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Elmar Altvater

Elmar Altvater, doctor, born in 1938, is a professor emeritus for political science at the
Free University of Berlin and editorial member of PROKLA.
In his distinguished career, he has offered many publications on capitalist development,
state theory, development policy, the debt crisis and the connection of the economy and
ecology. In 1971, he became a professor at the Free University of Berlin and was
engaged in the 68’ movement in Berlin. His books on globalization have been best-
sellers.

Fukushima Mon Horrour. The Dream of Economic Reason Gives Birth to Tremendous
Catastrophe, 2011

Surveying Utopia

Cooperatives and the Good Life

Capitalism can be Cured, 2012

In the Towrope of the Financial Markets, 2014

Capitalism and its Crisis Proclivity, 2014

The False Model, 2015


Fukushima, Mon Horreur - The Dream of Economic Reason Gives
Birth to Tremendous Catastrophes

By: Elmar Altvater

(in: transform 8/2011, May 2011 http://www.transform-network.net/en/home/journal-


transformeurope/english/issue-082011/display-anzeige-not-in-menu/article//Fukushima-
Mon-Horreur-The-Dream-of-Economic-Reason-Gives-Birth-to-Tremendous-
Catastrophes.html)

[Translator’s note: In "Anti-Duhring," Frederick Engels explained that nature also has a
history and that capitalism tends to destroy its own foundations and nature. The negative
is bound to the positive as conservation of energy is bound to transformation of energy.
Elmar Altvater is an emeritus professor of political economy at the Free University of
Berlin.]

Co-President of the party DIE LINKE, Klaus Ernst, explained the meager results of his
party in the March 27, 2011 German regional elections (3.1% in Rhineland-Palatinate,
2.8% in Baden-Wuerttemberg) and the two-digit increase in the vote of the Greens after
the heated electoral campaign focusing on nuclear policy in the wake of the catastrophe
of Fukushima, in which the topic of social justice had been pushed to the background. In
his words: “If everything is contaminated with radiation, even a minimum wage does not
help”.

That is true. Even the global economic crisis which continues to cause pain and which
has maneuvered some states to the brink of bankruptcy, and the Euro-zone nearly to its
collapse, is less often spoken about than the nuclear disaster in Japan, at 9,000 kilometers
from Europe. This is globalization in its concreteness: supply and trade chains, financial
transactions and migration, cultural exchange, the internet and mobile phones, not to
mention the formal and informal meetings of the G-8, the G-20 etc., have created not
only a virtual but a very real proximity. And now radioactively contaminated material in
containers could be distributed from Japan to the entire world. Does the container – the
symbol and vehicle of globalization – have to be abolished, and is it necessary, after the
liberalization of customs and passenger security controls, to introduce new radioactivity
controls? Where are the limits of globalization? The answer is: in nature, as Frederick
Engels clairvoyantly explained in the reprimand in his “Dialectics of Nature”: “Let us
not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature.
For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us … Thus at every step we are
reminded that we by no means rule over nature … but that we, with flesh, blood and
brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst…”. If the productive and destructive forces
are sufficiently developed – and this is the case in the nuclear age –, economic rationality
transforms itself not only into irrationality but into catastrophes.

Nature and our relations to nature are moving up on the agenda. Up to now, the parties
only tried to demonstrate their “economic competence”; with such aspirations, the SPD,
for example, won the regional elections in Hamburg in February 2011. This mostly
amounts to a promise of relentless opportunism in economic policy. Its rationality
consists in servicing powerful capital groups and humoring their media. Competent
economic performance is measured at the economic growth rate of a country or a region.
That was the understanding of a maxi-coalition, also share of by parts of Die LINKE: the
economic problems of our times can be tackled with growth or rather with “acceleration
of growth”. A law for the acceleration of growth belongs therefore in the bag of tricks of
the conservative-liberal coalition in Germany. This could be plagiarism, since, like her
former minister of defense, Angela Merkel has also plagiarized. But from whom? – from
the left Lula government in Brazil, which has been putting into effect a “program for the
acceleration of growth”, with great economic success, albeit with disastrous
environmental consequences.

Meanwhile, the Greens promise “green” and sustainable growth with a “Green New
Deal”, whatever they might understand by it. Die LINKE – although not unanimously –
insists on the necessity of growth, on condition that it is balanced and resource-saving.
Obviously, growth is still the ideological and political anchor of stability in a society
which, as Günther Anders wrote in the 1950s, “incessantly works at the production of
(its) own downfall” and thinks it can continue on this path only by using up ever more
resources and energy, i.e. by growth, until the bitter end.

Yet, is it even possible at all?

Doubts are in order, because “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, such as the ones
Francisco Goya drew in his “Caprichos”. Something has happened that was not planned
in any script of the mainstream economy: First, the meltdown of world finance after the
sub-prime debacle in the USA and the bankruptcy of the Lehman Bank. Sneers and scorn
for the theory of the efficient, because neo-liberalized, financial markets. This was
followed by the “crashes” in the real economy and the soaring of state debt, which made
the Euro-zone tremble. The economy’s problem, so it was hoped, could be solved by
enormous sums of money from the public treasuries. This is a misunderstanding for
which especially those have to pay dearly who are not mobile enough to “optimize” their
tax payments by capital flight, fleeing, that is, the national tax offices. But the outrage
over tax dodging or fraud or over economic and social injustice is drowned out by
screaming ecological alarm bells.

We have gotten so used to red alerts that we could easily carry on with our “sleep of
reason”. Climate change is already embedded as an almost inescapable fate in our
everyday lives. It is well known that the combustion products of fossil fuels remain in the
earth’s atmosphere for about 120 years and heat it up. The laws of nature are responsible.
Once used up, fossil reserves are not available a second time. As fuels they are gone, but
in the burning process the useful hydrocarbons have been converted into contaminating
carbon dioxide. In nature, nothing gets lost – that is what the axioms of thermodynamics
say – but in an irreversible process the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
causes the climate catastrophe with its secondary and tertiary consequences, of which
climatologists are warning: floods and periods of drought at times and in places where
they are not supposed to happen, melting of the glaciers and disappearance of the polar
ice caps, “unusual weather events”. The heat in Russia during the summer of 2010 has
claimed about 55,000 human lives, the insurers are telling us in their annual damage
balances.

At this point we can start applying the costs multiplication table to the climate
catastrophe and decide with economic rationality if the climate change should be
permitted to take its course and the damages taken into stride, or if they are to be
prevented by precautionary measures.
The precautionary principle follows directly from the discrepancy emphasized by Hans
Jonas in his “Imperative of Responsibility” between the spatial and temporal scope of our
actions, which is increasing with economic growth and our knowledge about the
consequences of our actions. This incongruity leads to the paradox that, like the economy,
also our knowledge is growing and expanding geometrically, but that, on the other hand,
we can only know even less about the unintentional side effects our intention-governed
actions will have in time and place. Jürgen Habermas described this as the “new
complexity”. The precautionary principle in politics is derived from the philosophical
principle of responsibility. The precautionary principle is contested. Nobody will find it
unreasonable, yet the consequences to be drawn from it are disputed and will remain so at
least as long as the belief / superstition prevails that by boosting growth and
competitiveness most problems of the world can be solved. Those who want to increase
the importance of the precautionary principle must stand up against the rationality
presenting itself as the one and only alternative, and against the self-assertiveness of
economy as a science, and fight the lobbyist groups who rank short-term profit above
long-term provision. The possibility of a catastrophe as a consequence of this rationality
has been repressed. Thus the reversal of rational patterns of action into an overall social
irrationality has been removed from the horizon of our thinking and acting.

This does not only show itself at the end of the fossil fuel chain, with the emission of
greenhouse gases, but already at its beginning, in an irrational effect of strictly rational
action, in the extraction of fossil fuels. Also, at that point catastrophes can obviously not
be ruled out. The oil spillage in the Gulf of Mexico more than one year ago after the
explosion of the oil platform Deepwater Horizon has brought home to us the enormous
risks involved in the haulage of so-called “non-conventional” oil from the deep oceans
after the “conventional” oil runs low. So, the fossil age, which started out with coal and
the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century, is running out of its fuels. This is
a revolution, whether or not it is so perceived. The fuel and its transformation and usage
systems, which have driven the modernist as well as the post-modernist ages, are on the
decline or becoming obsolete. The fossil, Fordist or post-Fordist culture is waning.
However, it is not ending without struggle. Murderous wars are fought over access to the
remnants of the resources and over the influence on their marketing and price-formation,
in Iraq and in Libya, in the delta of the River Niger and in Sudan.

For a long time the belief prevailed that the nuclear age was the alternative to the epoch
of coal, oil and gas. The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of August 1945 has deeply
carved in humankind’s memory the tremendous power of destruction of nuclear energy.
However, it has also nourished the illusion that after the terrible Second World War this
immense energy could be used as “atoms for peace” in the world. The symbol of the first
World Exhibition after World War II in Brussels in 1958 was “Atomium”, an imitation of
a cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times and standing 102 meters tall. The
atom was accessible on escalators, tamed and useful to humans. This atomic optimism
found its quite critical organ in Germany in the magazine “Das Atomzeitalter” (“The
Nuclear Age”). Yet, since the 1960s, there has been ever more skepticism with the
growing number of nuclear reactors and the aggravated problem of disposing of the
nuclear waste.

