POSTCARD FROM PRAGUE
No-one has ever truly understood Franz
Kafka until he or she understands Wittgenstein’s enucleation of his maxim: “The
law always catches the criminal”.
Because if the law “always” catches the criminal, then it is no longer “the
law” but becomes instead an inexorable
fate. The aim of bourgeois economics
is, as it were, to square the circle, to present a specific historical reality
– that of the capitalist “market” where human beings alienate their living
activity – as an inexorable fate. By reducing this “political” reality to an
inexorable fate, bourgeois economics is then able to turn social relations of
production into inescapable mathematical formulae and equations that yield
“economic equilibrium”. But the very “success” of this operation – the “ful-filment”
of its conditions, their “satis-faction” or “com-pletion” – leads to the
con-clusion (German, Voll-endung, full-ending) and de-pletion of their con-tent:
in other words, the algebraic formulae of bourgeois economic equilibrium, just
like the law in Kafka, lose all meaning and content of their categories at the
precise instant that they seem to capture it.
This is how capitalism has turned from
a specific oppressive historical institution into a Kafkaesque nightmare of
ecological suicide for the human race. Even the Classical economists limited
the extent of capitalist production and profitability to the exertion of
“labour” – in the sense that Classical Political Economy (Adam Smit, David
Ricardo and J.S. Mill) could envision the limit
of capitalist accumulation as the political choice made by workers to exert
their “labour”. Such was the “positive” metaphysical slant of the Labour Theory
of Value that Karl Marx himself (!!) in the entirety of his theoretical work
could never envisage the eventual destruction on the part of capitalism of the
entire ecosphere through sheer human overpopulation!
The Classical Political Economists
could see that “goods” in vast abundance – such as water and air – did not and
could not carry any “value” – and therefore could not form the basis of capitalist
profitability. In its “constructivist” and “objectivist” slant (the labour
theory of value poses value as a positive objective quantity), this theory
could not lead to the “negative” subjectivist inversion of the theory of value
operated by Neoclassical Economic Theory (from Menger to Jevons to Walras) that
would lead to the nihilistic Schopenhauerian “renunciation” of life itself –
and therefore to the conceivable annihilation of human life on earth. This
nihilism of Neoclassical Theory is best captured by the notion of “scarcity”.
Where the Classical labour theory of value put value as “wealth through
labour”, the Neoclassics erected “wealth through privation”, - that is to say, scarcity as the origin of wealth. But
whereas for Classical Political Economy labour, and therefore wealth, were
finite quantities easily exhausted, for Neoclassical bourgeois economic theory,
wealth becomes an inexhaustible downward spiral of selfish appropriation of
resources!
As Bohm-Bawerk put it, “the first law
of physics is that in the universe nothing is created and nothing is destroyed:
everything is transformed”. For the Neoclassics, the self-interested individual
is the centre of the universe. All the Labour in the world – like the Sisyphean
Arbeit in Schopenhauer – cannot positively create any “wealth”. Wealth can only be the transferral or
“exchange” of possessions or properties from one individual to another – and
then only if some individuals “renounce” their right to present consumption “in
exchange for” future consumption. “Scarcity” is the inexorable fate of a
society that has put the unquenchable thirst for the accumulation of social
resources as the endless pursuit of the self-interested individual! Scarcity is
the end-result of Wicksell’s “universally free competition” amongst
self-interested individuals. In the Neoclassical bourgeois capitalist
economy, nothing is created, everything is transformed or delayed. In
this “exchange” nothing is “positively” created – selfish individuals have only
re-balanced their current legal claims to property into the indefinite future.
As Keynes himself put it, “money is a bridge between the present and the
future”. For the capitalist, money is the legal claim to future human living
labour. Capitalism is a hypothecation, a mort-gage (French, morte, death, and
gage, pledge – dead pledge) on the future life of workers.
But the result of this endless capitalist
hypothecation of future human activity can only entail the ceaseless exhaustion
of social resources through relative overpopulation – that is to say, through a
human population of living labour that constantly exceeds the means available
for its reproduction, for the survival of the human race. The constant “scarcity”
of social resources engineered by the capitalist economic system must perforce
engender the depletion of the ecosphere through human overpopulation. The erstwhile
saying “Socialism or Death” may yet come to reveal a hitherto unknown facet –
one that even the great fatidic Karl Marx could not envisage.
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