Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 40

While the socialisation of the capitalist mode of production, associated with the centralisation and concentration of capital, requires unprecedented cooperation in production, alongside the massively increased division of labour, it not only makes the potential for the working class to control such forces manifestly easier, it also progressively demonstrates the increasing potential redundancy of the capitalist class for the direction and management of this production.

The scale and scope of production becomes too big for individual capitalist owners to finance and manage.  Marx refers to the “enormous expansion of the scale of production and of enterprises, that was impossible for individual capitals.” (All quotations from Capital Vol III).

“Capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.”

This means that there is a “transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, administrator of other people’s capital, and of the owner of capital into a mere owner, a mere money-capitalist . . .  (the salary of the manager is, or should be, simply the wage of a specific type of skilled labour, whose price is regulated in the labour-market like that of any other labour) . . . total profit is henceforth received only in the form of interest, i.e., as mere compensation for owning capital that now is entirely divorced from the function in the actual process of reproduction, just as this function in the person of the manager is divorced from ownership of capital.”

“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.”

 Marx describes this process as “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.” 

For Marx, this whole process demonstrates that profit is not the reward for the labour and skills of the capitalist but makes it more obvious that it is the result of the appropriation of surplus value derived from the labour of workers, including its managers in so far as these are exploited.

Individual capitalists, indeed the whole capitalist class, commands capital that they no longer actually own, the property of others, so that all justifications of profit as the reward for risk (with other peoples’ money) or, even more ridiculously, abstention and saving (through a finance industry notorious for excess consumption!), is exposed as absurd. 

Also created is “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.”  “Conceptions which have some meaning on a less developed stage of capitalist production, become quite meaningless here.”

Today these phenomena are reflected in the widespread contempt for corporate executive pay and the culture of greed, incompetence and arrogance of bankers and others engaged in the finance industry. 

The sacred principle of private ownership of capital and associated caricatures of the heroic self-made entrepreneur less and less reflect any reality in the system, which itself carries out the crime of expropriation that is supposed to damn socialism:

“Success and failure both lead here to a centralisation of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals.”

“With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter’s social property, much as they are their social products. However, this expropriation appears within the capitalist system in a contradictory form, as appropriation of social property by a few; and credit lends the latter more and more the aspect of pure adventurers.”

“The credit system accelerates the development of the productive forces and the establishment of the world-market. It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction – crises – and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production.”

Over-expansion of credit is often blamed for the periodic crises of overproduction or financial crises, including the construction boom in Ireland when it became the predominant element of the Celtic Tiger, and the 2008 financial crash centred on unsustainable credit and its extension through derivatives.  For Marx such events are simply the aggressive manifestation of the essential dynamic of the capitalist mode of production which, as such, has a two-sided result requiring more than simple condemnation.

“The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production. It is this ambiguous nature, which endows the principal spokesmen of credit from Law to Isaac Péreire with the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.” 

All these developments have the potential to provide a transitional form out of capitalism and towards socialism:

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.”

“They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.”

 “Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale.”

“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.” 

“Cooperative factories provide the proof that the capitalist has become just as superfluous as a functionary in production as he himself, from his superior vantage point, finds the large landlord.”

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