Safe disposal is part of the idea of precaution, a principle which was agreed upon as
binding in the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio
de Janeiro and also in the EU Environmental Laws. Only in this way the nuclear cycle
between the mining of the uranium and the final storage of the spent nuclear rods can be
closed: Uranium ore is mined from the crust of the earth and then enriched in such a way
that nuclear energy can be transformed in a controlled way into thermal energy. This
again can be used for powering steam turbines and thus indirectly for the generation of
electricity.

What is also seen here is that according to the first principle theorem of thermodynamics
nothing gets lost, really. The spent nuclear fuel rods remain and have to be stored safely,
and that for more than ten thousand years. Disposal means complete isolation from
natural erosion and human contact. That this is impossible for only 30 years not to speak
of more than 10,000 was shown by the catastrophe of Fukushima. If the nuclear cycle
closes, it does so in the form of an explosion with nuclear fallout. The cycle is closed in
catastrophe, and that makes nuclear technology so dangerous.

Fukushima. A beautiful name for a huge accident in the history of mankind and, different
from “Hiroshima, mon amour”, an all too horrible setting for a love story, contaminated
with radioactivity. Whether the “horreur” of Fukushima is able to open people’s eyes,
remains yet to be seen. It did not even happen after Chernobyl. And will it after
Fukushima? US President Obama has defiantly announced the building of further nuclear
reactors for energy-policy reasons. Turkey is planning new nuclear power plants even in
areas at risk of earthquakes. South Korea does not see any reason to stop building its 14
planned nuclear power stations and to refrain from almost doubling the capacity of 18.4
gigawatt to 35.9 gigawatt by 2024. After cars, nuclear power stations are to provide
energy for the semiconductors and ships of the South Korean export offensive. Nuclear
power plants as a commodity – the contracts for the purchase, credit, use and
maintenance comprising three or four decades, while for bearing the consequences of the
production and use of the commodity of a “nuclear power station” human society is made
responsible for the rest of its history, that is for a time-span of more than ten thousand
years (the half-life of plutonium 239 is 24,110 years), which is a period more than twice
as long as from the first beginnings of early Mesopotamian history 11,000 years ago.

Do those in favor of nuclear power actually know what they are doing?
In Germany, after the Japanese catastrophe, the Merkel government has repeatedly
questioned nuclear energy after it had less than one year ago revoked the nuclear phase-
out law adopted by its red-green predecessors in government in a decision on the
prolongation of the operating lives of German nuclear power stations. Yet now the oldest
reactors are being decommissioned for three months to have their security tested during a
temporary moratorium. An ethics commission is to accompany this examination. In the
EU all 143 nuclear plants are to be stress-tested. What the government thinks of this
decision, Minister of Economy Brüderle blurted out in a meeting with the BDI, the
German Association of Industrialists. According to the transcript Brüderle “indicated in
his explications that in the face of pending regional elections there is pressure on politics,
and thus the decisions are not always rational”. Like a model homunculus oeconomicus,
Brüderle is equipped with a rationality which does not allow him to think for a moment
of the next 24,000 years but only of the board in front of his head. He is a pitiable figure
who is confident enough to believe he can conceive energy politics fit for the future. This
applies to economic competence in general: competent energy politics serves the short-
term profit interests of energy companies.
Unlike the hopes and promises made by the Brüderles of all nations, nuclear energy is not
an alternative to the fossil fuels of coal, oil and gas. This is the most important lesson to
learn from the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima, which has confirmed the almost
forgotten or repressed lessons from Chernobyl and Harrisburg. The international nuclear
lobby refuses to accept these lessons possibly for the reason which Hermann Scheer
mentioned referring to the “energetic imperative” in his book published shortly before his
death in October 2010. “In all the states owning nuclear weapons, nuclear technology is a
‘double-use-technology’. Nuclear armaments these lessons without a nuclear-
technological potential is unthinkable … Stopping the use of nuclear energy would mean
to have to realize disarmament of nuclear weapons.” Nuclear power plants intimidate not
because they are time-bombs, but because they document the technical know-how and
the potential for building the nuclear bomb. For which other reason is Iran prevented
from building a nuclear power station?

The energy model prevailing in recent decades, with coal, oil, gas and the atom at its
core, must be abandoned as quickly as possible. Yet such exits at short notice are hard to
find. Of course, renewable energies could be the alternative. Yet this will only become a
reality if not only the fuel is replaced, but also the energy transformation systems along
with the ways of life and production attached to them, that is, if social relations and the
human relation to nature are also transformed. Solar energy and an economy of solidarity
could become cornerstones of socialism of the 21st century.
COOPERATIVES AND THE GOOD LIFE

SOCIALISM OF THE 21ST CENTURY

By Elmar Altvater

{This article published in: Blaetter fur deutsche und internationale Politik, April 2012, is
translated from the German on the Internet
http://www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2012/april/genossenschaft-und-gutes-leben.
Elmar Altvater is an emeritus professor of political economy at the Free University of
Berlin and a prolific author of books on globalization and the economic crisis.]

[Translator’s note: The rights of businesses in exploiting resources end in the rights of
nature according to the constitution of bien vivir. This understanding of the person-nature
relation surpasses the rationalist model of rule over nature realized in capitalism's
globalized praxis. Art. 395 of Ecuador's constitution insists the state guarantees a
sustainable development model balanced in relation to the environment, which respects
cultural diversity, maintains biodiversity and ensures the well-being of present and future
generations.]

The attention of all climate- and development decision makers is directed at the coming
mammoth UN conference “Rio + 20.” Although hardly anyone noticed, we have been
living in the UN Year of Cooperatives since January 1, 2012.

The UN Secretary General Ban K. Moon reminded the international community that
economic efficiency and social responsibility can be realized at the same time. [1]
Cooperatives are merely a variation of his eulogy of the “global compact.” Its principles
of “corporate social responsibility” and profit-making are “two sides of the same coin.”
Growth can be “sustainable” and “bring social progress alongside profit.” [2]

The free markets with their shareholder value logic maneuver capitalism to the edge of
collapse, namely to a destructive financial-, state debt and monetary crisis. Hunger
returns, a constant attendant of humankind that the UN challenged in its “millennium
goals” in the 21st century. The supplies of fossil energy come to an end and an energy
crisis threatens. CO2 emissions fall much too little to prevent climate collapse. In this
way, the systemic prerequisites of the capitalist production method – natural resources
and the institutions of social cohesion – are systematically undermined by this capitalism.
Even Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum in Davos, admitted in 2012:
“The capitalist system no longer suits the world.” [3] Concrete capitalism as we know it
has obviously reached the end of a cul-de-sac of its development. [4] The “victory in the
Cold War” first gave free rein to the capitalist forces. However the euphoria about the
supposed “end of history” did not last long. Allegedly “without alternative,” the
development of concrete capitalism leads increasingly into crisis. In this morning-after
feeling, the UN recalls the cooperatives that accompanied the acquisitive capitalist
society from the beginning as a “moral economy.” [5] The statistics published by the UN
[6] are quite impressive: 800 million persons in 100 countries are comrades in rural and
industrial, housing- and credit cooperatives. Energy cooperatives are in vogue in the
exodus from massive fossil and nuclear power stations and in the entrance into a de-
carbonized solar and therefore decentralized energy economy. Doctors also increasingly
organize cooperatively in praxis communities. After being reduced under the pressure of
state debt crises, communal services are now becoming cooperatives in many cases. Even
the so-called creatives, the models of the new individualism of the Internet galaxy
idolized by neoliberals, often offer their services in a cooperative form. The reasons for
all this are obvious. One can save costs, distribute the risk on several shoulders, mobilize
synergies and have fun.

FAITHFUL COMRADES

Even if the society is not changed when individual enterprises are carried out
cooperatively as non-profit institutions, collectives of labor represent the “moral
economy” against the contemptible “morality of acquisition” (Karl Marx) of the capitalist
current of profit maximization and exploitation. [7] Cooperatives have traditions deeply
rooted in social history. In and with capitalism, they experienced an upswing. They
demonstrate that all spacers are not commodified and that collective economies are
“embedded in society.” Economies in the “niches” are different and not individualist and
private. Their form is not always the same everywhere. German cooperatives and Italian
cooperatives, the “good life” (“buen vivir”) of Indian communities in Latin America and
the artisan cooperatives in pre-revolutionary Russia and modern exchange-rings in crisis-
shaken Greece are considerably different. For that reason the term “solidarity economy”
may be more appropriate for grasping the diversity of cooperative and communal
economies. [8]

