The Revolution of the Giving Hand
The
Revolution of the Giving Hand
By: Peter Sloterdijk
Taken from: Faz.net
In the beginning
of all economic relations, the arbitrariness and the light-heartedness, if one
can believe the classics. Rousseau, in the famous introductory sentence to the
second part of his discourse on the inequality of mankind of 1755, declared the
necessity: "The first who had fenced a piece of land, and thought it
possible to say," This is mine, "and the people Who were simple
(simple) enough to believe him, is the true founder of civil society (société
civile). "
According to this,
what we call the "economic life" begins with the ability to build a convincing
fence and place the terrain captured by an authoritative speech act under the
authority of the fence master: Ceci est à moi. The first taker is the first
entrepreneur - the first citizen and the first thief. He is inevitably
accompanied by the first notary. In order to trigger a kind of overcrowded land
management, a pre-economic "action" must be assumed, which consists
in nothing but the raw gesture of possession. However, this must be
consolidated by a subsequent legalization. Without the consent of the
"simple", who believe in the validity of the first assumption, a
right of possession can not be maintained in the long run.
What begins as an
occupation is sealed by the land register entry - first the arbitrariness, then
its blessing in the form of a right-wing recognition. The secret of bourgeois
society is thus the retrospective sanctification of the violent initiative. It
is only a matter of being the first to be concerned with the initial robbery,
which later becomes the legal title. Whoever comes too late, punishes life. Arm
remains who is on the wrong side of the fence. To the poor, the world appears
as a place where the taking hand of the others has already acquired everything
before they entered the Schauplatz.
Arbitrary
requirements of the economy
Rousseau's myth of
the emergence of bourgeois society from the land occupation did not fail to
have an effect on readers in political modernity. Marx was so impressed by the
scheme of the original fencing that he wanted to trace back the entire early
history of capitalism, the so-called original accumulation, to the criminal
arbitrariness of some of the British landowners who had the idea of fencing
large land and large herds Which would naturally not have happened without the
expulsion of the previous owners or beneficiaries of the soil.
When Marx
developed his theory of capital-driven economics from the point of
"criticism of the political economy," Rousseau's suspicions that all
economics are based on pre-economic arbitrary preconditions, on the same violent
fencing initiatives, Current ownership of bourgeois society. The first
initiatives of the beati possidentes are equal to original crimes - they are no
less than repetitions of original sin in the sphere of property. The sin comes
when the private property is excluded from the common. He continues to testify
in every later economic act.
Reparation of
initial injustices
In such opinions,
the modern habit, which is characteristic of Marxism but not only of this, is
based on disrespect for the law in force, in particular the most bourgeois of
rights, the right to the inviolability of property. It is irrelevant who
believes to see the "existing" as the result of an initial injustice.
Because, according to this view, the property is traced back to an original
"theft" in diffuse public ownership, the owners of today are to make
sure that one day the correction of the grown conditions is placed on the
political agenda. This day begins when the simple ones once cease to be mere
simples . Then they remember the "crime" committed by the first
fences. Enlivened by an enlightened revolutionary vigor, they are arrested to
tear down the existing fences.
From then on,
policy reimbursement must provide for the disadvantages that most of them have
to face in the early distribution: it is now necessary to complain about the
general situation, which was made by the first private individuals. On the
ground of every revolutionary disrespect, one finds the conviction that the
present-day "legitimate" owner does not mean anything. From
disrespect to expropriation, it is only a step. All the avant-gardes proclaim
that the division of the world must begin from the beginning.
Thieves in power
Against this
background, it is easy to understand why Rousseau's "critical"
economy had to take the form of a general theory of theft. Where thieves are in
power, even if they have long been established masters, a realistic economic
science can only be developed as a doctrine of the kleptocracy of the wealthy.
From a theoretical perspective, the latter wants to explain why the rich have
always been the rulers: whoever has accessed the initial take-up will also be
at the forefront of future power.
From a political
point of view, the new science of the taking hand explains why the existing
oligarchy can only be overcome by taking back the initial assumption. This is
the beginning of the most powerful political and economic idea of the
nineteenth century, which, thanks to the Soviet experiment from 1917 to 1990,
also influenced the past century. He articulates the quasi homoeopathic idea
that against the original theft only a morally justified theft On the part of
the many remedies. The criticism of the aristocratic and bourgeois kleptocracy,
which had begun with Rousseau's immensely threatening theses, was absorbed by
the radical wing of the French Revolution with the embittered enthusiasm that
arises from the dangerous liaison of idealism and resentment.
