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Last week, during the 3-day Congress on Solidarity Economy in Berlin, over 1000 participants discussed how to design a good life in a sustainable way, without further resource depletion and unnecessary economic growth. http://solikon2015.org/en One session was called "Introduction into the Criticism of Monetary Logic," with Uli Frank as presenter. Videos of the conference sessions are not available, but I found a video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmUN_gYQsMs (in German) which was presumably similar. This video is worth while to watch for those who understand German. It seems like a modernized re-telling of the first chapters of Marx's Capital, with some excellent insights but one difference: it does not make the link between money and labor. After remarking that the capitalist exchange economy makes everything one-dimensional, Frank refers to the book by Eske Bockelmann called "Im Takt des Geldes" (in the tact of money) which documents in the history of art and philosophy and mathematics when this turn to one-dimensionality occurred (some time around 1620). Frank marvels about it that today's complex global economy can function based on such a primitive one-dimensional organizing principle, but Frank (and apparently also Bockelmann) fail to explore the conditions which make this miracle possible. Marx argues that the market's one-dimensional organizing principle can only be successful because production, underneath the diversity of the use-values produced, is also governed by a one-dimensional social principle: it is the allocation of one-dimensional human labor-power to different tasks. Marx's exploration of the conditions of possibility of capitalism has gained new relevance today because it also explains why the capitalist market economy, which was originally wildly successful, is failing today. Today it mistakes the destruction of resources for production (uneconomic growth), for the simple reason that labor is no longer the most important factor of production, but the finite store of natural resources is now the binding constraint on the economy. Following Marx, Frank says that the one-dimensionality of money implies the necessity of growth, because the circuit M-C-M does not make sense unless the second M is bigger than the first. But again Frank deviates from Marx by not asking how M-C-M' is possible. Marx's answer is that M-C-M' is based on the exploitation of labor. Again, Marx's answer has relevance today because the exploitation of labor is the biggest *obstacle* to the changes in the production system necessary to prevent environmenal degradation. The modern capitalist system refuses to produce in a sustainable fashion not because it lacks the technology and resources to do so, but because sustainable production is not as profitable as the unsustainable suicidal business as usual. Labor and exploitation do not play a role in Frank's talk. Frank is injecting Marxist thoughts into today's environmental movement, but he leaves out the pivotal links between money and abstract labor, and between wage labor and profit. I think this makes his theory less powerful in terms of the question "what to do about all this" than it otherwise would have been. Hans G Ehrbar _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
