The question of socialism can't be reduced any longer to the laborers appropriating the
property of the capitalists and associated labor becoming dominant in the organization of a firm.
It can't be that anymore because capital is so systemic that really the path to socialism can
only be defined by what might be called a kind of redesign of the whole system rather
than simply laborers taking over the means of production and becoming the managers. That's
not adequate anymore. So what I wanted to say was, when we start to think about this system redesign,
we're confronting something which is very, very, very large. In the Grundrisse what Marx kind of
says is "Look, we've been considering matters from a standpoint of the individual capitalists
in this moment. So when we're talking about productive labor and productive activity,
we're talking about an individual capitalist firm or an individual capitalist person.
But [at] a certain point all of this gets socialized and we start to find ourselves
behaving in such a way which is not how we would behave if we were left to ourselves but
is a way that we are forced to behave" by what Marx calls "the coercive laws of competition".
The coercive laws of competition force capital, for example, to certain kinds of technological
change. These technological changes are such as to give certain advantage to individual capitalists
who adopt them first. So, we get something Marx called relative surplus value through
technological advantage. But the problem is that the technological advantage comes by removing
labor from production. Now, if labor is the source of all value, that means there's less value to go
around. Therefore, technological change and the relative surplus value is at the source of the
falling rate of profit, and therefore, there is less profit to go around socially. So that,
in a sense individual capitalists operating in their own self-interest produce a systemic result
which is antagonistic to the well-being and the capacities of the capitalist class as a whole.
So, no capitalist would actually engage in technological innovation if they knowingly thought
that that technological innovation was going to lower their rate of profit. I mean, it would be
an insane thing to do, but they do it because they don't know that it's going to lower the rate of
profit. And it's the coercive laws of competition that have forced them to do it. So what Marx then
says is, by the time you've got through all of this, what we're looking at now is a system.
And the whole system is integrated, and the integrations within the system are such that
we find ourselves responding to abstractions. And he has a very interesting kind of moment
when he says it's these abstractions and the contradictions implicit in these abstractions
which start to actually dominate how a capitalist system works, independent of what the opinions
and ideas of the individual capitalists are and therefore independent of whoever is in charge of
the firm. So what happens then is that, if the laborers take over the ownership and management
of the firm and set up a cooperative enterprise and say, 'Well okay, the social relations are very
different' and all this kind of thing. If those social relations are embedded systemically in a
system that's organized through the coercive laws of competition, then in a way it doesn't matter
whether it is the capitalists who own the firm or whether it's the laborers and the associated
laborers. Because they're both going to operate in exactly the same way because the coercive laws
competition are going to force them to do this. Now, this is a sort of problem that is confronted
in Argentina where there's been a lot of takeovers of firms and cooperatives set up. And all of them
to some degree do a good job or try to do a good job of of improving the social relations within
the company, within the firm. But the firm is in competition with other firms and through
competition finds itself forced to certain labor practices and certain forms of efficiency and so
on. So that the larger number of recuperated enterprises that exist in Argentina in a way
end up being enterprises which are self-managed, but they're still capitalistic because they're
embedded within the system. So this is the point at which you would say look it's the
whole system that has to be addressed, not the individual enterprise, and that therefore the
notion of socialism which we have to pursue is about the redesign of the whole system.