Pannekoek June 1920

Socialisation (Part I)

(From “Die Internationale”)

ANTON PANNEKOEK (Dutch Communist Party)

Source: The Call , 10 June 1920, p. 2

Transcribed: Ted Crawford

HTML Markup: Brian Reid

Note: A slightly different translation is also available.

Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.

I

During the first months that followed the German Revolution of November, 1918, there arose a cry of “Socialisation.” It was the expression of the will of the masses to-give to the revolution a social meaning, and not to let it stop at reshuffling of persons, or at a simple transformation of the political system. Kautsky warned the public against a too rapid socialisation, for which society would not yet be ripe. The miners put forward socialisation as one of their strike aims—as did recently the British miners. A commission to study the question of socialisation was formed, but secret councils and the Government sabotaged its decision. For the Majority Socialist Government, socialisation is only a phrase, a means of deceiving the workers; everyone knows that it has long ago abandoned all the former aims and principles of Socialism. But the Independents have remained the faithful guardians of the old Socialist doctrine; they believe in it sincerely, as far as the programme of socialisation is concerned. It is therefore interesting to study this programme, in order to characterise the radical tendency which exists in the social-democracy of all countries, side by side with the governmental Socialists or opposition to them.

When the workers demand socialisation, they are, beyond any doubt, thinking of Socialism, of its Socialist form of Society, of the suppression of capitalist exploitation We shall see if it has the same meaning for the social-democratic chiefs of to-day. Marx never spoke of socialisation: he spoke of the expropriation of the expropriators.

Of the two principal transformations introduced by Socialism in production—the suppression of exploitation and the organisation of the economic system—the first is the most significant, the most important for the proletariat. One can conceive the organisation of production on a capitalist basis; it leads to State Socialism, to a more complete enslavement and exploitation of the proletariat by the power of the centralised State. The suppression of exploitation with the dispersion of production was the ideal of the primitive co-operators and of the anarchists; but where the suppression of exploitation has been accomplished, as in Communist Russia, it is necessary immediately to occupy ourselves with the organisation of production.

It is at this point that the Social-Democrats put forward general watchwords, preparatory to practical measures of legislation, from which we can see, in the clearest possible way, what socialisation means to them. Such was the case at Vienna, where reign the “Marxists” Renner and Otto Bauer. We take from a lecture given by Bauer on April 24th, at a meeting of Trade Union leaders, the arguments by which he sought to recommend his plans to these working class representatives. In order, he said, completely to socialise large industry, in order to get rid of the capitalists, expropriation is first of all necessary. “We take their enterprises from them,” and the organisation of the new form of administration must follow. “Expropriation must not take place without compensation, for we should be obliged to confiscate all capital, including war bonds. The savings banks would then go bankrupt, the small peasants and the employees would lose their savings, and international complications would arise. It is therefore impossible to realise a mere confiscation of capitalist property.” The capitalist would therefore be compensated; an arbitral court would determine the amount of compensation, which “ought to be fixed according to the permanent value, and ought not to consider war profits” The compensation would be paid in State loan bonds, which would bear an annual interest of four per cent.

Of course, he concludes, this does not yet mean complete socialisation, because the former capitalist still receives the interest on his enterprise as an annual income. “To suppress this gradually is a problem of fiscal legislation, and, eventually, of the transformation of the rights of inheritance”; after some generations, revenues not produced by labour would completely disappear.

To throw light on the principles which lie at the bottom of these plans of socialisation put forward by the Social-Democrats, we must consider more closely the essence of capitalist property and of economic expropriation.

II

Money, in its capacity as capital, has the power of multiplying itself continually by means of surplus-value. Whoever transforms his money into capital and invests it in production receives his share of the total surplus-value produced by the world-proletariat.

The source of surplus-value is the exploitation of the proletariat: labour-power is paid less than the value it produces.

Money and property have thus, in the capitalist system, not merely quite a new meaning, but they have also become a new standard. In the petit-bourgeois world, money is the measure of the value of the labour-time necessary for the production of a commodity. In its capacity as capital, money is the measure of surplus-value, of the profit which can be realised by the means of production. Although it may have involved no labour, a price will be paid for piece of land corresponding to its rent capitalised. It is the same with a large enterprise. If its foundation has cost, let us say, 100,000 francs (a hundred shares of 1,000 francs each) and it produces a dividend of 10 per cent., a share will not be sold at 1,000 francs, but at about 2,000 francs: for 1,000 francs at 5 per cent. bring in the same revenue as that share. Its capitalist value is 2,000 francs, for it is fixed by the revenue; and the capitalist value of the whole enterprise is 200,000 francs, although it may only have cost 100,000francs.

We know that the great banks, on the formation of a new enterprise, put this difference in their pockets in advance, as “promoter’s profits,” by issuing (in the case under consideration) shares for 200,000 francs.

On the other hand, if the profits from this enterprise fall—for example, through the successful competition of still larger enterprises—more and more, until it can only produce a dividend of 1 per cent., its capitalist value falls to 10,000 francs. If the profit disappears entirely, the capitalist value of the enterprise falls to zero, and only the material value of the stock can still be realised.

Capitalist property signifies first of all, then, not the right to dispose of commodities, but the right to receive revenue without working for it, to receive surplus-value. Its form is the share, the paper on which this right is inscribed. The enterprise, the factory, is only the instrument by witch surplus value is produced; property itself is the right to surplus value. The suppression of exploitation, the suppression of this right, is in consequence the suppression of capitalist value, the confiscation of capital. We can now understand the method of Otto Bauer: to confuse under the same heading this form of capital and the few pence saved by the little man—who is thinking primarily of safeguarding his property, and not of receiving a revenue without working for it—and in this way to make the Trade Union official’s shudder at an attack on exploitation.

The suppression of capitalist property and the suppression of exploitation are not, therefore, cause and effect, means and end; they are one and the same thing. Capitalist property does not exist except by exploitation, and its value is fixed by surplus-value. Let surplus-value disappear in one way or another, let the worker receive the full product of his labour, and capitalist property will disappear at the same time. If the proletariat improves its conditions of labour in such a way that enterprises will no longer bring any profit to capital, their capitalist value will fall to zero; the factories can become very useful to society, but they will have lost their value for the capitalists. Money, then, loses the power of producing more money, of producing surplus value, because the workers no longer allow themselves to be exploited. This is the expropriation of which Marx was thinking. Capitalist property will be suppressed because capital will have no value, will not produce any profit. This economic expropriation, by which property loses its value and is consequently destroyed, although the right of free disposition remains, is the opposite of the legal expropriation often carried out in the capitalist world, by which the right of free disposition is suppressed, while property is allowed to remain in the form of compensation.