– Introduction
S Walther Rathenaus’
hundred year old dictum “The economy is our fate:” sounds
threatening today. The economy, the Holy of Holies of this society
and its practical pivot, is out of control. Until recently the
economy was regarded as the refuge of a higher reason. Today in
reading economic news, we feel regularly transposed into a lunatic
asylum. Since the subprime crisis brought the global financial
markets to the edge of collapse in the fall of 2008, the world
economy has only been stabilized for the short-term. The political
movers and shakers and their economic sages had hardly proclaimed the
“end of the crisis” in an instrumental optimistic way when new
bad news was at the door. As soon as one fire or troublespot was
buried with new masses of fresh money, the fire blazed at two or
three other corners of the capitalist world system. Through the
emergency nationalization of rotten credits, a policy of the cheapest
money and massive state indebtedness, governments and central banks
successfully averted the threatening global economic collapse.
However they only prepared the next, even greater crisis. Now the
bursting of the state bubbles threatens to drag the world economy to
the brink.
A catastrophic confusion
of opinions accompanies this dramatic development. Hosts of
dece4ivers explain to the public at what point “our economy”
diverted from the path of free enterprise virtue and with what
therapies the lost economic reason can be drummed into our heads
again. The authors of this book do not join in this charade. They
regard the assumption underlying the current debate that the present
crisis can be solved with the capitalist production method as
essentially inverted. The alleged “degeneration” of the glorious
market economy responsible for the present disastrous state of the
capitalist world system is understood as a revelation process. The
capitalist production method is an extremely irrational form of
wealth production programmed for self-destruction. Deregulation of
the financial markets, speculation, excessive state indebtedness or
whatever else is offered on the market of opinions as causes of the
present malaise are in truth only symptoms of a much deeper crisis
process. We face the dissolution of the foundations of the capitalist
world system, not some “malformations” that can be cancelled.
This idea is taboo in the
public debates with the loud ostentatious “capitalism criticism”
hurled at us from all the media. This criticism is largely limited to
crash bashing of the financial markets – undergirded with
personalized condemnation of “bankers and speculators.” The
obvious insight that the system of capitalist wealth production could
be untenable is repressed. Reality presses to the idea of a
fundamental crisis but the dominant consciousness with all its
strength diverts from this reality. The fear of a great catastrophe
is certainly in the air. However this remains diffuse and channeled
either in esoteric fantasies of world destruction like a supposed
Maya prophesy, wildly proliferating, partly anti-Semitic,
conspiratorial fantasies and individual attempts at escape from the
daily routine or is contained by the notorious faith healers who
trivialize the crisis by means of their sedatives or tranquilizers.
The silent background of
this schizophrenic mood is the social-psychological preparation of
modern individuals after thirty years of radical economizing of all
areas of life that make another form of social interaction than the
commodity form, spending of abstract labor power and money seem
impossible. In addition the dogma of the lack of alternatives to
capitalism is conflated to common sense with the collapse of command
socialism. “Command socialism” was nev3er anything but an
authoritarian variant of capitalist modernization backed with a
bizarre ideology of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and in
no way stood for a perspective of social emancipation. However its
existence alone seems proof to many that there can be an alternative
to the orientation of all social relations according to the principle
of economic rationality. For that reason, its destruction has not
expanded the horizon of emancipative thinking but on the contrary
cements in heads the lack of alternatives to the free
enterprise-capitalist way of life and production. The notion of a
fundamental system criticism is implicitly under a taboo in that the
mere possibility of an emancipative mastery of capitalism is
dismissed as a crazy idea of unrealistic dreams and incorrigible
diehards. It cannot be understood as a crisis of an obsolete
historically-specific production method but appears as an apocalyptic
event like a global nuclear war or the crash of a giant meteor by
parts of the political class. The austerity commissar Peer Steinbruck
said he “looked into the abyss” in the shock of the financial
market crash. A spontaneous horror at the consequences of one’s
actions is sometimes expressed. But this ultimately serves as
legitimation of those drastic austerity measures and sacrifices
exacted on the population to keep the economic dislocations under
control. Thus the apocalyptic vocabulary stands here for a variant of
the notorious TINA-principle: There Is No Alternative. This sentence
was never presented so often and so full of conviction as after the
bursting of the real estate bubble and the shockwaves triggered by
that bursting. One cannot be squeamish when world destruction
threatens.
