Lewis Corey

The Decline of American Capitalism


PART SIX
Concentration of Income and Wealth


Summary


CONTRARY to the claims of the myth-makers of the “new capitalism,” and wholly in line with the nature of capitalist production, there was an upward movement in the concentration of income and wealth during the prosperity of 1923-29.

The solid foundation of the concentration of wealth and income is private ownership of the means of production, upon which depends the livelihood of society, and which permits the owners to exploit the workers. But forms of ownership and exploitation change. The capitalist originally combined the functions of exploitation and management; he was at one and the same time the organizer of industry and its plunderer. With the development of large-scale, corporate industry, however, the separation of ownership and management has deprived the capitalist of his managerial functions. The multiplication of stockholders with ownership a monopoly of the bourgeoisie, the working class having an insignificant stake in corporate ownership has vested management in a class of hired professional managers, while control is usurped by the financial capitalists, who merely rule and exploit. The basis of this development, the socialization of production, is also the objective basis of socialism. For modern corporate industry retains private property relations within the relations of social production and social property.

Unequal distribution of income and wealth is identified with all the exploiting relations of capitalist production, with all the forces of cyclical crisis and breakdown. They are also identified with the decline of capitalism, for it is the socialization of production which has so increased the productive powers of society that they choke capitalism with the abundance they are capable of yielding. These conditions demand new social relations of production, a new social order. Resistance to this demand by the capitalist class is responsible for increasing instability, for economic decline, for the social convulsions now afflicting the world.

The capitalist expression of the socialization of production is monopoly capitalism, dominated by the financial oligarchy. Since monopoly retains all the old relations of private property, it is identified with restriction of production, with economic decline, with the export of capital and imperialism as the means of broadening the economic basis of national capitalism, of securing markets for surplus capital and surplus goods. Thus the progressive possibilities of modern industry are turned into their negation, into a source of want, unemployment, and war.

As capitalist decline becomes worse, mass disemployment limits the production and realization of surplus value, the accumulation of capital. All the stronger is the drive of capitalism toward imperialist aggression and war. For in foreign markets and the overseas investment of capital the capitalist class, especially the financial oligarchs who dominate monopoly capitalism, see a way out of the crisis. As the inner sources of wealth tend to dry up because of economic decline, as surplus capital, unable to find profitable investment at home, becomes more threatening, all the highly industrial nations of the world concentrate on the task of conquering foreign markets. Monopoly capitalism and imperialism, arising out of capitalist production and its concentration of income and wealth, are interlocked with the decline of capitalism, and inevitably bring on the threat of more devastating wars.


Last updated on 4.9.2007