“If we have no
business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for
all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at
present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that
it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with
the powers that be.” — Karl Marx
Shouldn’t criticism be constructive, helping to
improve what is criticized? Do we only want to be destructive?
It is not our program to contribute well-intentioned suggestions for
the success of what we criticize:
that people must work because they need money and if they lose
their lousy job they don't have enough money to live on and need to
find a new job right away — because “employees” gain
nothing by working
for other people and their poverty is never escaped;
that this endangered existence is the necessary basis for wage
labor;
that this dependence is reproduced on a worldwide level as the
whole planet is subsumed to its logic and there is more and more
absolute impoverishment as the free-market economy sorts out those who
are useless for it;
that the entire globe is analyzed for what is good for
business so
that some areas are useful for industry and four fifths of the world
have no other use than supplying raw materials;
that nature and the sources of life are also resources for
business
so that the air, water, food supply and even the weather are ruined in
a sustainable way.
These are not unfortunate side effects, “problems,” that
our politicians must continue to work on. The causes are also not:
something called “globalization”;
a moral defect of the capitalists called “profit
greed”;
corrupt and irresponsible policies;
the missing willingness of everyone to begin with themselves
in order to improve the world.
All these are the necessary results of an economic system, the
so-called free-market economy, in which something as trivial as
supplying people with their needs is not a valid social goal, but only
and exclusively the increase of capital accumulation.
Because one cannot make this system better — on the contrary,
it
already functions too well! — we have no suggestions for
improvement.
We persist in the knowledge that these problems exist because
of the system.
Discussion in Oakland, California, August 9, 2008
What Can Be Learned From Karl Marx:
Everything About Work and Wealth in Capitalism
When: August 9, 2008, Saturday, 1:00 pm
Where: Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA 94609-1113
Ph: (510) 595-7417
Speaker: Frank Winter, co-editor of Gegenstandpunkt (Germany)
Leftist groups include the 19th century theorist whose ideas once shook the world in their inventory of traditions, but they are no longer acquainted with his writings. Marx is now a dead dog. All the more as in the universities, inasmuch as he is remembered, he is politely included in the intellectual historical western heritage -- and as a Great: he is to have been a great philosopher, the last after Hegel to have succeeded in dialectical thinking; a great sociologist who created a system in which society is brought by a single principle from the material base up to the superstructure of ideas; a great prophet who early predicted globalization; a great utopian who thought up a nice better world.
That the Old Man himself wanted to accomplish none of these greatnesses and, if he were asked, would have refused to tolerate this praise, cannot deter his intellectual-historical friends. They even forgive him that he was a communist. He himself saw his achievement solely in what the subtitle of his theoretical major work announces: the “criticism of the political economy” of capitalism. Marx was, if anything, an economist. However, economics does not have a good recollection of this classic; actually none at all. No wonder. In the end, he attacked not only the misanthropic and absurd logic of the economic system that they find so reasonable, he also dismantled their theoretical understanding of it.
Capitalism, which Marx analyzed and criticized in the phase of its emergence, has changed since his day in this way and that, but in nothing really essential. The accumulation of money is still the dominant purpose of work. Working people are still a cost factor, thus the negative variable of the company’s goal: profit. The development of the productive power of labor, the greatest source of material wealth, still takes place exclusively to save money on wages and lay off employees -- thus making workers poorer. Because of this reality, and only because of this, the long forgotten thinker deserves to be remembered. His books help to explain economic reality today.
This talk will demonstrate this by quotations from the first chapter of Das Kapital Volume 1, “The Commodity.” It offers thoughts about use value and exchange value, concrete and abstract labor, money and benefit, work and wealth – paired together, terms that our modern world can no longer distinguish, when they really contain the hardest opposites.
Recent additions
June 26, 2008
Wage Reduction Made in the USAModern unions' understanding of capitalism: securing jobs - offering income
The Proletarian Version of the “American Way of Life”The richest capitalist power maintains its working class
March 9, 2008
Fund closures, credit jams, bank crashes – The global success of a business technique of finance capital is having an impact:
Financial Crisis - A Lesson on the Character, Performance and Power of Finance Capital
“Crisis atmosphere” rules on the financial markets. Because of some bad mortgage debts? The impoverishment of American homeowners plunges the world financial system into a crisis? It is rather the reverse: the money hardships of American citizens, as well as the credit needs of an upscale clientele, are good for this type of global financial business!
