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.