SOLIDARITY ECONOMY: FROM DISTRESS TO REBELLION

Cooperatives are often “children of distress,” an organized collective self-help against


hunger, unemployment, loss of the dignity of work and human dignity. In his “Report
from Germany” (1946), Willy Brandt wrote: “When we were still rich, we didn’t want to
be socialist. Now after becoming poor, we are forced to become socialist.” [9] Therefore
the solidarity economy arises again and again as defense of the dignity of the
“indignados,” the humiliated and enraged. The boom of cooperatives in Argentina at the
beginning of the 21st century was a direct consequence of the economic crisis at the end
of the Menem era with its brutal neoliberal economic policy of expropriating the little
people. The “dollarized” market economy did not function any more as in the late 1990s.
The upgrading of their currency on account of the bond of the peso to the US dollar
blocked exports and lowered the price of imports. The currency reserves melted away.
The movements of the land- and factory occupations first spontaneously and successfully
reorganized production until the occupations of social (territorial) spaces were given a
legal form through a sovereign act as cooperatives. Thus the “Occupy” movement from
the US that also occupied the banking district in Frankfurt and Paris has a Latin American
pre-history. The movement of the landless took possession of land; factory-occupiers
took possession of factories, the “Piqueteros” the Argentinean streets, the so-called
“socio-territorial” movements the territories with the mineral resources and the water.
[10] In the European crisis, new solidarity forms of economics are developing today.
Every year 300 are added in Germany to the 5500 registered cooperatives, the German
cooperative association reports. [11] Local and Internet-based exchange rings are
sometimes understood by their protagonists as pre-forms of a new society that ward off
the distress of the grave crisis. This is manifest in the loss of jobs, in the reduction of
incomes and in deep cuts in social state benefits. In Greece, life for millions of persons
became even more desolate after the cut-orgy forced by the Troika when there was no
“solidarity economy.” The movement is advancing in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia
and elsewhere in Latin America where it has gained the support of governments and
institutions of the political system in the form of so-called “incubadoras (publically
financed “incubators”) to support social initiatives. Therefore the question whether
cooperative solidarity activities should be organized by the state or against the state
inevitably comes on the agenda. [12] How can cooperative production and state (re-)
distribution form a unity and join forces in a political project? How can the nation, state
and social initiatives constitute the future social model of“socialism in the 21st century”?
With the help of these questions, the historical range of the current “leftist” governments
in many Latin American countries opens up.

THE INVERSE TRANSFORMATION PARADOX

Franz Oppenheimer's “transformation paradox” [13] seems confirmed in the present


crisis. Conversely economic success in cooperatives, Oppenheimer says, is transformed
into capitalist enterprise. Cooperatives can also be successful when they organize
themselves in a cooperative way and at the same time compete on the market like well-
managed capitalist enterprises. The Basque Mondragon cooperative is a good example.
Organized internally as a cooperative, they act outwardly like transnational combines.
Therefore the cooperative enterprise can obviously become a capitalist enterprise. The
transformation then follows the “capitalist gradient.” All alternatives ultimately land in a
capitalist pot where they become a mixed economy. This increased entropy can only be
prevented with great social and political energy. Social movements can only amass this
energy with great effort and often fail. Therefore it is simpler, one can interpret
Oppenheimer, to yield to the strange attraction of capitalism and become “similar” to the
capitalist enterprise as cooperatives. Many cooperative initiatives had this experience in
European “alternative enterprises” as in the land occupations by the Brazilian landless
movement. However the transformation is also obviously carried out in an opposite way
today. Needy persons or capitalist enterprises are transformed into cooperatives. In short,
many blocked tr4aditions of the “moral economy” come to light again when the veneer of
the capitalist growth- and prosperity model fades. Therefore it is no wonder that the non-
profit sector now flourishes and offers more jobs in all OECD countries – and not only in
“developing- and threshold countries” than in traditional industry as the OECD
discovered in a study on the third sector. [14] This is not only reason for rejoicing since
many of the new jobs are precarious. However these initiatives also reveal their
attractiveness in making possible life and work beyond the pressures of capital
exploitation and in harmony with social traditions and nature. That is the reason for the
excitement that the revived cooperative movement, the experiences of the “solidarity
economy” and the concept of “buen vivir” from the Andes area far beyond the original
geographical region.

THE ECONOMY OF GOOD LIFE

The (negative) experiences of the socialism of the 20th century must also be recalled: the
collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union after 1928 destroyed the old
cooperative approaches while producing new designs in the form of the collective
economy (Kolchose). As Alec Nove wrote in his classic about the Soviet economy [15]
these designs were vehicles of “original socialist accumulation” – the transfer of
resources from agriculture to industry, training part of the rural population as paid
laborers and the provision of cities by the countryside. This was not fundamentally
different in principle from the original capitalist accumulation. With the help of the
collectivization of agriculture, the goals of the Five-year-plan from 1928 were met. Nove
expressly emphasized that “no doubt existed about the rationality of these measures.”
[16] However reason could only prevail with authoritarian pressure against the rural
resistance.

The cooperative idea was damaged by the Soviet experiences. Therefore much that had
central significance for the socialism of the 20th century cannot be dragged into the 21st
century. The deadwood includes the united party and political centralism, the
comprehensive nationalization instead of the socialization of the means of production, the
censorship of public opinion, the cult of persons, atheism as a kind of new religion, the
centrality of the working class in relation to “alliance partners” and the dissolution of the
tension of freedom and equality in favor of equality with limited freedom. The uncritical
adoption of the Fordist consumer model, surrender to “system competition” and the
implicit bond to non-socialist standards were also fatal. The capitalist West to be
overcome could set norms in the future that were decisive for socialist development. That
is one of the reasons why recourse to the old inheritance of Latin America’s indigenous
people and the emphasis on solidarity and cooperation against competition as a surprising
“new vision” [17] are recommended for the 21st century.

To Sumais Kawsay, the “good life” is found in diversity and harmony with nature” (as in
the Preamble of the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution) in a solidarity community of people
who cooperate instead of compete, who do not prescribe individual and short-term
pursuit of profit but rather want to form collective life sustainably and in the long-term.
[18] In the meantime the “good life” (buen vivir or vivir bien) is anchored as a
constitutional principle in Bolivia and Ecuador. More participative elements are also
found in the Venezuelan constitution. Nature is understood as an independent legal
person, as “pachamama” in the “cosmological order of good life.” [19] This is a breach
with the western tradition in which nature is subservient to people, the feminine gender is
subordinated to the male gender. Thus bien vivir is more comprehensive than the “good
life” in Aristotle. [20] In the Andes tradition, the happiness of people is incomplete since
it can only be reached in harmony with the legal subject nature.

THE RIGHTS OF NATURE


This understanding of the person and nature and of people in nature has very practical
aspects. The rights of businesses in exploiting resources end in the rights of nature
according to the constitution of bien vivir. This understanding of the person-nature
relation surpasses the rationalistic model of rule over nature realized in capitalism’s
globalized praxis. The uninterrupted commodification of natural resources, the
transformation of the wealth of nature of everyone into the economic prosperity of
individuals transferable, individualizable and measured in money. Thus individuals can
be made happy – or not.

Economic prosperity becomes the privilege of a few distinguishing them from the
collective. Especially in Latin America, the plundering of the wealth of resources and the
exploitation of people are not accepted any longer. A comprehensive de-colonialization is
underway. Therefore the desired “good life” is always gained by fighting. The subject of
struggle is the model of development and the morality of the economy. There is not only
one model and one morality as we have seen. In Ecuador’s constitution, article 395
declares: “The state guarantees a sustainable development model balanced in relation to
the environment, which respects cultural diversity, maintains biodiversity and the
capacity of the natural renewal of the eco-systems and insures the well-being of present
and future generations.” [21] At the same time interests are effective everywhere in Latin
America which – as Gunther Anders emphasized – “view the earth as an exploitable
mine” and form relations to nature correspondingly.

LATIN AMERICA: FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW EXTRACTIVISM

The ambivalence between solidarity and oppression, between collective and private
property which Marx already identified for the Russian village community also continues
in the Latin American reform countries. The constitution text of bien vivir in Ecuador and
Bolivia is not translated !:1 in constitution reality. Rather this is characterized by a “new
extractivism” of the same governments. [22] The “old” extractivism of the 20th century
was marked by raw material exploitation by transnational corporations and the “secular
case” of exchange relations of raw materials for industrial products (terms of trade). The
consequence was that people in raw material countries except for the “comparado-
bourgeoisie,” became poorer and poorer the more wealth was taken from the ground. In
the 21st century, the trend of the terms of trade seems reversed in light of the rising raw
material prices. The increasing demand for raw materials occurs in a time of peak
everything. [23] At least the “leftist” governments in Latin America have successfully
contained the power of transnational corporations and ensured the largest piece of the
cake of raw material exploitation for the population. The currency revenue from raw
material exports is also used for social projects of the poorer population and no longer
only enriches transnational corporations. Minimum wages are introduced, old age
provisions improved, school education promoted, universities built, neighborhood- and
regional groups financed, unions all over the country are subsidized, public services
revived and privatized public goods socialized again. All this is not trifling but doesn’t go
beyond what Raymond Williams [24] called “socialism of redistribution,” which a
significant part of the western socialist left made their program in the 20th century. Just
before his death, Tony Judt recalled: “The first task of radical dissidents is to remind their
public of the achievements of the 20th century – and to speak about the likely
consequences of the light-minded zeal with which these achievements are dismantled.

“The Left has something to preserve.” [25] This should be underlined. Nature with her
“rights” which can be interpreted as limitations on human conduct is not respected
enough in this anthropocentric view. Too little consideration is given to the laws of
evolution and to thermodynamic principles and the threshold values for toxic substances.
The natural, social, economic and cultural restrictions are a sign that the moral resources
in acquisitive capitalist society are used up (aufgebraucht). A moral economy must be
built today that “limits itself.”

