Wealth without greed
Wealth without greed. How we save ourselves from capitalism is a book by the politician Sahra Wagenknecht ( Die Linke ), which was published on March 10, 2016 by Campus Verlag .
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The main message of Wagenknecht's economic analysis is: modern oligarchic capitalism increases inequality , blocks innovation or monopolizes it. This “economic feudalism” consists in the fact that people earn an unemployed income with no benefits for society. They live on business assets and thus on the work of others or inherit economic assets and thus power over others.
The core of the power of the upper ten thousand and the origin of their unpowered earnings is today's constitution of economic property. (...) Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the most important economic resources are concentrated in the disposal of the richest 1 percent. Once again, 99 percent of the population work for the most part, directly or indirectly, for the wealth of this new money nobility.
The consequence of this development is the weakening of the middle class and the emergence of a new class society .
The upper class is sitting in the penthouse, has put the elevators out of order and pulled up the ladders. The rest can be happy if they can at least stay on their floor.
Beyond the previous systems, which represented the market or the state and the planned economy and private economy as exclusive forms of the economic order, she sees a new order model. She sees solutions, for example, in “ public welfare companies ” for publicly important economic sectors and in the regulation of the financial sector by the state, whereby non-profit-oriented “ public welfare banks ” secure the economic financial needs. Then there is the partnership, the owner of which is liable with his private assets, and the employee company, which, like a foundation, such as the Carl Zeiss Foundation , belongs to itself. The situation is made particularly difficult by globalized capitalism, which can no longer be controlled by democratic institutions. Wagenknecht therefore pleads against the dissolution of state sovereignty and thus for nation-state concepts and for democratic control in supranational organizations. In the current situation, Europeanization and globalization only benefit the corporations at the expense of the workers.
Democracy and the welfare state were fought for within the framework of individual nation states for good reason, and they disappear with the loss of power of their parliaments and governments. For the foreseeable future, there will therefore primarily be an instance in which real democracy can live and whose re-democratization we must campaign: that is the historically created state with its various levels.
Reviews
In his review of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Peter Gauweiler emphasizes that the "really well-written" book by the clearly thinking economist Wagenknecht testifies that she wants to save what is important to "all of us": the market economy and democracy. Right from the start she had “developed an understanding of the canon of values of the Federal Republican founding fathers that could make some born FRG people pale” and understood the ordoliberal foundations of the social market economy of Erhard and Oppenheimer , which she rightly saw realized in the crisis-free, positive early days of the Federal Republic. Only for the economy dominated by the “alienated financial economy” from 1990 onwards did she use the term and term “capitalism”, since investment banking has meanwhile become a threat to entrepreneurship. The conclusion to rethink property sounds a little threatening, although “employee societies” and “common good societies” are meant. There was a need for discussion on the subject of inheritance, but this part too was clear and informative and contained essential information.
Armin Pfahl-Traughber in the Humanist Press Service assesses Wagenknecht's work as ambivalent, “somewhat plain, but not inaccurate” . It is true that capitalism no longer corresponds to the freedom and performance principle of the market economy, it has become a lie of life , it lacks legitimation . The capitalist form of economy differs from the market economy in that "it is not reproduced with capital alone, but for the sake of capital, so that in it the returns on the capital employed are the actual goal of production" (p. 129f .). Wagenknecht's suggestions for improvement and their popular science and moralizing arguments are superficial. Unfortunately, despite Wagenknecht's realistic view, the alternatives remained “more than just vague in terms of content and strategy”.
The then editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland , Tom Strohschneider , criticized the fact that the term exploitation did not even appear in the text . Likewise, one misses an indication of how the proposals for the reorganization of property law stipulations are to be brought through politically.
