Translator’s note: The Book of Abolitions [Buch der Abschaffungen] is Korsch's final manuscript, composed in the United States in the 1950s.¹ This translation was prepared with reference to the original German typescript held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, as well as the French translation of that manuscript, Livre des abolitions, translated by Robert Ferro (Les Éditions de l’Asymétrie, 2024). The French translators also consulted the scholarly edition prepared by Michael Buckmiller for the forthcoming seventh volume of the complete works of Karl Korsch (Offizin Verlag, Hanover). Since no definitive edition of the text exists yet in German, we have adopted all the editorial decisions in the French edition and translated many of their helpful footnotes. The following is a preliminary translation of about half of the typescript. –HB

General Remarks on the Abolition of the Capitalist Mode of Production

The major problem here lies in determining what ought to be abolished, and what has already been inherently abolished through the development of capitalism. Conceived in a Hegelian and dialectical manner—recast in materialist terms, albeit terms which retain a disenchanted, restorative character—the question is meaningless. Hegel explicitly states that something becomes conscious, and in doing so, it becomes other.²  This is true of the entire Phenomenology, but also in later works.³  Put less mystically, one could say that although the revolution brings about only an eversion,⁴ this eversion becomes the basis for a different development. Perhaps something of this is expressed in Marx’s curious conception of ground rent as the only value that capital creates in a form independent of itself—namely, that completed development once again posits itself outside itself.⁵  (“Landed property,” even in its capitalist form, would then be very characteristic of the “restoration”!)

But if we try to determine what is specific to capitalism—what did not exist before (even though it arose out of what preceded it) and what will no longer exist after it, since it will be replaced by something else (irrespective of when that may take place, for instance after the political revolution or in the “second phase,” [of socialism -trans] etc.)—we find:

that the domination of landed property, or of the social relations on which that domination was based (private ownership of land [Erde], of the “means of production not created by man”⁶ ), has been replaced by the domination of the owners of the means of production produced by human labor, (i.e., the owners of capital). Just as ground rent was not previously ‘abolished’ but transformed into ‘capitalist ground rent’ (thus acquiring a subordinate, derivative position within the new system), so too industrial (and agro-industrial) profit will not be ‘abolished,’ but transformed into something else. How is this to be conceived in Marxist terms?

One illustration of this can be found in the thesis (defended, among others, by Cherbuliez, and later by Lenin and the Bolshevik theorists) accepted by Marx,⁷  according to which the nationalization [Verstaatlichung] of land and soil would allow rent to continue to exist; but the state, which owned all the land, would receive it, and it would lease the cultivable portions to private individuals who had sufficient capital to exploit it.⁸  (Marx calls this Ricardo’s true conclusion). What consequences does this imply for the nationalization of capital, as is currently taking place in Russia, and increasingly elsewhere in different forms? It is now the functionaries of the new state—entrusted with the administration of specific fractions of the “total capital,”⁹ —who extract profit¹⁰ , irrespective of the conditions under which this takes place. We can sharpen the comparison by adding that the nationalization of land has never occurred within the capitalist mode of production—and perhaps could not occur. Why not? What does Marx say or imply about this subject? And thus the consequences outlined by Cherbuliez—and, indirectly, by Ricardo, whether as a hypothesis or merely as Ricardo’s “logical conclusion,” as Marx puts it—are now coming to pass in 1) an unprecedented boom in industry, now liberated “from all fetters” in the totality of production after the industrialization of agriculture; 2) an unprecedented reduction of the old social distinctions to the simple “classification of human beings into rich and poor.” Now we only have owners of the state and workers of the state (state proletarians). For example, the restrictions that excluded forced labor (slavery) from capitalism (in theory and, to some extent, in practice) in the dominant capitalist countries are now being discarded, as are so-called individual rights and “the individual” as such.¹¹  Yet this account is “too consistent,” relying so much on analogy that it fails as an empirical description of history.  (Or if it does become true, as in Russia, then it no longer corresponds to Marx’s theory in a realistic and historical sense.)

Yet it remains debatable whether the myth already emerges here—ideas and symbols so carefully sealed off from any immediate realization, or even from any realization that could be empirically derived as a continuation of the immediate effects of this revolution;¹²  a revolution for whose realization no class is any longer indicated, not even the embryo of a future class that, in its own interest and under the conditions then prevailing, would be driven forward to this new stage. For we surely cannot suppose that Marx, Lenin, etc., consciously conceived of a second revolution against their own society.¹³

Let us therefore also try the other approach here, the one that begins from labor. Marx says (explicitly in 1858, and less directly elsewhere) that over the course of capitalism’s development, labor ceases to be the foundation of value. It is replaced by machinery, or “fixed capital,” with its accumulation and organic growth. There is hardly any individual labor left, but only social labor, conditioned and determined by the machines, etc. On the other hand, the wealth of society (tendentially—regardless of the moment at which this point is reached, whether before or after the revolution) no longer consists in the value of commodities, but in the disposable [disponible] time it creates.