FROM “SOCIALISM OF REDISTRIBUTION” TO THE “SOCIALISM OF THE 21ST


CENTURY”

The fossil age will inevitably end in the course of the 21st century. The conventional
supplies of oil, gas and coal are already nearly consumed today. Peak oil is reached, peak
gas is approaching in the next years and peak coal is also foreseeable. There are still non-
conventional supplies whose production entails very high ecological and social costs. The
2010 catastrophe of the Deep Water Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico was
writing on the wall. Polar oil and the oil from the tar sands in Canada and Venezuela can
only be produced with massive expenditure of energy and with acceptance of gigantic
ecological destruction.

Whether the energy expenditure for the production of fossil energy is less than the
“harvested” energy – not to mention the necessary regulation measures – is also
uncertain. The increase in the concentration of climate gases in the atmosphere is another
argument that dependence on fossil energy cannot be overcome any more by opening up
new coal-, oil or gas deposits. Nuclear energy is not an alternative since Fukushima.
Therefore the transition to a less energy-intensive mode of economics on the basis of
renewable solar sources of energy is the only way out today. The socialism of the 20th
century was essentially fossil. The socialism of the 21st century can only succeed with
the help of photo- and thermo-voltaics, water power, wind- and wave energy and bio-
mass. Thus the socialism of the 21st century will be solar and ecological. Conversely
ecologists can only come near their goals if they are socialist. However ecological
socialism is only possible if the highest possible economic growth is not sought any
longer. This has far-reaching consequences. More goods need to be produced for use and
consumption and fewer for investment.

The whole development of science and technology is affected by this decision on


direction. In the 20th century, capitalist- and socialist rationality did not see nature and
her limits. Firstly, the limits of burdening nature still seemed far away, in any case outside
the horizon of the active generation. Only a few sensitized ecologists grasped the limits.
Secondly, blind industrialism and growth-fetishism dominated especially since the
beginning of “system competition” after the Second World War. The command socialist
development was deeply corrupted. The development of productive forces was over-
emphasized and the restrictions of nature misinterpreted as obstacles from capitalist times
to be overcome. The critical Marx- and Engels’ statements on the nature question were
forgotten. In the “system competition,” only gaining victory was crucial. To that end,
growth had to be increased - on a path on which the developed capitalist nations had a
considerable advantage and on which it was easy for them to prevent socialist planning
and the economic guidelines of the command socialist countries after the Second World
War.

A PLANNED ECONOMY AT THE HEIGHT OF THE TIMES

Socialist planning didn’t change this at all. Socialist planning is more rational than the
planning of mammoth corporations in the capitalist West coordinated by the market. Even
if the big corporations use methods developed in the socialist planned economy in their
planning – like the input-output analysis – they remained imprisoned in the narrow
horizon of micro-economic rationality and cannot pursue macro-economic social goals.

Whether capitalist or socialist, individual measures are subject to competition on the


world market and therefore plan against one another. Zero-sum games are involved very
often. All actors plan rationally. Nevertheless some end on the losers’ bench while others
rise on the winner’s side. Who wins in the global space is often due to accidents.
However the future’s direction of development is determined by them and is unplanned in
a spontaneous way. This is a strong argument against a society of private owners and for
collective property. However the prerequisite for a collective rationality is the collective
control over the material conditions of work and life, literally over the means of
production. The socialism of the 20th century guaranteed this through state ownership.

But the socialism of the 21st century requires a greater diversity of forms of ownership:
cooperative ownership that takes account of the great significance of the “concrete”
cooperative movement, communal and state ownership that guarantees the availability of
public goods and common ownership of the commons to which neither private persons
nor the state can have exclusive access. Therefore traditional indigenous forms of
ownership and use are appropriate. Private property also has its place in a plural order of
ownership. Necessary rules must be issued so property does not have its “destructive”
effect, as Marx wrote in his letter to Vera Sassulutsch about the role of the Russian village
community for the transition to a socialist society. [26]

In the socialism of the 21st century, a “planned economy at the height of the times” could
prevent irrational malformations. [27] “At the height of the times” means using efficient
computers with which the billions of decisions on the labor- and commodity markets can
be coordinated. The financial markets must be strictly regulated and will take little
storage space on the hard disk drives of the computer networks. However the notion that
social reality can be represented on a computer is simply not suitable to the solar
solidarity and democratic socialism of the 21st century. This naïve notion underrates the
variety of approaches of solidarity economics from which a real and transformational
movement emerges out of capitalist conditions. Therefore the economy cannot be
simulated in a planned way. If it could succeed, the computer network engaged for the
plan would determine production and consumption and would hardly open up spaces for
social participation. Therefore the planning must be appropriate to the spatial and
temporal range of the produced and utilized goods.

Planning must be open on different planes and not only occur centrally or globally. A
planned system may not be conceived like a mammoth mono-cultural plantation in which
ecological diversity is an irrational nuisance element where democratic discourse about
alternatives must fail because of technically given practical constraints. Rather the
socialism of the 21st century is only a “real utopia” in the sense of Ernst Bloch when it is
tied to the existing movement of cooperatives, solidarity economy and the “good life.”
Developing possibilities of social alternatives appropriate to the reality of future societies
is vital today.

SURVEYING UTOPIA

A Conversation about the Myths of Capitalism and the Coming Society

By Raul Zelik and Elmar Altvater

[The following chapter on economics published in: Surveying Utopia (“Vermessung der
Utopie,” 2010) is translated from the German on the Internet.]

Raul Zelik, b.1968, works in the border area of literature, social sciences and political
activism. Zelik was a guest professor for politics at the National University in Bogota.
Elmar Altvater, b.1938, is an emeritus professor for political economy at the Free
University of Berlin. His books on globalization have been bestsellers. Altvater is a
member of the academic advisory council of Attac Germany.

[Translator’s note: Raul Zelik and Elmar Altvater discuss the nature of utopia, economics,
how growth and work became fetishes, how what is rational in micro-economics can
become irrational in macro-economics, time prosperity, how the financial crisis shows the
self-destructiveness of capitalism and how Marx recognized the contradictions in
capitalism. Alternatives are possible and necessary. Viva Occupy!]

The Book

The “free market” seems unable to solve basic social and economic problems – whether
climate change, industrial over-capacity, unemployment or distribution of wealth. Is a
society beyond capitalism even conceivable? In their conversation Raul Zelik and Elmar
Altvater give a critical analysis of the present. Their common attempt to develop a
utopian model of society starts from an idea of the economy that and is based on reason
and includes ecological and social public interest
Raul Zelik: On first view, surveying utopia is a rather strange undertaking. A non-place,
“a land that is not yet,” can hardly be measured. Perhaps where this land is not could be
defined first. I believe the failed emancipation attempts in the history of humanity
encourage something like a negative survey. One can read how it did not happen.
The time for this venture is good. The present crisis shows firstly that another policy is
possible and necessary. We witnessed how quickly another strategy can be developed if
the readiness exists. In the bank crisis, several hundred billion Euros were mobilized
within a few days. In the years before we were told the financial resources necessary to
eliminate hunger or provide African HIV-sufferers with medicine did not exist – although
a fraction of the mobilized funds would have sufficed.

Thus changes of course are possible at any time if the will is there and the dominant
interests agree. In other words, hunger and the African Aids-catastrophe are results of the
dominant political will.

Secondly, alternatives become urgent. This is obvious in the crisis which is actually
several crises. This is not a beauty contest between systems in dreaming up a “better
world.” The survival of humanity and the sharing of humanity are put in question by the
developments.

Elmar Altvater: I don’t know whether something negative can be surveyed. In “surveying
utopia,” Daniel Kehlmann’s novel comes to mind. His novel makes “surveying utopia”
artfully plausible. A theoretician, the mathematician Gauss, deduces the world and
doesn’t need to leave his hometown, the peaceful Gottingen. Very differently, the
empiricist Alexander von Humboldt crawled into every possible hole on the planet,
waded through every puddle and climbed every summit to survey the entire world and
bring knowledge out of it.

Science compiles this knowledge n a system and generalizes the rules of this system. This
was and is authority. Science can establish the course of human and natural development
in the past, present and perhaps future.

Raul Zelik: That is the hope.

Elmar Altvater: Utopia is not only a non-place, “a land that is not yet.” No, it is a full-
blown contradiction. The concept of measuring must break down in the utopian.
Therefore utopias have such a bad reputation. Progress seems to go from utopia to
science. That was Friedrich Engels’ perspective. Wanting to measure utopia is itself a
presumptuous utopian undertaking. This is shifting a little. A “new surveying of the
world” is suddenly not entirely utopian any more. It has become the theme of realpolitik.
The necessary new surveying is the activity of those think tanks that are paid for their
scholarly advice to politics.

Political consultation is not our goal. The utopia that is central here has to do with another
measurement – that appears in a text by Heinrich Heine from 1835. There we read:

“We have surveyed the land, weighed the natural forces, calculated the means of industry
and behold we discover that this earth is big enough to offer adequate space to build the
huts of their happiness, that this earth can feed all of us reasonably well if we all work
and don’t want to live at the expense of others and that we don’t need to expel the poorer
class to heaven.”