Already with the
early socialists it was immediately said: property is theft. The anarchist
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, on whom the instructive doctrine was based, had
demanded, in his writings on the property of 1840, the abolition of the old
orders in uncontrolled producer confederations-first under the fierce applause
of the young Marx. As is well known, Marx turned his back on his Proudhonian
inspiration a few years later by claiming to have deepened the nature of the
problem of property, and eo ipso the theft phenomenon.
Economy as a
kleptocracy
If later Marx were
to write the "expropriation of the expropriators" in a classically
disrespectful manner, this should by no means be merely the reparation of the
injustice which had been committed before a certain time. Rather, the Marxian
postulate, supported by a wisely confused theory of value, aimed at the
elimination of daily looting plundering in the capital system. They claim that
the "value" of all industrial products is always unjustly shared: the
mere subsistence level for the workers, the rich surplus value for the capital
owner.
The Marxist theory
of value added the following thesis, which has always been formulated in the
field of property criticism. In their illumination the bourgeoisie, though de
facto a productive class, appears as a fundamentally kleptocratic collective,
the mode of which Vivendi is all the more reprehensible, since this is
officially based on universal equality and freedom, not least on the freedom of
contract in entering into employment , What is concluded under the legal form
of free bargaining between entrepreneurs and workers is in fact only a further
application of what Proudhon called the "extortionist property."
It leads directly
to the value-added theft, which appears to be evident in all the profits of the
capital side. In wage payment, a concealment conceals under the pretext of
giving; With her, a looting in the guise of a voluntary, just exchange. On the
basis of this moralizing stylization of the basic economic conditions
"capitalism" could become a political foe and systemic abuse.
Driven by credit
As such, it is
currently taking place again. It stands for the continuation of the feudal
slavery and physical exploitation with the means of modern or bourgeois
wage-receiver exploitation. This is what the thesis says, the
"capitalist" economic order is moved by the basal antagonism of
capital and labor - a thesis which, with all its suggestive pathos, was based
on a false representation of the situation: the move of the modern economy is
Namely by no means seeking to counteract capital and labor. Rather, it conceals
itself in the antagonistic liaison of creditors and debtors. It is the concern
for the repayment of loans which modern economies advance from the outset - and
in view of this concern capital and labor are on the same side.
After all, in
these financial crimes it is already known from the tabloids: The credit is the
soul of every business, and the wages are first and for the most part borrowed
from borrowed money - and only on success also from profits. Profit-making is
an epiphenomenon of the debt service, and the fistish unrest of the eternally
driven entrepreneur is the psychic reflex of the interest-rate.
Capitalism and the
state
However, the
hypothesis that "capital" is only a pseudonym for an insatiable
predatory energy, continues to live in Brecht Sottise, according to which the
attack on a bank does not matter in comparison with the establishment of a
bank. Wherever one can see, in the analyzes of the classical left the theft
seems to be in power, how serious it may be, and how paternally some employers
also work for their employees. As far as the "bourgeois state" is
concerned, according to these assumptions, it can not be much more than a
syndicate for the protection of the all-too-known "ruling interests".
At this point, it
would not be worth mentioning the errors and misunderstandings inherent in the
adventurous mis-construction of the principle of property on the line leading
from Rousseau through Marx to Lenin. The latter has shown what happens when the
formula of the expropriation of the expropriners from the sphere of sectarian
tracts is translated into that of the state patron. He is indebted to the
unrivaled insight that the destinies of capitalism, like that of his supposed
counterpart, socialism, are inseparable from the development of the modern
state.
The money-sucking
monster
In fact, one must
look to the contemporary state if one wants to capture the activities of the
taking hand on the latest state of art. In order to estimate the unprecedented
infiltration of statehood in the present world, it is useful to remember the
historical relationship between early liberalism and the initial anarchism.
Both movements were aroused by the deceptive assumption that they were heading
for an era of weakened government. While Liberalism strove for the minimum
state, which governed its citizens almost imperceptibly and left them alone in
their business, anarchism even set the demand for the complete dying of the
state on the agenda.
In both
postulates, the expectation typical of the nineteenth century and its
system-blind thinking was that the plundering of man by man would come to an
end in the foreseeable future: in the first case, by the overpowering
disempowerment of the unproductive powers of extraction, nobility and clergy;
In the second, by the dissolution of the conventional social classes into
alienation-free small circles, which themselves wanted to consume what they
themselves produced.
The experience of
the twentieth century has shown that liberalism and anarchism were opposed to the
logic of the system. Whoever wanted to develop a valid view of the activities
of the taking hand would have had to consider, above all, the greatest take-up
power of the modern world, the updated tax state, which was also to become more
and more a debt state. Approaches to this are found in de facto predominantly
in liberal traditions. They have noted with great concern how the modern state,
within a century, has become a money-sucking and money-givering monster of
unprecedented dimensions.