The many crisis gurus
that have appeared since the fall of 2008 use this model. Their
success is based on their addressing a subliminal social mood with
their alarmism and painting pictures of overwhelming dislocations in
contrast to the squad of faith healers and appeasers. But despite
everything they share the social consensus that the crisis doesn’t
have any fundamental systemic character but can be solved through
resolute political actions and intensifie4d austerity efforts. The
idea that the capitalist production method can become untenable and
be carried out ad absurdum is completely alien to them. Fixated on
the surface of the crisis, they polemicize against alleged
“malformations” like “boundless state indebtedness,”
“excessive claimant thinking” or unrestrained speculation” that
must be finally stopped if society doesn’t want to be swept into
the abyss. According to the crisis-gurus, the restoration of a
healthy prosperous capitalism is only a question of political and
social will. They cheerfully join in the great trivialization,
The most successful
German representative of this guild, Max Otte, understands the crisis
as a chance, as a collective and individual occasion for successful
re-positioning in the capitalist competition and obviously not as a
change for developing a counter-praxis to the current madness (Otte
2006, p.193). The opportunity to improve its position in the world
market competition is offered to location Europe. Excellent
possibilities for multiplying its last few pennies on a “bear
market” are proffered to the clever investor. Despite all the
economic dislocations, a shaking of the foundations of the capitalist
system is inconceivable for Otte. The world market continues
functioning to the end of days. The holiest determination of human
existence will never be changed. Optimizing one’s capital formation
will always be possible and remains the center of all earthly
striving.
The prognoses and
diagnoses of the diverse crisis-gurus differ in their details. In his
book written before the crash of 2008, Otte interprets the crisis
primarily as a deflation crisis in which stock price s fall and
securities change into junk. Other authors warn of a collapse of the
international monetary system and of a hyper-inflation. This fear is
in no way taken out of thin air. The current crisis process must flow
into a crisis of money and of the monetary system. We will discuss
this in the second and third parts of this book. Today’s monetary
order with the dollar as world money and the Euro as the second key
currency cannot hold on in the long run. This development was long
everybody’s secret. The crisis-gurus cannot look into the dark
tunnel without seeing a golden glimmer at the other end. The
prescription presented by Nathan Lewis in his book “Gold. The
Currency of the Future” (Lewis 2008) enjoys great popularity among
other great and small neoliberal crisis-gurus. The states, Lewis
says, should allow indebtedness and return to a gold-based monetary
system. Then the monetary foundation will be created for a renewed,
solid and prosperous world economy.
Such proposals can only
be made when all sense for the logical and historical development of
the system of capitalist wealth product ion is lacking. That this
grew in the course of many decades from the gold currency was not an
accident or the result of a mistake of misguided politicians that
could be cancelled as Lewis and his kindred colleagues imagine.
Rather it was the result and prerequisite for the enormous expansion
of capitalist product ion and its triumphant march over the whole
globe. The capitalist growth-push of the last decades would never
have been possible ion the foundation of the “barbaric metal”
(Keynes) subject to a natural limitation because of its material
substance. The transition to pure credit money was indispensable. It
is entirely conceivable that attempts will be made to dock national
currencies to gold in some way at a late stage of the decay of the
world economy and the breakdown of money. However such monetary
reforms would be the result and development of a disastrous
shriveling process of the system of capitalist wealth production.
They have as much to do with a future-oriented reconstruction as the
spontaneous formation of cigarette currency after the Second World
War…
Dubious crisis-gurus like
Otte and Lewis are not the only ones who lack any understanding for
the fundamental character of the present crisis process. If the
largest part of the public debate on this theme clings to the surface
of events and the symptoms of the crisis are mystified into its
causes like the independence of the financial market or the exploding
state indebtedness, that reflects more than shrinking from the
enormous range of the capitalist system crisis. Economics across all
rival schools is unable to conceive a fundamental crisis with their
basic theoretical assumptions and paradigms but immunizes itself.
Since the days of Adam
Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, economics almost without exception
resisted that capitalism produces crises out of its inner logic. Even
though the capitalist dynamic obviously produces constant imbalances
and incongruities that detonate in crises and always are contained by
merely provisional solutions, the economics marked by classicism and
neoclassicism see reliable guarantors of balanced states in the
market. According to their understanding, economic crises on
principle cannot be explained by an inner economic crisis but by
definition are the result of exogenous or non-economic factors like
natural disasters, wars and political slips. In this way, all these
crises that accompanied the rise of capitalism were already
ideologically mystified. The inner capitalist contradictions that
inevitably had to lead to recurring dislocations were defined away.
