Issodhos @aol.com wrote:
>Does anyone have a concise analysis of the benefits that would be derived
>from a breakup of Microsoft? Alternatively, do we beneft more from a
>monopoly (if indeed it is one) or not?
An interesting question, to which there is not a simple answer.
The article below might help. As you will notice from reference to steam
plows being the latest technology, this was written quite some time ago,
certainly before computer software was considered a part of the machinery
of production, but the analysis still seems remarkable useful. Or most of
it anyhow.
THE PEOPLE
DECEMBER 1999
VOL. 109 NO. 9
THE TRUST--FROM THE SOCIALIST STANDPOINT
BY DANIEL DE LEON
What is the trust?
The trust is essentially a tool of production. The difference
between the trust and the oldest style of privately owned tool,
seen now only in museums, is a difference, not of kind, but of
degree.
Man is a tool-using animal. The tool adds inches to his stature
over nature by increasing the productivity of his labor. The
same instinct that led man to fashion the first tool pushes him
on to improve it. The more perfect the instrument of production,
the more abundant are the fruits of labor. The trend of
civilization is to render the product of labor so abundant that
the burden of arduous toil, together with want or the fear of
want, for the material necessaries of life may be lifted from
the shoulders and the minds of man, and, thus raised above
animal needs, his individuality, his intellectual and moral
faculties may have free play. The rungs of the ladder, up which
man climbs towards civilization, are the ever more perfect tools
of production.
***
The development of the tool, or instrument of production, is
twofold. It gathers power individually; it also gathers power
collectively, by concentration.
The tool gathers power individually by keeping lively step with
the discoveries of science and the maturing genius of man; the
old handloom becomes a steam and Northrop loom; the old
agricultural implements become steam plows, reapers and
harvesters.
The collective power, however, of the tool is gathered by a
bitter experience. In the course of its growth, the tool
encounters a serious obstacle, that threatens it with
nullification. Its aim, the increase of the store of wealth, is
for a time balked. The tool is a weapon against the foe of the
race--POVERTY. The wastefulness of competition turns the
weapon's edge against itself. Only a long and bitter experience
taught the lesson and suggested the remedy--CONCENTRATION. The
discovery once made, it points and paves the way to further
improvements. First is born the PARTNERSHIP of two individuals;
then follows the partnership of two or more partnerships--the
CORPORATION; next appears the partnership of several
corporations--the TRUST.
The trust is that doubly developed instrument of production that
combines both the highest individual and the highest collective
development so far reached. It brings the productivity of human
effort up to the highest point so far attained by the individual
perfection of the tool. As such, the trust raises man to giant's
stature over nature; it is a weapon that makes for civilization.
But this is not the whole truth.
***
It is not over nature alone that the tool adds inches to the
individual; it also adds inches to him over the toolless man.
This pregnant socio-economic fact does not from the start
manifest itself.
So long as the tool is slight and simple, he who wants it can
readily bring it forth by the direct application of his labor to
nature, and thereby place himself on a par with whomsoever
already is in possession of its equal. But the tool develops.
Its development is not from within, like organic matter. The
feature of its development is the need and increasing need of
other tools, besides increased powers of steam and electricity,
to carve it out of nature with, and thus render it more potent
by rendering it more fruitful. The tool used in production
presently needs two, three, four other tools to bring it forth.
Even then its acquisition by individual man, to the end of
enabling him to compete with those already in possession of its
like, may not be impossible, though the process becomes harder
by degrees. When, however, the tool has finally reached that
individual perfection of a Northrop loom, a Mergenthaler
typesetter, a hydraulic press, a steam plow, reaper and binder,
a Westinghouse electric engine, a cotton harvester, etc., and
even long before that, none can any longer himself conjure forth
its equal out of nature. When to this individual growth is
coupled the collective development or concentration implied in
the trust, free competition ceases de facto, whatever it may
remain in theory.
The trust is the highest form of collective development the tool
can reach under the system of private ownership in the machinery
of production. But the gigantic powers it wields over nature
accrue to those only who hold it; to all others it becomes a
scourge. As such, the trust blocks the nation's path on its
march to civilization.
Once the tool has reached this stage, it stands transmuted into
a social-industrial power that emphasizes the changes which
society has been undergoing since the privately owned tool first
appeared, especially since the time when it entered upon the
period of its rapid development; it carries these changes
further, and it forces to the fore a new social problem.
