On The Social Development Of Capitalist Property Relations

Since the Second World War, especially after the 1980s, modern science and technology and information industry have rapidly developed in the developed capitalist countries and have made the capitalism transform from the industrial economy into the knowledge economy, thus the mode of production and the productive relations have had many tremendous changes and presented many important new characteristics. How to use the standpoint, the viewpoint and the method of the Marxism to know and analyze these new situations and questions on capitalist politics, economy and culture has already become an important research topic of political economics at present. What has happened to the capitalist property relations, why these changes could happen as well as what would be the future of these relations are of great importance not only to the capitalism themselves but also to the construction of socialist market economy system in China.The phenomena such as legal person shareholders, stockholders decentralization, capital virtualization, stakeholders pattern, participative management, extemalization of production management functions as well as welfare countries are not the accidental adjustments of capitalism but the inevitably reflection of the socialization of property relations. If we analyze all sorts of changes in capitalism from the view of socialization of property relations, we can obtain much more scientific explanation which conforms to the reality and logic. The property relations are all kinds of economic interest relations based on the property between persons which include four basic elements: the owning relation, the controlling relation, the exchanging relation and distribution relation. The capital and the enterprise lie in the core of the property relations in the capitalism and the expressions of socialization of property relations include the capital socialization, the socialization of corporate governance, the socialization of production management, the capital virtualization and internationalization, the socialization of distribution relations and so on, in which the capital socialization is the core and the socialization of distribution relations is finally realized form. Some theoretic and empirical analyses on the above several aspects have been done in this paper.The main conclusions of this paper include:The property relations in capitalist are experiencing the comprehensive socialization, and the socialization of property relations is a general rule of capitalism. The basic reason of this socialization lies in the contradiction between the socialization of production and private personal holding form. To resolve this basic contradiction must substitute the socialized owning form for the capitalist personally owning form in the producer goods and fruit of labor, replace capitalist's individual decision-making with organized socialized decision-making in the production decision, speed up the exchange of capital and enhances the capital disposition efficiency by socialized relation of circulation and transaction, and guarantee the balance between social purchasing power and social reproduction through socialized distribution relations. The contradiction between the socialization of production and the capitalist property relations needs to be adjusted and alleviated through the unceasing socialization of property relations, thus the property relations can be more suitable to the socialization of production and open up a bigger space for the development of productive forces.The socialization of property relations is a process of renewing itself for the capitalist system in which massive socialism factors have already been produced, and these factors are necessary preparations for the transition from capitalism to socialism. The socialization of property relations is also the essential condition for the capital to hold the social productive forces continuously, and it is advantageous for the capital to control labor and gain more surplus values. Therefore, the socialization of property relations in capitalism is a process of dual attributes and the capitalist system has had some partial but not fundamental qualitative changes.The main innovations which have been implemented in this paper include:1. Based on the review and appraisal to the previous property theories, this paper sets forth the theory frame of researching the socialization of property relations and promulgates the power mechanism from two different aspects including the evolution of social division form and the contradict movement of capital intrinsic duality. Based on this theory frame, this paper makes a newest summary about the socialization of property relations from five principal aspects and puts forward some new theory proposals on how to overcome those deep level contradictories in current market economy system of China and how to drive this system to further development.2. Taking four scientific and technological revolutions as the clue, this paper has systemically discussed the historic course of capital socialization and manifested the rational adaptation of owning relation to the development of social productive forces prominently. Simultaneously, the dual attributes of the socialization of property relations has been discussed in this paper.3. The theoretic viewpoint that the stakeholders should be defined according the property controlling relations has been proposed and the stakeholder pattern can be regarded as the logical extension of the process that the pattern of "shareholder center" switches to the pattern of "manager center". Thus, the stakeholder pattern is the concrete realizing form of the socialization of corporate governance.4. Based on the transitions of production organized mode from Ford System to Lean Manufacturing System then to Mass Customization System, this paper gives thorough analyses and arguments on the redistribution of production management authority within an enterprise and the production management cooperation between different enterprises. These analyses and arguments promulgate the socialized trend of production management. It is also a new research view that summing up the development of capitalist producer service organization as a constituent of socialized production management.5. It is a more profound and reasonable research method to summarize the capital virtualization and internationalization as the socialization of capital relations in its circulation and transaction. Therefore, the development of capital market is not only the financial innovation, but is also an important constituent of the socialization capitalism property relations. Baed on the dual influences that capital virtualization has imposed on the social credit system, this paper attributes the current international finance to the excessive development of capital virtualization.6. It is also a new theoretical abstraction to summarize the change of capitalist distribution relations as a socialized process and regard this process as the finally realized form of the socialization of property relations. This new abstraction has provided a rationale for the understanding and forecast about evolution tendency of capitalist distribution relations.