The victory of capital

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In her monograph Der Sieg des Kapitals (2013), Ulrike Herrmann goes back to the roots of capitalism , as capitalism is primarily to be understood historically. It strictly delimits the terms market , money and capital from one another, since mixing or confusing them would have caused serious misunderstandings.

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She explains the emergence of modern capitalism in England with the high wages that technical progress in the textile industry would have forced:

“ Capitalism is not driven by low wages , but by high ones. Technical innovations that increase productivity and thus generate growth are only worthwhile if the labor force is expensive. "

The markets of the “ market economy ”, explains the author, are largely a fiction, as is free competition , which is at best a playing field for small companies. The economy would largely be dominated by a few corporations, most of which were founded at the end of the 19th century. These large corporations have no interest in competition, and new competitors have no chance of founding a company with the given investment volume, for example in the automotive industry. As the elite researcher Michael Hartmann has presented, the management positions in these corporations are not determined by their supposed performance , but primarily by their social background . The so-called “ labor market ” represents a particularly paradoxical contradiction to the market model , since the wages as the price of labor are set by the employers alone, i.e. they do not develop in the free play of supply and demand :

“The“ labor market ”cannot be a real market that generates a fair wage by itself. Unprotected, the workers would be forced to sell their labor even at the lowest prices because they have to survive. There is a power imbalance between employers and employees, as Adam Smith has already observed.

Historically, real competition for the price of labor was only possible with the strong negotiating position of the unions. But she lost this position.

The state is not the antipode of the economy, but actually the condition of life in that it promotes capitalism and stabilizes its social consequences. In addition, the state controls the economy via the interest rate level, which determines the behavior of the financial market .

Globalization is nothing fundamentally new, the term is primarily used as a sham argument to make unjustified wage dumping appear plausible.

Money and capital are concepts that should not be put into one and mixed up. Money turns into capital only when it is invested to produce goods of better quality and at lower prices. A society can only make provisions for the future by investing today in tomorrow's production. On the other hand, money as such is not a driving force of the economy, since it can also be piled up in unproductive and harmful speculative bubbles . Therefore, having money per se is not beneficial to the economy, which is concealed in the simplified and generalized term "capital" (physical capital plus financial capital ").

Reviews

Stephan Kaufmann judges in his review of the Frankfurter Rundschau that the presentation gives laypeople a good overview, it takes the necessary counter-position to the prevailing doctrine and shows that the world is not as simple as economists and politicians explain to us. However, Kaufmann criticizes that the author, in her need to clear up common mistakes, sometimes goes overboard: “In her presentation, inflation is never bad, debts are never a problem, there is actually no market and wages cannot be high enough . It's too easy. In addition, she has made a lot of plans to explain the big picture on just 280 pages. As a result, her argumentation is sometimes erratic and too short, and she tries to overwhelm entire schools of thought with a few sentences. That should hardly convince their opponents. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephan Kaufmann: Ulrike Herrmann: The victory of capital: Profit in Mesopotamia .
  2. ↑ Stephan Kaufmann: "The victory of capital" by Ulrike Herrmann: Profit and speculation in Mesopotamia . In: Berliner Zeitung . ( berliner-zeitung.de [accessed on January 31, 2017]).

literature

The victory of capital. How wealth came into the world. The story of growth, money and crises . Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-86489-044-4 . Paperback edition by Piper, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-492-30568-6 .