, private property, rather than communal property, and new social relations arising from it.

In order to consolidate itself into a new ruling-class, however, the section of society – inevitably a small minority – must become actually conscious of this change in social relations that has occurred, and draw the necessary conclusions from it. It must take the social revolution that has already taken place behind its back, which, objectively transformed it into the ruling-class, the personification of this new mode of production, and complete it, by carrying through a political revolution, the bringing into line of the ideological, juridical and political superstructure with the new economic and social base on which it rests.

Nor is this simply a matter of a single event, a storming of the Bastille, Winter Palace, and so on, which represents only the final insurrectionary act. In previous revolutions, the functionaries of the state change over a long period of time, reflecting, themselves, the new social relations and ideas, which these relations engender. Only in static modes of production, in which no new social relations, and so no new ideas, develop is that not the case. In the AMP, for example, there is no real political revolution only changes of dynasty, changes of personnel, but representing the same forms of property, and sets of ideas.

The bourgeoisie developed, across Europe, in the pores of the existing feudal society. At first, the bourgeoisie is a commercial class, which expands rapidly, along with the towns, as trade expands, and the world is opened up by the merchant adventurers – privateers and pirates like Drake, Raleigh and Columbus. Its material basis is the expansion of trade. Necessarily, as Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, this development finds a reflection in the realm of ideas – Monetary School and Mercantilism. These are the ideas that guide the academics in the universities, and, as this becomes clearly seen as the means by which the existing state, and its ruling-class prosper, it is these ideas that the state itself pursues to that end.

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