At first, development is antagonistic, as is everything under capitalism: it advances one class at the expense of another. Under socialism, however, development is no longer antagonistic—it proceeds for all, or better, for each individual and for everyone together.

However, unlike in his earlier period, Marx no longer formulates the question of the “abolition of labor” in a positive or affirmative register. Labor must always exist, just as “surplus labor […] must always exist.” Instead, labor is conceived as assuming a more dignified form—one in which the development of the individual and of the productive forces would no longer be hindered.

According to Marx, capitalism accomplished all of this, even if only in an antagonistic form—for example, in the case of underdeveloped countries, colonies, and so on.¹⁴

NB. A main topic: Goals and Limits of Marxist Scientific Socialism. Here, Fourier and the other utopians would also have to be considered, and Marx himself—substantially in his early period and, to a lesser but still significant extent, later on—would likewise need to be treated as a utopian socialist. Conversely, one would have to show in Hegel—and in the conditions of Germany (as well as most of the world), which were still lagging behind the French Revolution—the limit that finds expression in his successive rejection, up to 1890, 1914, and even today, of all tendencies “that go too far.”

Just as Hegel’s philosophy is the expression of a restoration already underway, so Marx would represent the anticipated restoration of a revolution still to come. The topic could more enigmatically be titled: The Importance of Marxism.

According to our assumption, labor was no longer individual but had already become an inseparable component of social labor within the preceding, still capitalist phase—during which a certain hierarchy among the workers (and among all those participating in production in the broadest sense) had already formed on the basis of this kind of labor.

Marx himself, and later even more so Lenin, emphasized the necessity of leadership and direction (from the orchestra conductor to the military commander), and also—though less emphatically—the necessity of the internal and intermediate hierarchy that lies between them (without which modern large-scale production, in general terms, would not be possible). The qualification of the new functionaries, in our account, likewise consists in their being able to perform such a function successfully.¹⁵  For this, they must under all circumstances assume the new “risk” that has replaced the capitalist one (a risk more akin to that of the old military organization): to carry out orders with initiative and under their own responsibility.

But materialist “science” does not go any further. This is where myth necessarily begins. And once the praxis of revolution has reached this point, both theory and myth are transformed into a dogma which resists being altered by changing conditions—and into an ideology that is used for any immediate purpose whatsoever (heteronomy of ends). What Marxism is is now determined by an act of will, by a decree—often pre-decided by the apparatus, or, in exceptional cases, ¹⁶  imposed with retroactive force in a “crisis,” when many are driven into ruin and eliminated or demoted. 

The most elementary case of such a “crisis” is perhaps one in which there are “objectively” several—perhaps only two—mutually exclusive decisions (or a more complex combination of both, when a “major” decision is avoided or postponed, and thus only tentatively prepared, perhaps merely sketched out) which must be made. Thus disagreements can arise within the bureaucracy, embryos of factions, and, in certain circumstances, genuine revolts or full-blown splits. “Misunderstandings” here, as in most other cases, are the same as—or worse than—deliberate insubordination. Equally interesting is the case where scapegoats are created for provisional ends (the “willing scapegoats” appear only in trivial matters; the serious scapegoats value their lives too much). Or, in a more subtle form: when it is known in advance that a certain measure must be carried out but will provoke some degree of opposition, a victim is manufactured in order to be thrown to the wolves. The king can do no wrong—the “responsible” minister in bourgeois constitutional parliamentarianism. “And in proceeding in small steps, we have succeeded”—and in these small steps the entire bureaucracy is renewed, expanded or reduced.

At a later stage, it is the Vulgate: reading (or even uttering) the sacred text in its original version becomes heresy. There remain only multiple and shifting interpretations.

In all this, the opponents [of socialism –Trans] prove of great help. For example, Ivor Thomas (1949) says that in socialism (Marxism) there exists an absolute “obligation to work.”¹⁷  Eugen Richter proved helpful in describing the socialist state as a penitentiary state.¹⁸  And the “specter of communism” legitimates the actual killing of its living form, in full view of its contemporaries and, for posterity as well. But even the unveiling of its real form cannot restore life to what is dead; it only destroys the last remnant of its effectivity [Wirkung] and reveals the “specter” to have an independent actuality [Wirklichkeit].