We people – the nine billion that we will soon be – could all have a reasonably bright life
but must do something for that and simultaneously refrain from many things. We must
reorganize the earth and spruce it up ecologically so to speak. Nature was ruthlessly
exploited in the few centuries since the fossil and industrial revolution. We must prevent
climate catastrophe and ensure that the intensifying battle for raw materials does not
result in a bloodbath. We must prevent financial- and economic crises further aggravating
the social oppositions.

In an interview, the English historian Eric Hobsbawm recently voiced the fear that the
crises of capitalism could lead to a great and extremely bloody war. I hope these were
only the fantasies of an old man who lived through two world wars and the “age of the
extreme.” However I fear Hobsbawm could be right with his scenario.

Thus the standards for a utopian project are clear: enable people on earth to live
reasonably well and not banish them to Paradise any more.

Raul Zelik: What is central is not only “bread,” the basic provision of people, but
something that could be described generally and concisely with the term happier life, a
life in which communication, work and social relations have another rank and substance.

Elmar Altvater: Right. Utopias can be presumptuous and not do justice to reality. We
should be aware of this double meaning. One cannot simply escape the danger. Obviously
we can be presumptuous when we speak about something that does not exist or does not
yet exist.

Thus we3 need to reflect about utopian projects and answer to what extent these projects
are somewhat realistic. We must size up whether they are fit and make possible a good
life for people – in the ecological, social and political regards. Whether they enable the
basic needs of all people to be satisfied with the preservation of nature, whether they lead
to a rule-free world in which people can form their life and their working activity
themselves and are not subservient.

We must attempt this even if we know that every experiment to realize these goals will
meet with harsh political resistance.

Raul Zelik: Every utopia mirrors existing conditions and develops as criticism of those
conditions. Before we speak about utopia, we should first try to survey the conditions in
which we live. Let us begin with the term economy.

Elmar Altvater: Agreed.

Raul Zelik: Dietmar Dath, one of the few younger German-speaking authors who takes
seriously anti-capitalist positions, published the book “Machine Winter: Manifesto for
Socialism” in 2008. There he says:

“A society is obviously disgusting that gives running shoes with inbuilt computers to its
top athletes while refusing co-payment for wheelchairs to senior women and tolerating a
care emergency of which hordes of apes would be ashamed. A society is obviously
repulsive that allows all these things in its horribly apolitical winner terrains. I won’t
speak about that. Morality is a matter of luck and assumes covering the most important
essentials. One usually has other concerns. All this is not rational and therefore cannot
function. Whoever denies the possibility of ordering things better is not evil but either
lazy enough to deceive himself or suffers in this negativity from a birth accident. That
seems to me a good starting point. In the first place, the system in which we live and
which lives through us is immoral. It is unreasonable, irrational and inefficient.

Elmar Altvater: This is well-known since the beginning of the middle class. One of the
first who pointed to this unreasonableness or stupidity was the physician and philosopher
Bernard de Mandeville. In his “bee fable,” he showed that the system can only exist when
people commit small crimes and gross nastiness. Corrupt and disgusting conduct keeps
the economic cycle going and increases the “wealth of nations,” not virtue. Where ther4e
is no crime, no locks are needed. Where there are no locks, there are no locksmiths and
where there are no locksmiths, there is no work. In other words, crime is necessary so this
economy can carry on.

Very beautifully and very ironically with many examples, Mandeveille showed how
public virtues can arise out of private vices. A society that needs private vices – the
repression of the other – can only be unreasonable. Besides Mandeville, we can find
many other examples from literature and science that critically decry the irrationality of
capi8talism.

Raul Zelik: The market economy is a paradoxical system. The market exists because we
need others and society. No one can live from the fruits of his specialized work. No baker
can eat a thousand loaves a day. An office worker doesn’t get any practical value from the
documents that he or she worked on. Our work first has a utility or gives a benefit
through its socialization. Paradoxically the socialization of our life functions through the
market where we meet as rivals in predatory wage battles against one another. Thus
division of labor is based on cooperation while the market is based on competition and
struggle. One could argue the market functioned very well in the past for a long time.
Economists explain that competition and “severe budget restriction” – the threat of going
bankrupt – prompted market actors to act frugally and efficiently. However the wasteful
side of the market appears in a drastic way in crises. In the last5 months, assets in the
billions were destroyed. Produced goods are destroyed - including food – to maintain the
prices of unmarketable goods. Finally, climate change is a clear sign that capitalism will
destroy our foundations of life. In this regard, the economy with which we are involved
in totally uneconomically.

Elmar Altvater: The first one to systematically criticize this was Karl Marx. Vance
Packard continued this in 1960… The system in which we live and which lives through
us is unreasonable, irrational and inefficient. We could rewrite the forgotten cultural-
critical book about “planned obsolescence” (“The Waste Makers”) in which Packard lists
many examples of waste and the intentional production of garbage within a capitalist
market economy. Expecting rationality from the market is naïve; disappointment is
certain...

Why is a market economy wasteful? A market economy is wasteful because its actors
follow a micro-economic rationality that is not true for macro-economic reason. We see
this very clearly in the current financial crisis. Rational micro-economic conduct causes a
macro-economic catastrophe. When an individual bank receives credits with higher
interests to start businesses and thus becomes indebted, that is completely obvious micro-
economically. The lower the capital holding requirement and the higher the sum of
conferred credits, the higher the profits. But when one adds this up for all banks in
Germany, one comes to 1 trillion Euros of uncertain foreign assets of banks. That is more
than double the capital of these banks, 360 billion Euros. In the US the relation is the
same while the absolute amounts are much higher.

What is rational in micro-economics is irrational on the aggregate economic systemic


plane because the system altogether becomes endangered. The profit of the individual
bank comes about through a business model that can also cause bankruptcy for the whole
system impacting the individual banks. Individual banks can fulfill those demands that
bring profits. “Originate and distribute” is the sesame, open yourself to dream profits.
Repression of the othe4r – necessary to produce a public virtue – means economic profit
can only be unreasonable…

Create securities, have their value confirmed by a rating agency and then distribute the
papers worldwide. Some global player who is dumb enough to take them in his portfolio
will be found. However the banks and funds alone cannot provide the income streams to
really meet these demands. That can only happen when there is work.

Raul Zelik: That is taught in every introductory economics course. Manage3ment benefits
and macro-economic benefits are not identical. That is the reason why the state has an
important role even in the most liberal economies. For example, individual entrepreneurs
are afraid of massive investments in the infrastructure when they cannot amortize or
amortize too late. As another example, a new power plant has undoubted benefits on the
macro-economic plane since it reduces energy costs. Micro- and macro-economy and
operational- and aggregate economic rationality diverge. Why is this hardly mentioned in
the debate?

Elmar Altvater: The (neo-) classical thesis is that the invisible hand of the market ensures
that reasonable action based on self-interest brings the greatest aggregate social benefit.
This was drummed into the heads of students of economics for generations…

Raul Zelik: What defined the economy in the last decades was obviously not economic.

Elmar Altvater: If one starts from Marx, economy has a double meaning. First, there is
the material transformation of matter and energy, the practical value sided. Nothing
would function without influx of energy, nowadays we must say without fossil energy.
That is the material energetic side of the economy.

Secondly, there is the value-based monetary side in contradiction to the material side
since the demands for monetary production are boundless. The money supply can be
increased very easily nowadays. One need no longer dig in the earth to extract gold.
Paper scraps are not needed any more. Money can be produced immaterially in the form
of bits and bytes. On one side, we obviously face limits, for example in fossil fuel and in
the receptiveness of the environment as to toxic substances. We cannot fade out the social
relations to nature that are interwoven with the economy and cannot be separated from
the economy. Over against this is the enormous dynamic of the value-based monetary
economy that is only defined by the self-interest of the actors. These interests are
separated from the material side. In his treatise on “ecological communication,” the
system-theoretician Niklas Luhmann showed that fading out material-energetic processes
leads to absurdities. Everything that has to do with payments and non-payments belongs
to the economy. Therefore the price of a barrel of oil is economy but not the pumping out
of oil from the earth.

Raul Zelik: The central national economic numbers have little to do with the economy
and budgets. Consider the growth rates of the gross domestic product. A serious accident
can be reflected in increased growth in two ways – through repairing the way and the
medical treatment of the injury. Here it is clear: growth need not have anything to do with
social well-being. Rational economic co-efficients must also consider very different
aspects: life expectancy, access to basic goods, reduction of ecological burdens and so
forth.

Elmar Altvater: If this could be solved with numbers, the problem would be simple and
would lose its drama. Whether the social relations to nature and the conditions of life are
formed corresponding to the numbers is crucial, not how something is defined. To return
to the theme of surveying, we must not only measure and evaluate something with
numbers, as for example the per capita emission of greenhouse gases but form life and
work so that we live “in moderation” in the Aristotelian sense.

For a long while, the UN Development Program has tried to represent prosperity with the
alternative indicators of the Human Development Index. Others attempt to define
happiness with the help of numbers. An economy should actually produce “happiness.”
More exactly, it should make happiness possible for the greatest possible number of
people. By the way, this is also a leading idea of the US constitution which emphasizes
the pursuit of happiness. Nicholas Georgeseu-Roegen, the most important advocate of the
thermo-dynamic economy, asks why people unavoidably increase entropy – produce
waste products, waste water, waste air etc. He answered with the pursuit of enjoyment of
life. That the damage to the environment in a capitalist society has something to do with
the search for profit did not occur to him.