Banks, one hears, award not just real estate and other loans, they bundle loans to securities that they sell and make billions with. How can banks turn something they have given away into a profit-making product?
Now the banks write off billions; financial products once declared solid suddenly lose their value. What really are these assets that suddenly turn into losses? What kind of wealth has been produced here?
This crisis concerns all of us, one hears, because now the “repercussions” threaten the rest of the economy from which the growth of finance capital is apparently thoroughly disengaged. Conversely, however, everything in what is called the “real economy” – production, building houses, consumption – depends on the success of speculative transactions. What is the actual reason for this real power of finance capital?
Previously the financial world called for state restraint, now for intervention. Not in vain. While for social security, health care and education “the cash isn’t there,” the central banks donate hundreds of billions to rescue financial businesses. Their success is apparently vital to “our” economic system.
Not good evidence for this mode of production!
A dissenting view on the October 27th Coalition’s arguments for peace
A cry for peace is not a critique of war
What statement is made by pictures of empty boots and crying children? Is it meant as an explanation or even an agitation against the logic and reason of war? Is the human tragedy on display an attempt to clarify how national interests are pursued over the interests of other nations? Or are these pictures trying to confront the public with the radical warning: the way that politicians execute their goals isn’t trustworthy, it even leads to failure.
Indeed, the suffering of war is a costly lesson that “our elected officials” teach us – and it’s a lesson that the protesters should take to heart. A nation-state that sees its “vital interests” threatened by another state asserts those interests over corpses. The export of freedom and democracy is apparently a thoroughly bloody affair for those who have the misfortune of living in what America defines to be “rogue states,” and thus have the questionable luck of being designated for liberation by the US military. And indeed, these people have received liberty, either dead in heaven or living in the bloody hell that is American nation-building.
“Bring our troops home” seems reasonable, nobody would voluntarily stay in a war and no one in these foreign countries has exactly invited them to come. But asking exactly those who send and keep the troops there to do otherwise is unfortunately not challenging their responsibility, as if they just made a mistake or overlooked something. Contrary to what the protestors seem to suggest, the politicians that have carried out this war and managed its operation haven’t violated the duties of office. It’s much worse than that – they have done the very job assigned to them and enshrined in the constitution. And they have done us the “favor” of informing us quite explicitly that the nation’s imperialist ambitions can’t afford to shy away from the human costs of war; its “vital interests” simply require a good deal of death. Did Bush or anyone else promise that a war to liberate the Iraqi people would go off without a whole lot of killing and dying?
In the light of all this, isn’t it a bit contradictory to make an appeal for peace to the very same authorities who found this war so necessary, regardless of the objections of protestors who took to the streets? And why should those responsible for the problems now be the ones we address our concerns to and rely on to fix them? And instead of appealing to the career ambitions of politicians, as if these “vital interests” didn’t exist, shouldn’t we have a closer look at what these interests of our nation are? Maybe these “interests” are now the motive for so many politicians to be concerned about the war, rather than objections and concerns based on the suffering of the people involved. It seems that because of the fact that these sacrifices haven’t paid off for American control in the region, the method of this war is now under review – not because of a critique of the means and ends of “our interest,” but rather concern for their success.
So instead of demanding peace by showing pictures of crying children and empty boots – images used just as often as justification for continuing and escalating the war so as not to “abandon” the poor Iraqi children, or so that the fallen troops “shall not have died in vain” – perhaps it makes more sense to look at what the true substance of this freedom export is and why it always seems to demand so many sacrifices. After all, the interests that are being violently defended in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere won’t disappear when this war comes to an end and the troops come back home. On the contrary, it is precisely in the times of peace longed for so dearly by the protestors that the US – like all nation-states – accumulates both the reasons and the means for the next war.
War hardly has a good reputation, but unfortunately this protest’s mode of political judgment – democratic critique, confronting politicians with the results of their actions – does. Asking the above questions might not end the war now, but it can offer reasons for putting an end to imperialist war and peace.