With Keynesianism, an economic school arose for the first time in
view of the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s that partially
weakened this dogma while continuing it in other ways. According to
Keynes, the preference of money over other forms of wealth
(“liquidity preference”) can impair the production of economic
balance and bring about a structural under-employment by removing
this potential disturbance through corresponding monetary and
fiscal-political measures. The state comes into play as an actor.
However its task consists in restoring the harmony-creating power of
the market where this was suspended by temporary disturbances.
Even if all past crises
were successfully trivialized, it cannot be surprising that a
fundamental crisis of economics seems completely unthinkable. The
economic definitions and basic ideas developed in the last two
centuries do not allow the formulation of such an idea. As long as
they are stylized as self-evident foregone conclusions, immunity is
guaranteed whatever picture of the capitalist world system may occur
empirically. In the last years given the rage of the crisis, some
representatives of economics condescend to discuss the “end of
capitalism.” Like the dubious crisis-gurus, this emphasis on second
view turns out to be a mere code for an alleged “derailment” of
the market economy which only needs to return to the true path of
virtue.
Capitalism is evil and
the market economy is good. That is the credo that always only
denounces “excessive speculation” on the financial markets. In
this version, arch-liberal hardliners like the flat tax propagandist
Paul Kirchoff are invoked. In the ZEIT-series “Is Capitalism
Finished,” he pleads for a “responsible market economy” and
insists “we may not be driven into a corner by a financial market
that has become wild” (Kirchoff 2011).
This distinction of
“market economy” and “capitalism” has a tradition. In the era
of the Cold War, it was the core of the West’s legitimation
ideology that sold its “social market economy” as the third way
between capitalism and communism. In the era of crisis capitalism, it
gains new importance in warding off the threatening idea that the
whole system could be up for disposition. Still the roots of this
base immunization go much deeper. They arise from the self-image of
economics which itself is a child of the capitalist production method
but cannot speak of this historically-specific form of socialization
without mystifying it into a general human way of life. Where the
exploitation of capital hardly calculable in the capitalist reality –
the abstract end-in-itself of making more money out of money – is
the pivot of the economic process and production of goods is merely
the secondary means to realize this goal, economics wants to see
nothing but harmless “goods production” as it always existed
since the ancestors of Homo sapiens climbed down from the trees.
Every economics textbook begins with the unquestioned axiom that t6he
purpose of the economy is providing people with useful things and
goods production, money and the market are only presented as very
sophisticated means to reach this goal, the organization of the
social division of labor and the “optimal allocation of resources.”
The essential reversal of means and ends that belongs to the nature
of the historically-specific character of the capitalist production
method is made invisible. The resulting inner contradictions are
extinguished and the notion of a crisis resulting from them becomes
meaningless.
A special incompetence of
this generation of economists cannot be made responsible when the
crisis analysis of expert economists turn out so superficial and
helpless. The problem is its basic structure, not the deficient
command of economic instruments… Whoever wants to understand this
in its depth must change into another theoretical reference system
that breaks with the base harmonist assumptions of economics and can
grasp the historically-specific characteristics of the capitalist
production method.
150 years ago Karl Marx
laid the foundations for such a theoretical reference system.
Starting from a criticism of goods production and its inner
contradictions, Marx described the capitalist production method as an
extremely irrational fetish system governed by an uncontrollable
historical dynamic that ultimately must bring about its own
self-destruction if humanity does not abolish it. Astonishingly these
insights didn’t play any practical role in the past crisis debates.
In the last years there has been a certain “Marx renaissance.”…
The insane pranks of crisis capitalism and the unreasonable social
demands that it involves awaken a longing for principled social
criticism for which the name Marx is a kind of code. The real
explosiveness and actuality of Marx’ criticism of political economy
is more blocked than revealed by such reminiscences.
Some conjure a return of
the class struggle and reactivate that part of Marx’ theory that
had an enormous effectiveness ideologically and politically in the
past. This may be hopelessly outdated today. Marx as a chief witness
for the abridged criticism of unfettered financial capital that
supposedly “overgrew” the “real economy” and therefore must
be restrained. In his time, Marx sneered at these middle class
fantasies of a healed capitalist world. Finally there are academics
who bring down Marxist thinking to the theoretical reference syst4em
of economics and thus rob it of its critical substance. They declare
Marx a kind of predecessor of Keynes or put the subjective
value-theory of neoclassicism on him. On the other hand, that part of
Marxist theory that has its full explosiveness today, the fundamental
criticism of goods, labor, value and money and the crisis theory
based on that is almost completely fade4d out.