Thus the attempts to measure happiness, joy and well-being are rather frustrating since
the indicators are useless as long as the social forms are not changed. One can
demonstrate in alternative numbers that the countries with the highest per capital gross
domestic product are not the countries with the greatest sense of happiness. The indicator
of human development does not agree with the economic output – measured by per
capital income.

Changing the social forms so other goals of economics are considered is central. The old
question about another solidarity socialist economy – whatever that may be called –
follows from that. This question must be raised again and again because new answers
always have to be found.

Raul Zelik: Interestingly socialist economists now start from the same numbers. The
socialist movement is very enthusiastic for higher gross domestic product and ruthless
growth. New economic numbers would change nothing but make clear where the journey
must go. Neither capitalist nor state socialist accumulation has anything to do with social
well-being.

Elmar Altvater: That command socialist societies use the same economic numbers as
capitalist countries is really another reason for their breakdown. It was the attempt to
move on the same track as the developed capitalist forerunners without passing the train
of capitalism. The economy must develop in another direction and not be oriented in
capitalism. Only in that way can an alternative come out of socialism. That is an
important lesson for all future experiments that go beyond capitalism. The goal cannot be
simply growing faster and better as happens anyway under capitalist conditions.
Socialism is not characterized by quantitative differences; it must represent something
qualitatively different.

Raul Zelik: Over thirty years ago the Swiss economist Hans Christoph Binswanger said
the growth rate must be limited. Danielle and Dennis Meadows, environmental researcher
and economist, said something very similar in their 1972 study “The Limits of Growth”
for the Club of Rome. Binswanger is not a leftist.

Elmar Altvater: Certainly not.

Raul Zelik: Josef Ackermann, the head of Deutsche Bank, gained a doctorate with
Binswanger and still gives ceremonial addresses for him. One can see how powerless is
the economic discovery considering the real power relations on the market. Nothing
contradicts Binswanger’s thesis on the limitation of growth as much as Ackermann’s
profit goals that break all natural and social limits…

Binswanger says high growth puts in question the ecological foundation of the economy
altogether. On the other hand, he also defends the thesis – if I under5stand him rightly –
that capitalism needs growth. What does this mean when growth destroys society in the
medium term while capitalism cannot manage without growth? Is this a systemic limit of
capitalism?
Elmar Altvater: Yes, I think so… This can also be explained with the above-mentioned
double character of the economy. Nothing grows on the material-energetic side. Only
qualitative transformations occur there. We use the energy that we bring out of the earth
and burn in the form of coal and crude oil. We leave behind pollutants in the sinks of the
earth. On balance, nothing grows. Only entropy increases. In other words, the used
energy cannot be used a second time. The thermo-dynamic laws cannot be transcended. A
qualitative transformation takes place, not always as an improvement as we see
empirically in the changes of the conditions of nature. A Polish proverb illustrates this
fact: you can make soup out of an aquarium but not an aquarium out of fish soup.

A capitalist economy needs a surplus value or profit. This system logic cannot be
abandoned as long as capitalism is accepted as an institutional system. A surplus must be
produced under existing conditions. In the material-ecological sense, this is not possible
because only material and energy are transformed.

Aristotle who coined the term oikonomia distinguished between household s and the
money economy and propounded the thesis that monetary surpluses are an absurdity
because they damage society and nature. Through quantitativism and money, one could
say with Aristotle, monetary relations are created that divide society. In Aristotle’s time
there were debtors and creditors, not workers and capitalists. He saw that such
oppositions could lead to civil wars. In his thesis on Athens’ constitution, he described
Solon’s greatest achievement as resolving the basic conflict between debtors and
creditors, not that Athens had a constitution.

This also happened in the Jubilee year documented in the Old Testament and demanded
by Christian solidarity groups for the millennium in the year 2000. However that did not
happen. The resistance of the banks and their political advocates was too great. Whoever
wants to cancel debts reduces demands or financial assets.

Let us return to the theme of growth… There was no growth or hardly any growth before
the rise of the industrial revolution which was also a fossil revolution. There was no
growth before capitalism – before the separation of paid labor and capital, before the
transformation of fossil energy into labor energy, before the social principle of having to
produce a surplus product and a surplus value… Thus there was a “stagnation pressure”
for a long time, not a growth- and innovation-pressure.

Even in pre-industrial times, there was the belief in riches out of nothing, in a land of
milk and honey of endless need satisfaction and growth without time passing away. Hans
Christoph Binswanger emphasized this in his beautiful theoretical-economic
interpretation of Goethe’s “Faust.” As long as money consisted of the natural substance
gold, the multiplication of wealth was bound with travail and suffering and gold remained
limited like all other materials scraped from the crust. The magic of money began with
paper money that can be multiplied almost endlessly and riches with it. This bestows
power and makes possible “triumphant growth” – as the US economic historian Richard
Easterlin says. To savor this triumph, Faust made his pact with Mephistopheles.
Raul Zelik: When capitalism first overcame the stagnation pressure, it was a marvelous
system. In other words, not everything was bad in capitalism! Who wants to continue
operating grain mills by hand? The dynamic triggered by the accumulation pressure
makes possible rapid development and relieves life incredibly. This development – as
Dietmar Dath stresses in his socialism treatise – could relieve life tremendously when this
development is used to benefit society and not for the purpose of more accumulation.

Elmar Altvater: Technical developments should not be equated with growth dynamics.
Technical developments have undoubtedly relieved life. However growth under capitalist
conditions is a very ambivalent accomplishment.

Driving in a car from A to B is obviously pleasant. But this is not pleasant when too many
want to do this. If too many are underway in their cars, we stand in a gridlock and the
automobile becomes immobilization. We are social beings. This becomes clear even to
the most strident individualist or libertarian socialist when we are caught in a gridlock…
because many strive for enjoyment of life.

Thus whether a development leads to relief depends strongly on outward social


conditions. Many manufactured goods are positional goods. The use of these goods is
determined by how others or many others use them. Little houses in the country only
exist when there is greenery. If too many little houses are built in the greenery, the
greenery disappears and we find ourselves in a dreary row house development. This is
another example how individual rationality can change suddenly into social irrationality.
We are social beings but are accustomed to make our decisions individually as though
society did not exist. We have forgotten social decisions affecting our individual conduct
are made in a collective process. Liberalism and neoliberalism have led to a mutilation of
the sociality of our individual existences…

Consider the middle class economists of the 19th century, for example John Stuart Mill.
Mill appreciated the capitalist development dynamic. However from a certain point, he
noticed having more time “for contemplation” was crucial. Growth means acceleration.
From a certain moment, this becomes annoying because it produces busyness. Middle-
class thinking occurred in agrarian conditions. The people lived in and with nature. They
knew growth takes time and ends sometime or other. Trees do not grow to the skies.
Some time or other children stop growing and become adult. It would be te3rrible if they
did not. This led middle-class economists like John Stuart Mill to the conviction that
capitalist growth is important but reaches a limit some time or other when growth is not
desirable any more and one must find one’s way back to “contemplation” to have time for
oneself and nature. That was obviously a luxurious idea unattainable for proletarians.
Proletarians were always marked b y the rush of the workday. If they were not, their
situation was even worse. They became unemployed and had no income.

The modern growth discovery has a very short history. It first arose after the First World
War. Marx was not a growth theoretician although he created its foundations. He showed
how the different divisions (investment goods production on one side and consumer
goods production on the other side) must develop in “expanded reproduction” or growth
so the whole stays in an – always precarious – balance. He explained the conditions of
such an equilibrium and demonstrated that this balance hardly appears in capitalism but is
interrupted by crises of accumulation.

Growth theoreticians pointed this out after the Russian Revolution. If I see rightly, the
first growth theory was developed in the young Soviet Union by the economist Stanislaw
Strumulin who used the term “human capital” central in neoclassicism and by Gregory
Feldman who devised a growth theory for the Soviet economy on the basis of Marx’
reproduction model.

Raul Zelik: This is Lenin’s revenge, so to speak. Capitalism perishes in a growth ideology
for which Soviet economists created the foundation…

Elmar Altvater: Not entirely. Growth pressure was part of capitalism before that. But the
growth theories seem to have developed for the first time by Soviet economists. These
theories showed that the two “divisions”, investment- and consumer-goods production,
must grow in a proportional relation to each other and that a planned socialist economy is
more dynamic than crisis-shaken capitalism.

Raul Zelik: The Soviet Union failed phenomenally in this planning. Consumer goods
were always a scarce commodity.

Elmar Altvater: A mathematization of growth processes occurred at that time. All this
should have led to overtaking capitalism and the developed states with a catch-up
socialist accumulation. Command socialism submitted to or was subjugated by an
accumulation pressure.