Appendix

On the question of conscious action and of becoming conscious of an actuality that is already present, a few excerpts from Hegel:

The planned economy that was once equated with socialism can be seen as extending the old rationality of commodity production to its fullest expression (as is evident both in the contemporary Russian planned economy and in the early experiments with planning undertaken within the old capitalist countries).

Hegel maintains that in becoming conscious of itself, something becomes something other. And perhaps more importantly, his mystical idea of the “mole burrowing from below”—or, more precisely: the one that will have burrowed!

1. Preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, “As the thought of the world, philosophy appears at a time when actuality [Wirklichkeit] has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state.”¹⁹  The following sentence is significant as well.²⁰  See also the earlier homage to Plato,²¹  who had grasped in Greek ethical life the deeper principle of “free infinite personality,” yet “hoped at last to have found it in an external special form of Greek ethics,” one that “could directly manifest itself only as an unsatisfied longing and therefore as ruin.”²²  Perhaps, for example, one might note here that, vis-à-vis Russia, the old Catholicism could still stand for conscious freedoms, for limits on state power, and for free wage labor rather than forced labor.

2. It should perhaps be noted that the essential point about the “mole burrowing from below” is that it concerns something genuinely situated in the future, and not faint echoes of the French Revolution, such as the Festival of Freedom²³  or the Wartburg Festival.²⁴  In this regard, it is worth remembering how many centuries and how many collapsed empires intervened before that deeper principle, following the full disintegration of Plato’s world, could finally take on a concrete historical form. It is perhaps to this that the theory of the two stages [of socialism], the “withering away” [of the state], and so forth in Marx, Engels and Lenin refer.

3. Marx, and especially Lenin, with their conception of socialist consciousness brought “from outside” into the working class, can be traced not to Hegel but rather to Fichte, and so on.

4. Further evidence of Hegel’s curious identification of the movement of consciousness with the transformation of the subject in the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences—which, it seems to me, are quite different from the theory developed in the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of History:

“The transition, namely, from the first object and the knowing of it to the other object about which one says that it has learned from experience, was specified in such a way that the knowing of the first object, or the being-for-consciousness of the first in-itself, is itself supposed to become the second object… However, based on the point of view given above, the new object shows itself to have come to be through a reversal of consciousness itself. This observation of the matter is our addition … and which is not there for the consciousness that we are observing.”²⁵  (Here, it would perhaps be more appropriate to take as an analogy the Marxist-Leninist theories of revolutionary class consciousness criticized above.)

“[I]t [the new object] is for consciousness not a result and has no relation to the preceding movement…”²⁶

“[S]tate power reflected into itself … exists as wealth.”²⁷  (but remains distinct from wealth, to which it belongs both conceptually and in actuality).

Likewise, in the Philosophy of Mind: “the dialectical movement of the concept, the progressive determination of consciousness, does not look to it like its own activity, but is in itself and for the I an alteration of the object.”²⁸  (So this perhaps concerns the way in which capitalism and capitalists experience socialism.)

Note

Another useful passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: “The determinations and stages of the mind, by contrast, are essentially only moments, states, determinations in the higher stages of development. As a consequence of this, a lower and more abstract determination of the mind reveals the presence in it, even empirically, of a higher phase. In sensation, for example, we can find all the higher phases of the mind as its content or determinacy.”²⁹  Thus, it may seem to have its “seat and even root” there. “But all the same, when lower stages are under consideration, it becomes necessary, in order to draw attention to them in their empirical existence, to refer to higher stages in which they are present only as forms.”³⁰  In this way, one already anticipates the content of later development.

§383: Becoming = positing = presupposing [Voraussetzen] nature.³¹

On ethnology. Engels often speaks of a “negative significance of the economy”; Mannzen³²  provides several good examples of this as well: he, too, draws deductions based on the supposition of a “lack,” which is clearly a teleological approach—projecting backward from contemporary society. These deductions are offered without critique, even though such an approach would be appropriate only as a comparative explanation, as a mode of classification, or at most as a heuristic principle for research.

On the other hand, Cunow³³  is in some respects better and in others worse than Engels: better, because he also considers the economic foundations of even the most primitive forms; worse, because (see my excerpts from Die Neue Zeit, though the same can be found throughout his many writings) he applies an impoverished and simplified version of materialist dialectics to ethnology.