If we follow this
theoretical strand and develop it further, capitalism and its
crisis-susceptibility appears in a very different light than in the
axiomatic and unhistorical harmony models of economics. The
historical crises that cannot be explained within this model point to
the irrational and self-contradictory character of the dominant
production method are also stepping stones on that long way that
leads this method to its inner limit.
The narrow-minded
end-it-itself of capital exploitation is incompatible in the long run
with the enormous potentials of material wealth production that it
produces because that process goes along with an inexorable reduction
of necessary working hours in goods production. Under different
social conditions, these potentials could be used to make possible a
good life to all people without destroying natural life and the
foundation of life. However under capitalist conditions, the
constantly increased productivity undermines wealth production and
the foundation of capital exploitation. Therefore a point must be
reached sooner or later at which the attained level of productivity
becomes incompatible with the capitalist form of wealth.
Seen this way, the
current worldwide economic crisis in no way a result of excessive
speculation and indebtedness for which the bill must be paid now.
Conversely the gigantic inflation of the financial markets as a
reflection that the labor force in the core sectors of capital
exploitation has become “superfluous” and wealth production is
declining absolutely. The triggered structural crisis that was
clearly manifested since the 1970s as a crisis of labor could only be
outplayed and delayed by the enormous accumulation of “fictional
capital “on the financial markets. The devaluation of that
fictional capital now swings over the whole world as the sword of
Damascenes. The superficial all-clear crisis announcements are as
wrong as the Cassandra cries of the crisis-gurus who admonish
conversion to a “healthy market economy.” Just as invertedly as
the all-pervasive demands for “taming the financial markets.” The
fundamental structural crisis may be delayed by another inflation of
fictional capital and different measures of emergency administration
but cannot be solved within the capitalist logic. If this logic is
forcibly maintained, a great c catastrophe threatens as the crisis
intensifies. It can only be averted if a social alternative can be
developed and implemented globally beyond goods production.
The arrangement of this
book follows the following structure. In the first part – written
by Norbert Trenkle – several basic ideas will be explained that are
indispensable for understanding the historical dynamic of capitalism
and its underlying inner contradictions. Then we will investigate how
this contradiction became a vital motor of capitalist execution in
the postwar boom and then changed into a driving force of a
fundamental structural crisis in the course of the third industrial
revolution. A self-sustaining push of capitalist exploitation is not
possible any more on the achie3ved level of social productivity.
The fundamental
structural crisis can be delayed through the inflation of the
financial superstructure. The second and third parts of the book –
written by Ernst Lohoff – carefully analyze3 fictional capital.
Part 2 develops the theoretical foundations for understanding this
sort of capital and its position in the capitalist accumulation
process. He shows that the property titles from which fictional
capital is composed represent a special category of commodities,
goods of the 2nd order that have a future value and a specific
practical value. Whether and under what circumstances this
anticipation of the future can be fulfilled and where the logical
limits lie will be explored.
Part 3 analyzes the
ranking and function of fictional capital in the historical course of
the capitalist development method. If it was only of secondary
significance in the age of the industrial revolution, it already
played an important role in the epoch of Fordism as an impulse-giver
and motor of accumulation since the enormous investments necessary
for installing industrial mass production could only be financed
through anticipation of the future. While this anticipation could
only be fulfilled through actual wealth production, this is not
possible any more in the era of the third industrial revolution.
Fictional capital changes into the motor of accumulation which can
only be maintained through a repeated anticipation of the future.
However a gigantic devaluation fictional capital must occur where
limits of this anticipation are reached. This devaluation reveals the
underlying structural crisis and must also be expressed in a
devaluation of the money medium.
Several theses on social
emancipation in light of the crisis are offered as the conclusion of
the book. The so-called “austerity pressure” as invoked with the
picture of the “Schwabian housewife” is a complete madness that
only results from the mad logic of the constant production of social
wealth as a waste-product of capital exploitation under the standards
of “profitability” and “financiability.” If we can be free of
this project, it turns out that “we” in no way have lived “above
our means.” Rather the society has been too rich for the
narrow-minded form of capitalist wealth production. The existing
potentials of productivity can only be used reasonably and
meaningfully to make possible a good life for all people and to
permanently maintain the natural foundations of life if this form is
successfully stripped off.
04.07.2012
(Original translation from:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/05/08/18713149.php)
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