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PARTISAN REVIEW
the main economic factors: prices, wages, production, investment,
profits, consumption, foreign trade, bank rates. These are thus
robbed of their primary character as the determinants of economic
development and become secondary instruments manipulated by
a new 'prime mover,' the State bureaucracy. And they therefore
lose their power to determine decisively the course of the economy.
Private monopolism
perverts
the capital market economy, State
monopolism
negates
it.
"When a government has complete control over the man power
and the material resources of a country,'' writes Stolper in his
recent
German Economy,
"the only limit to the expansion of pro·
duction is precisely this man power and these national resources."
In such an economy, Marx's famous "laws of motion of capitalism"
are of little practical importance. The State can solve its economic
difficulties-so far as these are caused by the workings of capitalist
factors-by almost any means it chooses, including, if necessary,
a proclamation by the Fuhrer that the moon is made of green
cheese, followed by a decree by the Four Year Plan Authority that
all banks and corporations must subscribe a certain percentage of
their capital to finance the Hermann Goering Cheese Works to
exploit lunar food resources.
The well-known Social-Democratic economist, Rudolf Hilfer·
ding, author of the classic
Das Finanzkapital,
has formulated the
problem of 'State capitalism' in a masterly way.* The essential
passages of his argument are as follows:
The concept of 'State capitalism' does not stand any analysis
from the economic point of view. Once the State has become the
sole owner of all the means of production, it renders impossible
the functioning of capitalist economy,
it
abolishes the very mech–
anism which keeps going the processes of economic circulation.
The capitalist economy is a market economy. The price which is
determined by competition between property owners-'in the last
analysis' it is only as a result of this competition that the law of
value operates-in turn determines what is produced, the quanti–
ties produced, the part of profit which
is
accumulated, the
branches of industry in which all this takes place, and how
finally, in the continual process of overcoming of crises, there is
established a certain balance between the various branches of
*In an article published over here last year in
Proletarian Outlook,
a mimeo–
graphed political paper, and originally printed in the Russian Social-Democratic organ,
the
Sotsialistichesky Viestnik
of Paris.
It
may be noted that the press recently
re–
ported that Hilferding has been turned over to the Nazis by the Vichy government