“Chinese walls.” The Communist Manifesto speaks of them as of an Iron Curtain. (The prices of its commodities) are “the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.”³⁴

Spread of the bourgeois mode of production: “It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.”³⁵

Yet today we see that the capitalist mode of production is not an export commodity—not even the hypocritical know-how of the Americans and Truman’s Point Four Program.³⁶  

All of this was already clear by the time the theory of “imperialism” had appeared (or rather, it arose for that very reason; to express precisely this).

In the following paragraph, as if it were the same thing: “The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected, provinces with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation.”³⁷

Marx and his “aversion to the small nationalities,”³⁸  for example in the article³⁹  in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of January 1849 on the Magyars’ struggle for independence—the “refuse of peoples [Völkerabfälle]” (equivalent to the lumpenproletariat), who, until their destruction or denationalization, “each time became the fanatical supporters of counterrevolution”⁴⁰  (Gaels, Bretons, Basques—and, henceforth, the Slavs with the exception of the Poles, Romanians, and Transylvanian Saxons).⁴¹

Remark: The firmness of Marx’s class-based standpoint is also unstable. What counts is the class in its political sense, and Blanqui’s politically revolutionary party is closer to him than an apolitical revolutionary organization.⁴²

Abolition of Work

Labor and surplus labor. Heteronomous [Fremdbestimmte] and self-determined labor. Duration and intensity of labor. Realm of necessity and realm of freedom (“The shortening of the working day is its fundamental precondition”).⁴³  

In capitalist society, the worker performs surplus labor—and ever more surplus labor—in order to be permitted to perform necessary labor. In socialism, the purpose of work is reversed: less and less necessary labor is performed so that more and more time may be devoted to free activity (self-activity). In this case, more intensive labor counts as surplus labor — and consequently reduces the portion of the working day that remains the worker’s own, the time of “free self-activity.”

Certain utopians—the English Christian Socialists of the second half of the nineteenth century, and some modern zealots of “scientific management”—sought to transform all labor into free self-activity (or to present it as such). Hendrik de Man’s The Joy of Work, Lewin’s pamphlet from my collection⁴⁴  both embody this tendency, and it crops up as a marginal phenomenon in Lenin’s “Communist Saturdays.” We may add today’s socialist competitions, Stakhanovism, and similar endeavors emerge as caricatures of this tendency.

Conversely, the old and new totalitarians seek to transform free self-activity into externally determined activity (Dopolavoro in Italy, its equivalent in Hitler’s Germany, the organization of “leisure time” in the United States, and the corresponding institutions in the Soviet Union).

According to Marx’s manuscripts of 1857–1858,⁴⁵  the “value” (that is, the productivity) of social labor will no longer consist in the product of necessary labor time but in the production of free time (Influence of the pamphleteers⁴⁶ ; see Abolition of Work II). A vestige of this remains in Volume III of Capital in his discussion of the realm of freedom: “The reduction of the working day is the essential precondition is its [the realm of freedom –translator] fundamental precondition.”⁴⁷  For the rest, Marx limits his standpoint on this topic. “The real wealth of society”⁴⁸  depends not on the extent of surplus labor but on its productivity and on the more or less favorable conditions of production. He is thinking here more of progress—that is, of the “constant expansion of its reproduction process”⁴⁹ —than of genuine wealth, and still less of freedom.

Under slavery, what is obscured is the fact that the worker (1) spends part of his labor time working for himself, and (2) in addition to his labor time, has a certain amount of time for free self-activity.

Under wage labor, conversely, what is obscured is that the worker (1) spends part of his labor time working for capital, and (2) uses part of his so-called “free time” to reproduce his capacity to work for capital.

Marx’s claim that “surplus labor in some form must always remain”⁵⁰  is mistaken. Once enough surplus labor has been performed, no further production is required beyond what free self-activity provides. Instead, what the utopians—and the early Marx himself—had once envisioned comes to pass: even necessary labor comes to an end. Labor is abolished.

Abolition of Work II

Marx’s statement that “surplus labor must always exist” parallels Moltke’s⁵¹  assertion that “eternal peace is a dream—and by no means a beautiful one.”⁵²

The detractors of human freedom and happiness among the ancients—like those of the Middle Ages and of modern times—speak of the necessity of unfreedom and of suffering in labor.⁵³

“τῆς ἀρετῆς”⁵⁴

“You shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.”⁵⁵  (In myth, at least, this is a curse; but that is a feature common to all mysticism.)