***
We love to think that the Revolutionary Fathers gave our people
political freedom. They did not. The ballot was conditioned upon
property qualifications. This simple fact is of deep import in
the study of the problem presented by the trust.
Then the tool of production was slight; it was easily acquired;
and, consequently, property was the ready reward of industry. At
such a time the role played by property was not yet manifest;
indeed, it escaped the Revolutionary Fathers, except the two
wisest and most far-seeing of them all--Franklin and Madison. At
that time, accordingly, economic issues were absent from our
party platforms; the people divided on issues essentially
political. With the turning of the century a change comes over
the surface; economic questions force themselves more and more
to the front; they were prominent during the Jackson
administrations; they became dominant in the Harrison-Van Buren
campaign; today they are the all-absorbing topic. This change in
the physiognomy of our politics has followed closely, and has
been brought on by the development of the tool under the system
of private ownership.
Competition is predicated upon the capacity of competitors to
sell equally cheap; this capacity depends upon the power to
produce with equal abundance, and this, in turn, is in direct
ratio to the development of the tool. With the approach and
appearance in the country's industrial arena of a tool,
privately owned and so far developed that its creation by those
without it was no longer feasible, these ceased to be qualified
for the competitive warfare, and the commonweal began to be
differentiated into three hostile social classes:
First, the proletariat--the wholly toolless class, who, no
longer able to exercise their labor function without access to
tools not owned by themselves, are reduced to the level of
merchandise, and compelled to sell their labor power in the
labor market for a living;
Second, the middle class--the class who, though armed with tools
sufficiently powerful to exclude the toolless class, find it
harder and harder to hold their own in competition with the more
powerful and ever-perfecting tools held by the class above; and,
Third, the capitalist class--the class who, possessed of the
prerequisites for successful competition, can shift work from
their own to the shoulders of the proletariat; can live in
idleness upon "profits"--i.e., upon the difference between what
their employees produce and the "wages" paid to them--i.e., the
market price of labor; and can, with their more abundant and
cheaper production, undersell the class below and reduce it to
the grade of proletarians.
These class distinctions--proletarian dependence, deepening
misery and increasing numbers; middle-class precariousness of
existence, declining powers and ruin; capitalist idleness,
swelling affluence and masterhood--together with the class
conflicts into which capitalism casts society, long remained
veiled. The trust rends the veil. The several views held on the
trust are mainly the classconscious expressions of the three
hostile economic classes into which capitalist society is
divided, and which are shaken into classconsciousness by the
relentless logic of capitalist development manifested in the
appearance of the trust.
The capitalist class seeks to uphold the trust in order to
maintain its own class supremacy. Its spokesmen tire not
truthfully to point out the inevitableness of concentration in
productive powers, together with the advantages that flow
therefrom in increased production and cheapness; they conceal,
however, the blood that stains the trail of the trust, or even
deny the existence of such by inundating the country with rosy
statistics, gotten up to order, on the condition of the people.
But--"MELIORA PROBANT, DETERIORA SEQUUNTUR."*
The middle class, tho itself ready to profit by the dependence
of the toolless proletariat, is up in arms against the trust,
whose superior power is crushing it. It chooses to see only the
ravages wrought by the trust; it inveighs against "monopoly,"
while it upholds "capital"; ignorant of the economico-juridic
contradiction implied in such a position, it clamors for the
overthrow of the "monster," or, at least, for the clipping of
its wings; and lawyers who are not jurists, together with
economists who are not scientists, encourage the folly with
their twaddle.
Lastly, goaded into mental activity by the smarts it suffers
from the capitalist, and untrammeled by the class interests of
the middle class, the classconscious proletariat is pushed
beyond both the conservatism of the former and the reactionary
posture of the latter. Its class interests reveal to it the two
leading features of the trust; the development by concentration
of the tool, which makes for progress, and its system of private
ownership, which blocks progress; its class interests make it
aware of the contradiction, and direct it to save the good and
permanent feature by stripping it of the evil and temporary one.
The classconscious proletariat pushes the evolutionary movement
onward by straining for the public ownership of the trust.
***
The ladder, up which mankind has been climbing toward
civilization, the ever more powerful tool of production, is the
storm center around which the modern social storm rages.
The capitalist class seeks to keep it for its own exclusive use.
The middle class seeks to break it down, thereby throwing
civilization back.
The proletariat seeks to preserve it and improve it, and to open
it to all.
***
*They prove better things, but worse follows.--DDL
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