In 1929 an interesting development supervened. The capitalist world collapsed in the


years after the stock market crash and the first five-year plan was implemented in the
Soviet Union. While double-digit growth rates were posted in the USSR, the capitalist
economies shriveled around 20 or 30 percent. The Keynesian theory gained acceptance
while similar concepts were developed independent of Keynes by other economists.
Overcoming stagnation was central. On this background, stagnation theoreticians like the
US Alvin Hansen (1887-1975) devised growth theories in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Safeguarding the Soviet Union’s advantage was central. Today this is often forgotten. Up
to the 1960s, the socialist camp grew. From 1945, several states in Eastern and Central
Europe and Asia appeared alongside the Soviet Union. The growth rate was the success
indicator in the rising system competition. Since then, growth became a fetish-like term.

Raul Zelik: Let us return to the question how a society can develop its production and
labor without growing. Stagnation is obviously not desirable. That technology, labor
organization and knowledge continue developing is tremendous. Therefore growth
criticism – when it is intelligent – may only be directed against the pressure to exploit
labor more and more and expel more and more volumes of goods and services, not
against innovations.
Let us grapple with the basic ideas of economy. We spoke about growth as a fetish. There
is a second great social fetish: work. Unions, businesses, parties and media all play the
same tune. Work must be created. Everyone who reflects a little about this must object
that economy actually means the reduction of necessary working hours, in other words
the least amount of work involved with the greatest possible well-being. In this context,
the problem is then raised of justly distributing income and disagreeable work..

This also seems to me an interesting paradox. Capital is ultimately based on concretized


labor. From the perspective of capital, there should be as much work as possible since
capital increases accordingly. However capital with the help of rationalization and
automation constantly reduces the socially necessary work…

Elmar Altvater: Yes, Marx referred to this paradox…

Raul Zelik: …and the unions that should as representatives of workers and employees
should ensure there is less work propagate in their costly publicity campaigns: Work!
Work! Work!

However – in times of crisis – the demands go in the opposite direction. Capital fulfills
an historical mission when it reduces necessary work. How the remaining work can be
divided up sensibly and in solidarity and a dignified income for all secured must be
discussed. The 30-hour week could be a theme! The term employment is insane. The
social-therapeutic organization of lifetime is vital!

Elmar Altvater: A passage from Marx’ “Grundrissen” of 1857 occurs to me in this


connection. In the 1953 edition, there is a sentence that I have not forgotten (laughs). The
production of free time is not defined there as the central goal of capitalist economics.
Today one would say: time prosperity is the goal of an economy of happiness, of an
economy that puts humans and not capital exploitation in the center.

But this raises a fundamental problem. Such a redefinition of the economy would
amo9unt to a stripping of capital’s power. Capital means exploitation of labor power. If
labor power avoids this exploitation, the society changes in a radical way.

The French philosopher Andre Gorz discussed this in detail 20 years ago and
distinguished between autonomous and heteronymous work, between self- and foreign-
determined work. He described that work as heteronymous that one does not do gladly
but must be done. It is certainly more pleasant to sit in a café and have a good time with
people than to pick up the trash left by these people in the café. A balance must be found
between autonomous and heteronymous work. This is a civilization process that cannot
be decreed. People in society must agree about this.

When I abandon work as a principle, I put capitalism in question. That is the


presupposition. Only through work is that surplus value produced that can be distributed
as profit for businesses and as yield for speculators and bankers. Otherwise all this does
not happen.

Raul Zelik: Why are unions so incapable of making this clear?

Elmar Altvater: To pass over to another organization of work and another relation of
working hours and non-working hours, one rattles an institutional framework. This
contradiction has always led to acknowledging the institutional framework and bringing
out the best within the framework. This is the typical contradiction between the
revolutionary discovery that the fundamental conditions must be changed and the
reformist praxis that accepts that this institutional framework cannot be simply
“abolished” by decree.

When we act against capitalism, we are within capitalism and not somewhere on the
moon. We cannot simply move out of the spaces that are penetrated capitalistically. The
common location in social space is the basis for a variety of social compromises, for
example the cooperation of unions and business management. Militancy first arises when
the cooperative course breaks down. Whether the militancy is progressive depends very
much on the local, regionally specific culture and on the goals.

Raul Zelik: Although we are captive in the capitalist reality, we must constantly try to
move ou8t of it. There is only a fundamental change when one thinks and acts beyond the
existing conditions.

Back to our original question. We have to make clear that the real existing economy does
not deal sparingly with resources and lifetime. What is the “economy” generally? Is
“economy” identical with capitalism?

The differentiation in politics and economy was entirely unknown in feudalism. Whoever
ruled appropriated immediately what the serfs gained. Political and economic rule
coincided. Thus one could assume economy only had a meaning in the context of
capitalism.

Elmar Altvater: For Aristotle, economy was housekeeping or domestic science that is
guided by “good family management” and ensured the provision of the family. This
meant sowing and harvesting occurred at the right time, that tools, instruments and
implements were there, repairs took place etc. Aristotle distinguished the money
economy that breaks the framework of housekeeping and brings about a social division
into creditors and debtors. In the following centuries, this distinction was adopted with
the proviso that the money economy could not increase uncontrollably. With the interest
prohibition, people tried to go back to Aristotle. According to the perspective of the
agrarian world, cows have calves but money does not have any young.

The Catholic Church adopted this attitude in the canonical interest prohibition. It
continues up to today – at least formally – in the Islamic prohibition of interest which
also goes back to Aristotle.
In Europe, this prohibition fell first in the 15th century under the onslaught of capitalist
forms in upper Italian cities and with the colonial trade – the plundering of all continents
and imports of the robbed gold and silver from Latin America above all. Money
transactions grew at breakneck speed. The Italian banking houses, the Augsburg Fuggers
and Weller and later the houses in Antwerp, Brugge and Amsterdam gained in
significance. The “hard budget restriction” of interest was brought into the world. The
capitalists who accepted credits now had to submit to that restriction in amassing profits
and realized surpluses.

At the beginning of capitalism, the interests were much more volatile than today. They
fluctuated intensely simply because less was traded and the money- and credit markets
were not yet developed. They were usuriously high. With time, the interest fell to a level
that was below the profit rate, at least in the normal case. Thus businesses could become
indebted, gain a profit with the credit and render debt service somewhat securely.

With time, surplus value production increased in importance. This ultimately culminated
in the finance-driven capitalism at the end of the 20th century.

However all this can be interpreted differently as in Marx’ “Grundrissen” that was later
taken up by Rosa Luxemburg. According to this, According to this, the economy should
be broken up into an economy of time. At some point, the economy itself became invalid
with the increased purchasing power and the reduction of necessary working hours. What
Marx called the “kingdom of freedom” in a utopian sense would begin, a kingdom free
from practical ecological constraints.

In this connection, the term economy means encounters in the daily routine, namely
“economic practical constraints.” What increases “competitiveness” is generally
understood as economy. That is the standard by which everything is measured. Forced
conditions occur here as an economic law proclaimed daily by the high priests of the
modern age, the economic experts. In this way, economy is reduced to a repetition of
unquestionable compulsory laws.

What did not always occur need not always occur. The “forced laws” are fetishes. The
word fetish comes from the Portuguese fetticio. This means botched-up jobs and
miserable efforts can be changed.

Raul Zelik: What does economy mean now? Is economy a discipline that only exists in
capitalism?

Elmar Altvater: The modern concept of economy had its origin in the 16th and 17th
centuries. In this time, two things happened. Firstly, a boundlessness of economic
endeavor was manifested. With the voyages of discovery that quickly became conquest
expeditions and predatory attacks, the societies of the early modern age broke through all
spatial barriers. At the same time, the middle class national state formed – at least in
Europe. Limits were set. The state area was defined. Customs were introduced. Citizens
and in some countries subjects appeared on the scene and had to act in the legal limits.
The state also limited itself over against society with the 1776 American constitution. The
“Westphalia order” that regulated the borders of nation states in an international system
was established after the Thirty-Year War beginning in 1648. Thus a) an independence
and enclosure of the economy, b) the development of limited nation states, and c) the
formation of an international political system among these states occurred.

In this context, independence in the scientific realm resulted. Up to the modern age, there
was no separation between economy and politics. Philosophy and theology were pursued.
What we describe today as economy had its place in rules of conduct. You can look this
up in Luther.

Then a differentiation and specialization occurred that later was known as “political
economy” through the separation of economy and politics. The economic relation was
always understood as a work- and money-relation by the first theoreticians of this branch
of learning. With John Locke, labor was the basis of ownership and ownership was the
foundation of exploitation. With Adam Smith, a division of labor was emphasized, not
individual work. This division of labor was the basis of the increased productivity that
enabled the wealth of nations to grow. In Adam Smith’s “fifth book,” the state emerged
that acts as a regulator for what the “invisible hand of the market” could not control, what
we describe today as public goods, infrastructure, universal rules and so forth.

Thus the “economy” was “dis-embedded” more and more from society and politics.
However politics and economy were still interdependent for the early middle class
economists – like David Ricardo. This connection was first dissolved in neo-classicism in
the 19th century. A concept of economy as a rational decision system arose. Josef
Schumpeter described the beginning of the 20th century as “methodological
individualism.” The individual who had to rationally master a scarcity problem was the
starting point of theoretical discourse. How must goods and services be chosen with a
limited budget so that needs are optimally satisfied? The theoretical rational principle of
decision is in effect with the production of goods and services. The limited production
factors must be combined so an optimal profit can be realized.