Hegel’s “dialectic” is no less mystical than that biblical verse.

Proudhon (and Marx as well) speaks of the dignity of labor:
“[It is] not in vain that the worker passes through the harsh but strengthening school of labor.”⁵⁶

Ruskin, Kingsley,⁵⁷  and their modern disciples.

Conversely: Aristotle, Antipater (the Greek poet of the time of Cicero) [see my edition of Capital⁵⁸ , p. 389]; later, above all, Fourier; and indirectly Sismondi and other similar critics as well⁵⁹ ; Marx, Lafargue, and the anarchists regard: 1) wage labor (unfree labor) as an evil, as bondage, as a hindrance to the unfolding and development of the individual, of society, and of the workers themselves; 2) all “labor” in general as something that exists only in this specific form and that stands opposed to the “free play of faculties,” to the unfolding and development of human powers and capacities; 3) and, for the reasons set out above, as always remaining within the realm of necessity—“the true realm of freedom … begins beyond it.” Ambiguity: this beyond is linked to the two-phase theory of the state.

It is otherwise with Marx in The German Ideology (against Stirner!) and especially in the Grundrisse. The pamphleteering tone of these writings still makes itself felt in Theories of Surplus Value; it remains to be verified whether this is also the case in Capital.

Addendum: The Dialectic of Socialism

Thesis: utopian socialism

Antithesis: “scientific socialism” — or, one might also say, the division between the socialist development of capitalism and abstract anarchism.

Synthesis: abolitions [Abschaffungen] that are also acquisitions [Anschaffungen].

Abolition of the Difference Between City and Countryside

1. The metabolism between humanity and nature. Liebig on the cities (cited by Engels in The Housing Question⁶⁰ ).

Contemporary efforts to address this: see the various articles on China in Pacific Affairs (September 1949, Winfield⁶¹  and Needham⁶² ), which seek to abolish this natural metabolism altogether—because of the toxic effects already noted by Liebig. However, what is really at stake here is “primitive accumulation.

Instead of importing the chemical products of large-scale industry, the truly human solution would be to abolish the separation between town and country, to distribute the population evenly across the entire territory, and, within this very framework,⁶³  to transform the form of the natural (spontaneous) metabolism between nature and society.

The problem of overpopulation and its limitation is bound up with this question. Marx’s response: there is only artificial overpopulation (just as there is no “law of diminishing returns” of the soil). Both are expressions of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Abolition of the State

Dismantling [Zerschlagung] of the state apparatus (“the bureaucratic–military machine” –Lenin). In Marx, this already appears as a consequence of democracy. “Demolition [Sprengung]”—Bukharin’s term, later the point of contention in the struggle against him. It remains to be examined how the term was used earlier—first by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and then by the anarchists. It implies shattering [Zertrümmerung], breaking to bits [Zerbrechung].

Sublation [Aufhebung]: a dictatorship that “is no longer, strictly speaking, a state” (Engels, and doubtless Marx as well, both earlier and later)—the “not entirely state-like character of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” “Gemeinwesen.” Withering away—not of the bourgeois state, but of the proletarian dictatorship. The theory of the two-phase transition period (Marx, Lenin, Stalin). In Stalin: creation of a new state (supposedly theorized by Lenin; see Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 443, note at top).

Abolition of officials (the “bureaucrats”) and the creation of new officials (Lenin, The State and Revolution, and his subsequent fluctuations).

Armed people’s militia in place of standing armies (miles perpetuus).

Right of nations to self-determination (Lenin’s articles, Selected Works, vol. V, p. 283ff, October 1916; also p. 400ff; and Collected Works, vol. 19, p. 396, 2nd article: “The National and Colonial Question.” The German left).

Internationalism.                         “World Market.”

War.

Monopoly Capitalism.

Credit. Joint-stock companies.

Somewhere in the glosses it is said that Stalin formulated the view that the dictatorship of the proletariat—or the proletarian state—was “the highest form of the state.” To be checked: where, and whether anything similar is even hinted at in Marx, Engels, or Lenin.

Lenin’s notebook on “Marxism on the State,” published by the Lenin Institute in 1930 (v, 402 above), previously cited by Stalin in 1929 against Bukharin, page 445 ff. According to Lenin’s letter to Kollontay dated 2 March (17 February) 1917, this notebook was “almost finished” (vol. VII, p. 444); see also vol. V, note 81, p. 401 ff.

Lenin’s book State and Revolution was not completed, but instead interrupted. The plan was to include “the experience of the revolution of 1905 and February 1917.”