Expropriation by
income is expensive
He succeeded,
above all, by means of a fabulous expansion of the tax zone, not least by the
introduction of the progressive income tax, which is no less important than a
functional equivalent to socialist expropriation, with the remarkable advantage
that the procedure can be repeated year after year At least among those who did
not perish at the cupping of the last year. To pay tribute to the phenomenon of
today's tax dependency among the well-to-do, it might be worth remembering that
Queen Victoria, at the time of an income tax of five percent in England, had
begun to wonder whether this had not exceeded the limit of what was reasonable.
In the meantime, people have long been accustomed to conditions in which a
handful of executives left more than half the national income tax budget.
Together with a
colorful list of creations and cupping, which mainly concern consumption, this
results in a phenomenal finding: Fully developed taxpayers claim half of all
the economic successions of their productive strata for the treasury every
year, without the affected parties being the most plausible reaction to it, the
Antifisceral civil war, take their refuge. This is a political dressage result
that would have left any finance minister of absolutism pale with envy.
Kleptocracy of the
state
It is easy to see
why the question of whether capitalism has a future is wrong. We do not
currently live "in capitalism" - as a thoughtless and hysterical
rhetoric suggests again - but in an order of the things cum grano salis has to
define as a mass-media-animated semi-socialism based on the state of the state.
Officially, this means shamefully "social market economy". However,
as far as the activities of the taking hand are concerned, since the monopolization
of the national and regional treasury, they have been mainly engaged in
community tasks. They devote themselves to the sisyphusic works that spring
from the demands for "social justice". They are all based on the
insight: whoever wants to take a lot has much to favor.
Thus, from the
selfish and direct exploitation of feudal times in modernity, an almost
unselfish, legally restrained state-kleptocracy has become. A modern finance
minister is a Robin Hood, who has made an oath to the constitution. Taking a good
conscience, which the public hand calls, is justified by ideality and
pragmatism, by its unmistakable usefulness for social peace-not to speak of the
other achievements of the taking-giving state. The corruption factor usually
remains within moderate limits, despite different indications from Cologne and
Munich. Anyone who would like to test the local conditions needs only to recall
the situation in post-communist Russia, where a man without ancestry like
Vladimir Putin could, within a few years of service at the head of the state,
have a private wealth of more than twenty billion dollars.
Reversed
exploitation
The liberal
observers of the taking monster, on whose backs the current system of services
of general interest rides, has the merit of pointing out the dangers inherent
in the given circumstances. These are the over-regulation, which limits the
entrepreneurial drive too narrowly, the over-taxation which punishes the
success, and the over-indebtedness, which pushes the seriousness of the household
with speculative frivolity - in the private as in the public.
It was also the
authors of a liberal tendency which first pointed out that today's conditions
have a tendency towards the reversal of exploitation. In the case of economic
antiquity, the rich have lived unequivocally and directly at the expense of the
poor, it can happen in the economic modernity that the unproductive indirectly
At the expense of the productive - and also in a misleading way, namely, that
they are told and believe that they are wrong and they owe them more.
Forgiven future
In fact, almost
half of all populations of modern nations currently consist of recipients of
zero income or low income, exempt from taxation, whose subsistence is largely
dependent on the performance of the tax-active half. If perceptions of this
kind should spread and radicalize, a large style of solidarity could emerge in
the course of the twenty-first century. They would result from the fact that
the only too plausible liberal thesis of the exploitation of the productive by
the unproductives of the long less plausible left thesis of the exploitation of
labor by the capital runs the rank. The post-Democratic consequences would
follow, the painting of which would be spared.
The greatest
danger to the future of the system is currently the debt policy of the
Keynesian poisoned states. It steers as discreetly as inevitably a situation in
which the debtors once again expropriate their creditors, as has so often been
the case in the history of cupping, from the days of the pharaohs to the
currency reforms of the twentieth century. A new feature of the current
phenomena is the pantagruelian dimension of public debt. Whether depreciation,
whether insolvency, whether currency reform, whether inflation - the next major
expiations are on the road. It is already clear under which working title the
script of the future stands: the plundering of the future by the present. The
taking hand now even reaches into the life of the coming generations - the
disrespect also captures the natural basis of life and the succession of the
generations.
The only power
that could resist the plundering of the future would be a social psychological
re-establishment of "society." It would be no less than a revolution
of the giving hand. It led to the abolition of forced taxes and their
transformation into gifts to the general public without the public sector
having to be impoverished. This thymotic upheaval would have to show that in
the eternal resistance between greed and pride sometimes the latter can gain
the upper hand.
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