THE GOSPEL OF WEALTH 01 (original) (raw)

Transformations of Wealth – The Wealth of Transformations. A Four-In-One Approach

We should be aware that there is no longer the one great question and certainly there is not the one subject, the one protagonist of social protest, which would be able to shape all societal confrontations. If effective changes are to take place then different connections between the most diverse questions, problems and movements have to be created and the conflicts ‘articulated’ in a new way (Laclau and Mouffe 2006). One of the conditions for convergence is the consciousness of the common bases of conflicts. If one could conduct a conversation on the possible coherence of the different, if the fragments could fit into a mosaic with transformational force, then the ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri 2004) could assume concrete form. The revealing of the relationship of the spheres of production of social wealth to today’s central conflicts would be one possible path towards convergence. It would entail a four-in-one perspective, to use Frigga Haug’s (2009) formulation. What Frigga Haug elucidated exemplarily in connection with labour and labour time – the solidaristic interconnection of the different – is generalised in the present study. This should make it possible to introduce the interrelation between different social struggles and their solidary intermeshing not just as an extra condition that has to be forced on them from outside. The ‘four’ would be the four spheres of wealth: nature; social-individual life worlds; the societal institutions enabling security, trust, justice and democratic self-determination; and the world of the cultural-public. And the 6 ‘one’ stands for the production of a solidaristic combination that aims at the overcoming of the social inequality in life opportunities, power, and property in a capital-dominated society (see my own analysis in Brie 2006). It represents a common perspective on the posing of the four most important contemporary questions (see for a solidaristic perspective Dellheim, Brangsch, Wolf, and Spangenberg 2012). This article is an attempt to introduce into the current discussions a proposal, which could promote solidary cooperation. It lays out the rationale for a common foundation in uncertain times. Whether such a four-in-one perspective can be maintained throughout the processes of practical cooperation is still to be seen. This article is an intellectual experiment, nothing more nor less. Its purpose is to create a ‘living form’ (Schiller 1975, 311), which can help us to move forward in a more solidary way in today’s conflicts.

The Commodity Nature of Labor-Power. Science & Society, Volume 80, N° 3, 2016, pp. 319–345

Some recent Marxist contributions, among them the so-called New Solution to the " transformation problem, " call into question the idea of labor-power as a fully-fledged commodity. Yet, the rejection of the commodity nature of labor-power compromises Marx's whole explanation of the origin of surplus-value on the basis of the exchange of equivalents. It can be shown, however, that it is possible to offer a positive case for the commodity-nature of labor-power which is consistent with Marx's broader dialectical investigation of the determinations of the value-form. This requires building upon the arguments that Marx explicitly put forward in his economic works, but also going beyond them, albeit on the basis of those arguments themselves. Furthermore, this novel approach that treats the reproduction of labor-power as a commodity determined by the self-valorization of capital proves to be very valuable in shedding light on two classic Marxist controversies, namely: the debate on domestic labor and the one on skilled labor.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Economica, 1959

We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land-likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classesproperty owners and propertyless workers. Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws-i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedycompetition. Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate-for competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences. Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc.-the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system. Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce-namely, the necessary relationship between two things-between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man-that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained. We proceed from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity-and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces-labor's product-confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in