Letter: Productive forces (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Productive forces

I’m sure it was not intended, but in your reply to A. R. Ewbank about the “Inevitability of Socialism” (Socialist Standard, August) you could be taken as suggesting that capitalism has reached the limits of its economic development through lack of markets when you write:

Every advance in science and technology, each new mineral discovery, can add to the social wealth. But there is simply no market room for further development of the productive forces, and this is what matters (emphasis added).

But surely, as explained by the SPGB in its 1932 pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse, capitalism will never collapse through lack of markets, but will go on, with recurring crises, till the working class organize consciously and politically to abolish it.

A. Buick

Brussels, Belgium.

Reply:

When we stated that capitalism has developed all the productive forces for which there was room, we meant precisely that. Any further development would be socially unnecessary. Capitalist production is for a world market, and the productive forces have overloaded that market, as they have done repeatedly in the past. A market consists of people buying and selling each other’s products, and although markets may expand as the population grows, the existing social powers of production can more than cope. The working class is the greatest productive force of all, and are laid off in their millions through lack of markets for surplus products. Their labour-power cannot be used.

The economic development of capitalism is based on the profit motive, and the curtailment of the profit motive through restricted markets, or the lack of them, fetters the productive forces and prevents their use. The social powers of production are in conflict with the mode of exchange. Factories and shipyards are closed, machinery is left idle; the means of distribution, which form part of the productive forces — oil tankers, aeroplanes and locomotives, are laid up because of the inability of the capitalist system of production to employ them.

The productive forces in Socialist society would be allowed to develop freely, because the governing principle behind the production of wealth would be the social and personal requirements of human beings, not the profit of a few individuals.

There is no connection between the first and second parts of your letter. We have never claimed that capitalism would collapse because of its basic contradictions which produce recurring crises. Neither could this be deduced from anything in our reply. Our pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse represents our view today as it did in 1932 when it was written. The historical conditions for the establishment of Socialism can only emerge as a result of the contradictions of capitalism, but the working class must become aware of these contradictions, and consciously strive to end capitalism. It will not happen otherwise, and we have never said so.