Editing Socialism (section)

===The Need for the Transition to Socialism===
Marx noted that the growing accumulation of capital naturally supposes its growing concentration and power. The contradiction between the general social power into which capital has developed and the private power of the capitalists over these social conditions of production develops more intensely and blatantly. At the same time, this development also contains its solution - that the the conditions of production are now raised into general, communal, ''social'' conditions in accordance with its social power. This transformation is brought about ''by the development of the productive forces under capitalist production'' and is the manner and form in which this development is accomplished. The natural development of capitalism, of its internal contradictions, forms the basis for socialism.<ref>Capital Volume III (Penguin Edition), p. 373.</ref> 

This is illustrated, briefly, by two 'cardinal facts' of capitalist production outlined by Marx in Volume III:

(1) The concentration of the means of production into few hands, which means that they are transformed on the contrary to the social powers of production.

(2) The organization of labor itself as social labor through cooperation, the division of labor, and fusing of labor with the natural sciences.

Marx then notes that on both accounts (1) and (2), the capitalist mode of production ''abolishes'' private property and private labor, ''even if in antithetical forms''.<ref>Capital Volume III (Penguin), p. 375.</ref>

Marxism understands the capitalist development of the productive forces of social labor as its ''historic mission'' and ''justification''. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production. Capitalist production is not an absolute, but only a ''historical'' mode of production, corresponding to a ''specific'' and ''limited'' epoch. Marx's scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production shows that it is a mode of production of a ''particular'' kind and a specific ''historical determinacy''; of its ''historically transitory character''. <ref>Capital, Volume III (Penguin), pp. 365-8, 1018.</ref>