Markus Günther appreciatively emphasizes in the FAZ's review that the clever, imaginative and well-founded book essentially addresses the right question: “Why does the supposedly so superior system of freely organized capitalism fail to distribute the existing wealth more equitably and use it? to capitalize on enormous increases in productivity that benefits everyone and not just a few? ”Wagenknecht's proposals were particularly surprising due to the accentuation of national solutions. In the rejection of the EU and the common currency, the left Wagenknecht touched the AfD, on the other hand, their proposals to reform the financial market are "classic left". In contrast to Bernie Sanders , Günther misses a concept for real political implementation in Wagenknecht.
Ulrich Busch , on the other hand, criticizes Wagenknecht's overall “solid performance” for the romantic conception of the community banks. “This approach contradicts the complexity of developed economies and the extensive functions that banks have to perform in them. To want to reduce these to certain 'core tasks' would be tantamount to amputating the money economy. ”However, he acknowledged Wagenknecht's rejection of full money and an unconditional basic income. He sees a problem in the theoretical framework (two types of capitalism) and in the deviation of Wagenknecht's market economy conception from the principles of her party critical of capitalism.
In Der Freitag, Sebastian Puschner praises Wagenknecht's progressive, future-oriented orientation, her unconventional ties to Christian Felber and Mariana Mazzucato , her critical eye for the possibilities of the digital economy. He sees difficulties with their party base in their emphasis on national solutions.
Max Otte attests the “fundamentally critical work” of the “indomitable” parliamentarian independence and a broad knowledge base. The most exciting chapter for him is “Rethinking property”, since modern capitalism posits property as absolute. A particular problem with corporations is the separation of liability and property. In this way, not only income, but also income free of liability, is generated in the upper class. Wagenknecht's proposals for restructuring company ownership are definitely worth considering.
From the communist edge of the spectrum of opinion, Peter Schwarz of the Trotskyist world socialist website sees Wagenknecht's portrayal as a "cynical justification of an ethnically homogeneous nation-state with democracy". Her book reads “like the lament of a petty bourgeois who feels overwhelmed by the power of big capital because he stands in the way of his own social advancement”. Their idyllic image of a market economy serving the common good is an idealization of the extremely conservative Adenauer era. The verdict of these apparently new ideas was already expressed by Marx and Engels :
The petty-bourgeois socialism "dissects the contradictions in the modern production relations in a highly astute manner," but wants to "forcibly re-lock the modern means of production and means of transport within the framework of the old property relations that had to be broken up by them," they wrote in the "Communist Manifesto". This is "reactionary and utopian at the same time".
This petty-bourgeois thinking continued among the National Socialists as a distinction between “raffling” and “creating” capital. In reality, like Lafontaine, Wagenknecht wanted to defuse social tensions in order to prevent a social revolution. Sections of the state apparatus, the trade union bureaucracy and the upper middle class feared a threat to their social position from a social movement from below far more than the rise of the right.
Footnotes
- ↑ Capitalism: Wagenknecht's left market economy . In: sueddeutsche.de . ISSN 0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed on March 29, 2016]).
- ↑ Critique of capitalism by Sahra Wagenknecht. In: hpd.de. Retrieved March 30, 2016 .
- ^ Torn thread , Neues Deutschland, March 26, 2016
- ↑ Markus Günther: What Sahra Wagenknecht writes: One could talk about this communism . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . May 28, 2016, ISSN 0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed May 29, 2016]).
- ↑ Ulrich Busch: Ulrich Busch: Neofeudalism or Financial Capitalism? Accessed December 24, 2017 (German).
- ↑ Sebastian Puschner: Hear the bumblebee . In: Friday . February 5, 2016, ISSN 0945-2095 ( freitag.de [accessed on May 29, 2016]).
- ↑ finanzen.net GmbH: # NAME # News - News on # NAME # - BÖRSE ONLINE. In: www.boerse-online.de. Retrieved May 29, 2016 .
- ^ German Text Archive - Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich: Manifesto of the Communist Party. London, 1848. In: www.deutschestextarchiv.de. Retrieved May 29, 2016 .
- ^ Peter Schwarz: Sahra Wagenknecht's Plea for Nationalism and Market Economy - World Socialist Web Site. In: www.wsws.org. Retrieved May 29, 2016 .