In the notes to Vol. VII, 440 below. List of Lenin’s writings in Vol. VI and XI. “The Question of the State and Dictatorship.”

Lenin’s article “A Contribution to the History of the Question of Dictatorship” in Volume VII is particularly important. 

Theoretical position: Relationship of the state and the different state forms to civil society and to the different economic factors of society. Productive relations as the economic basis (on which a legal and political superstructure is established) and the relation “between the various forms of the state and the various economic structures of society” (Marx’s 1868 letter to Kugelmann)⁶⁴

Marx’s schemata for the book dedicated to the “Critique of Political Economy.” Certain remarks by Engels in The Housing Question, Anti-Dühring, Origin. 

This in Hegel and his predecessors—for example in Rousseau and in the Praxis of the French Revolution—on the other hand, by the anarchists—experiences of 1848 and the period that followed—foreign policy—the Commune, dissolution of the First International, etc. Also among the bourgeois free traders, Manchester people, etc. 

Abolition of capital (?)

(Abolition of private property and the means of production, of the capitalist mode of production, and perhaps of the law of value⁶⁵  as an objective, unconscious regulation of the relations of production?)

The problem then becomes whether I should also subjectivize and activate the sublation here “as abolition”? The abolition of “property” is obviously illusory (see below). The abolition of land ownership, of interest, etc. are merely shifts in the relations of power among different fractions of the capitalist class. Replacing private production with state production is merely the creation of the collective-capitalist [Gesamt-kapitalisten]. The tradition maintained by Marx and Engels speaks of the “free association” of workers, or perhaps more often, and abstractly of “the free association” in the singular. In this sense, Marx even describes the ‘right to work’ as an attack on capital’s control of labor.

Proudhon’s “social liquidation” (previously “an economic constellation”—Marx’s notion of an economic revolution that would be more important than all political revolutions, hence his view that England was more important than France). In the Introduction [to the Grundrisse –Translator] of 1857: “(3) Concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state.”⁶⁶

See also letter to Kugelmann in 1868: “with the exception, perhaps, of the relationship between the various forms of state and the various economic structures of society.”⁶⁷  

Marx’s idea of the self-sublation of the capitalist mode of production (i.e., the relations of production). Dialectically: the expropriation of the expropriators!

A. I.1) World market (probably already formed through competition between capitals and through credit).

I.2) Credit; the joint-stock company.

A. II.) Concentration and centralization of capital (monopoly and state capitalism?)

III) The crises

B) The shackles of capital monopoly “the capitalist shell”⁶⁸  and of the “centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor”⁶⁹  are demolished “by the indignation of the united and organized workers”⁷⁰  (that is: in the subjective moment, the objective factor appears once again!). Thus “direct action,” which is not envisaged economically, comes into play only indirectly, i.e. as political action.

According to Marx, legal relationships and forms of the state are “derived forms of the relations of production, relationships of will.”⁷¹  This was also the case for Hegel and already for Rousseau. But is it true? (Here, too, one might recall a sentence from the final section (4.6) of the Introduction: “But the really difficult point to discuss here is how relations of production develop unevenly as legal relations.”).⁷²

Marx often says that the distribution of the instruments of production is in fact a “moment of production.”⁷³  One could perhaps say the same⁷⁴  of the state and legal relations that determine the distribution of the means of production; in which case they would not be a superstructure, nor merely auxiliary articulations within an organic whole, but a “moment of the mode of production.” It is different with the legal regulation of the “distribution of products,” which is merely a result of the distribution of the instruments of production; in this respect, such regulations are only results of the underlying state and legal relations.

Example: for the Germanic barbarians, “agriculture with bondsmen was the traditional mode of production.”⁷⁵  They were able to impose these conditions on the Roman provinces “all the more easily, as the concentration of landed property which had taken place there had already entirely overthrown the earlier agricultural relations.”⁷⁶  Something similar must hold for the concentration of capital, which has already completely overthrown the earlier industrial relations, so that the process wherein “capitalist private property, already based on a social system of production, is transformed into social property”⁷⁷  is made easier—shortened and rendered less harsh. Dialectically, the “negation of the negation … restores individual property, which, however, is now based on the achievement of the capitalist era: namely, the cooperation of free workers and their collective ownership of the land and of the means of production produced by labor itself.”⁷⁸  The “fragmentation of the land and of the other means of production”⁷⁹ (typical of small-scale industry) “is destroyed” by the “new powers and passions” within the social body that feel themselves “fettered” ⁸⁰  by it.