RUTHLESS CRITICISM

“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.

Recent Additions

Our current agitation:

download as a Word doc and distribute widely!

The Vote – A Blank Check for State Power

Vote for the American dream:

Hard labor, the wealth of others and the never ending power of our Homeland!

Again two candidates want to become President and of course seek only to serve the American people. And like their predecessors, they promise to continue the logic of a democratic nation striving for growing wealth in the free market economy and for ever growing military might to ensure the national interest. But aren’t these promises rather serious threats? After more than 200 years, isn’t the content obvious? The service that any country provides is to organize the service of the people for their country. And the service that countries all over the world take their people hostage for is as simple as it is unpleasant: to live, work and die for the interest of the nation.

The first service the states organize is the free market economy. Owners of wealth offer the have-nots jobs – the production of wealth – but only if and as long as they guarantee the growth – the enrichment – of their capital, also known as money. And for this interest, the people are free to take any position or role that the market offers. With one important instruction: to learn that the market means competition, which also means that the standard of living of the employees is a cost burden to the goal of the employers. Therefore good business can only offer competitive jobs; in other words, jobs where the workers constantly need to work harder and for lower pay than those who work for other business owners. The consequences – felt in the bones and pockets – are everyone’s private affairs.

The second service needed and demanded by their national regime is to secure national interests: citizens do not need to ask what their country can do for them; they need to be ready for the service the country wants them for. So besides being cheap labor for success in the competition for the wealth of the world – a service for the American capitalist – people are needed for battling the enemies that there are so many of in other countries. Good patriots are to follow the calling of the nation in the competition for power, with no regard for their own lives or those of others.

So the National Interests our candidates are trying to serve – a competitive economy and the strongest military might – is the best use of their people as cheap labor and brave soldiers. An offer people should refuse. Because voting for these two candidates is not only wrong because of false hope for change you can believe in or not. It is wrong because choosing the government of your liking completes the democratic rule by acknowledging the obligation to serve as people for the nation. That is what’s on the ballot!

So if you are a subject, thus already the human resource of the rule, then do not worry yourself about which candidate lords over you, but judge what they intend and what is planned for you.

The Campaign for President of the United States

Can the citizens of the superpower grant their leader a license to kill? "Yes we can!"

Honorable Business

What the collapse of the financial system teaches about the wealth of capitalist nations

Scolding the Speculators

Blaming Wall Street while upholding the market economy

When the Banks are Crashing ...

The US-government announces its intention not to let any more big banks fail after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Instead the Treasury wants to buy the banks’ valueless assets for $700 billion and provide them with cash. The rescue package triggers off fierce controversies in the US Congress and in public: everybody notices the privileged treatment enjoyed by the speculative trade, and the question arises whether it is the state’s task to bail out the “gamblers” of the investment banks with the “money of the taxpayer” and save the fortune of failed speculators. Left-wing demonstrators and republicans protest against “Wall-Street socialism”: “No bail-out!”

At the beginning of October the debate is settled. Whether the state should save the speculators is outstripped by a more fundamental insight: It must – whether this is just or not. The banking system depends upon the crashing banks – and thereupon the entire economy and its course. It is not only the profit and growth rate of finance capital that lives on the health of the speculative trade; the money making of the entire society lives on it: once businesses can no longer get credit, once they are no longer able to pre-finance investments and other requirements of their business – they cannot make any profitable business at all. And once their enrichment doesn’t succeed, then the benefit is lost that a flourishing capitalism holds in store for the masses: jobs! Indeed: if the jugglers on the stock exchanges and in the bank palaces do not succeed in increasing their investments profitably, there is no chance for the poor in a country to work for a living in the service of others’ wealth.

And that’s not all. In one go the public becomes aware that even the already earned money that has been put aside – by no means only the money of the rich – is at stake. Savings do not exist in any other form than endangered bank accounts and dodgy certificates. Provision for one’s old age, life insurance – all that is gone as soon as the banks, which have collected it and put it into speculative investments, go bankrupt.

One week later the perception that the state must rescue the banks is replaced by doubts whether it can do that at all. Every day, the presidents, treasury secretaries and financiers as well as the heads of central banks appear at press conferences and announce the newest state aids for stabilizing the financial sector. Meanwhile the authorities nearly everywhere guarantee the saving accounts, no important bank will be allowed to crash any more all around Europe, central banks decrease interest rates all around the world in order to make profit-making easier for private banks – and there’s no end in sight to their credit giving. After each announcement everybody expects the opening of stock exchanges the next morning: will the investors honor the step, will they trust the guarantees and will they have confidence again in speculation – or is all that pointless and the state has to go further with aid and guarantees? Witness the British government: it has given up rescuing the bankrupt institutions by credit and takes them under state wings in order to maintain their functioning.

Slowly the question is arising whether states really can afford to guarantee and take over all bad debts. One of them, the small Iceland, is facing national bankruptcy; bigger states threaten to ruin the stability of their currency by their rescue activities; the term currency reform is discovered again. Even the money that doesn’t lie in a bank but is already in the wallet of its owner is only worth as much as the state that issues it has a functioning banking sector at its disposal.

Fall 2008 is like a crash course on the question what it means to live in capitalism. Actually everything – working and purchasing, living and surviving – is a dependent variable of the financial business. If stock brokers and bankers fail to enrich themselves, then everything fails – and the entire people is expropriated in one blow.

It’s a pity that the people in all their panic just don’t have the time to have a look at the absurd preliminaries of its everyday life. It is fully occupied in escorting the rescue of the financial system, in hope and fear, so that all this can go on as it has up to now. So that it won’t go on as it always did, we take some time to explain the accomplishments, mode of function and the crash of finance capital.