In this way, the economy became a decision system that has hardly anything to do with
the political and social system, the system of work, the division of labor and interaction
with nature. It is “dis-embedded” from nature, society and politics. All unintended side-
effects of intentional rational acts are regarded as “external effects” that distort the price
system. The joke is that “external effects” can generally only be externalized –
informationally – in the market mechanism. The burden of nature, for example, strikes
back again over a longer time period. The consequences strike the “externalizers” – like
climate change now in the form of water shortages expanding wildernesses, heat stress
and thunderstorms causing tremendous strains and costs. In other words, the “effects”
ensure that decisions rational at first prove irrational at the end.

To prevent this, external effects began to be internalized. In climate policy, the most
absurd calculations were introduced to trade CO2 emissions on the market. “The prices
must say the truth,” the doctrine declared. At best the market mechanism provides
information that makes rational decisions possible. However the concrete damages to
nature are irreversible and usually irreparable. The problem is that the CO2 emissions are
now expressed as costs. When others pay for my emissions, I have no reason to reduce
them.

Raul Zelik: In your book, “The Future of the Market,” you argue the time-horizon of the
market has to be limited. We witness this today in connection with the bird- and swine
flue epidemic. For a long while, it was known that industrial farming in which animals
are herded together and massively fed with antibiotics is a breeding ground for new
germs or pathogens. Therefore industrial farming is only “more efficient” than traditional
farming because it can shift incalculable epidemic costs to the general public and need
not bear them.

The real tasks of the economy still lie ahead. When a discipline of economizing aims at
frugal, reasonable and efficient relations with resources – above all with labor and nature
-, then no economy would exist.

Elmar Altvater: Profit is central in the capitalist economy, not economizing or oikonomia
in a domestic science. Profit is at the center and becomes the criterion for evaluating
investments. The profit rate, Marx would say, determines investment decisions. The new
Germany of MBA graduates and shareholder value defines what’s what. When more
production can be gained with genetically-modified organisms, with seed from Monsanto
laboratories or the pesticides of Bayer than in farming that leaves nature in its natural
state, it is clear where investments will go. The problem is the time horizon. After the
green revolution in Punjab, India, the yields temporarily increased. Today the soil is
barren, the groundwater is polluted and the yields – for a “long time” – have been
declining again. This is an ecological, social and human tragedy. Whether the capitalist
economy can guarantee a good life for people is clearer in farming than in industry.

No shortage in labor power exists now. Labor power became abundant in the course of
the globalization of the past decades. A labor market arose with a supply that can be filled
from nearly all world regions. The result is the increase of informal and precarious work
identified by all international organizations. This work is characterized by low incomes,
trifling social state protection and weak unions. The consequence – and this can be
documented empirically in all countries – is that the share of wages and salaries in the
national income has drastically declined. That redistribution from bottom to top is often
criticized in connection with the financial crisis. This redistribution has consequences. It
has reduced demand in crisis-shaken economies or, as in the US, led to a massive
increase in consumer credits. What was the reason for the enormous increase in consumer
credits? With the help of indebtedness, wage-earners were first able to bring their living
standard to an acceptable level that could not be financed with their wages alone. The
banks made this relatively easy since they could cheaply refinance for a long time and
could take money in China on very convoluted, non-transparent ways since China was
ready to build reserves of $3 trillion. With this enormous amount, poorer China gives
credits to the much richer consumers in the US.
Raul Zelik: I’d like to return to the theme of labor. You said no shortage of labor exists.
Nevertheless reducing the necessary work is economical.

Elmar Altvater: That could be the goal, an economy of time that expands free time. This
would not be empty time but time in which one develops oneself. This is what John
Stuart Mill called “contemplation” in his sympathetic idealism. However work-free time
today is filled by the culture industry in a way in which people remain alienated or
foreign determined. At this point, we must start with culture criticism that raises such
questions.

Unlike labor, an obvious shortage prevails in nature. A distinction is made in English


between scarcity and shortage. Goods must be scarce or made scarce when economy is
understood as a rational decision system as in the mainstream today. Only then is there
something to decide economically. In capitalism, scarcity must be produced again and
again.

Raul Zelik: Here is an amusing point. Shortage existed in almost all goods in state
socialism in which scarcity was unnecessary. In capitalism where shortage seemed
overcome in many regards, there is artificial scarcity so profit can be gained…

Elmar Altvater: Nature is always ultimately limited. Shortage prevails in many resources
because material- and energy transformations cannot be reversed. The effect of this
natural law is intensified because we use natural resources very wastefully, not
intelligently. Different raw materials are running short – in the medium term even if not
in the next five to ten years. For example, cell phone production depends on metals like
Colton that are only available in very limited quantities. Oil is also running short so a
frantic search for other sources of energy is underway in the automobile industry which is
having a hard time on account of the financial and energy crises. In the past, no solution
was in sight. New and serious problems are raised. Since the middle of the 1970s,
Brazilians have operated in the framework of the Proalcool program with ethanol and
biodiesel as substitutes for fossil fuels. They can show some successes since the oil price
has risen and bio-fuels can be produced profitably. Massive regions are transformed into
mono-cultural plantations. This agriculture fills car tanks, not hungry stomachs. There is
much too little reflection about alternative models of mobility – a mobility that manages
with out cars or with fewer cars.

The economic relations with shortage could react with foresight to the challenges
resulting from natural conditions. Nature is not a cornucopia or horn of plenty that can be
used boundlessly. In the current economy, this kind of shortage hardly plays any role.
Scarcity is the central category, not shortage. This is expressed in the categories of
neoclassical theory. Everything is defined as capital: industrial, financial capital, human-
and cultural- , knowledge- and natural capital. There cannot be shortage in this capital
world because capital is presupposed as substitutable. If resource shortage prevails,
financer capital must be invested to throw the resources on the market. Everything is a
question of price.
Raul Zelik: On the other hand, scarcity is indispensable for capitalism because what is
not scarce has no price and no capital can be realized without a price…

Elmar Altvater: Right. This is clearest on the food markets. Every year thousands of tons
of food are destroyed since otherwise the supply would be too great and the prices too
low. This can be seen with water. There is scarcity since public commodities can be
changed into a private good, bottled in plastic containers and sold as a good. Markets,
prices, goods and profits are created from which water corporations live. This is a typical
construction of scarcity. For a long while, air and atmosphere were not sold as goods.
Now the right to pollute the air has been changed into a commodity in the scope of
climate change policy that is traded on emission-exchanges in the form of pollution
certificates. A profit or yield must always be included in the price.

Negotiability assumes ownership rights in the respective commodity. For John Locke,
labor had to precede ownership. Today the state creates ownership rights. The right to
pollute the air and receive this right in codified form to trade on the exchanges – only
comes about through sovereign acts. There is no natural necessity for this. Goods that are
not boundlessly available (in which shortage generally prevails measured by the needs of
people or living beings) can be dealt with differently than in the form of exchange
trading. Take the example of water. Humanity had to manage with this shortage again and
again in its history. There are rules of use wherever water is not available in abundance.
The mineral springs are distributed; there are irrigation systems and so forth. In
“authoritarian Oriental despotism,” as some describe this, the state sets and carries out
allocation quotas in an authoritarian way. There are thousands of examples for this. In a
country like Germany, water cooperatives exist that allocate water either with market- or
scarcity prices or through state dictation.

The market-based rule that we regard as a foregone conclusion today is generally not
“normal.” However in a bizarre way this nonsense is followed by almost everyone – even
by the environmental groups Greenpeace and German Watch. All possible leftist groups
are involved in the emission trade…

Raul Zelik: Pottering about in a basically irrational system should make us increasingly
skeptical. However it could be sensible in this case. If the emissions trade leads
businesses to consider the limitations of nature in their operational calculations so
external consequences are internalized again and the environmental strain is reduced, that
would be a good result.

Elmar Altvater: First of all, the distribution principle speaks against trading emission
rights. Only customers with money count on the market. Whoever is rich may pollute. In
this way, persons or citizens who have a fundamental right to goods like water and air are
replaced by consumers. Their right to partake is determined only by the amount of money
they have. A justice- and democracy problem is obviously present. Secondly, there are
efficiency problems. The emissions trade has proven to be an absurd catastrophe in
Europe, a catastrophe because it does not function and makes no contribution to reaching
the Kyoto goals, reduction of CO2 emissions and absurd because everyone with a little
insight could know in advance that this result outcome would occur. Nature cannot be
saved by changing the right to pollute into a commodity traded on the Leipzig power
supply exchange.

There is a beautiful formulation in the 2005 Durban declaration of African NGOs: In an


atmosphere of privatization, they privatized the atmosphere. That alone was the reason
for trying to stop climate change through market laws. The atmosphere is also changed
into private property when everyone speaks about privatization and its political advocates
in all areas become the crucial models.

This obviously cannot be efficient under today’s conditions. The financial markets also
take hold of this market. In plain English, what financial actors deem profitable is done,
not what is necessary for environmental reasons. Many well-meaning ecologists believe
this is the trick or cunning of history that the private interest in the highest possible
profitability can also be used for protection of the environment and the climate. But many
necessary things are not profitable. No money can be earned by not producing anything –
even if this is absolutely commanded ecologically or socially.

Raul Zelik: Many would object that wind- and solar investments could be profitable.

Elmar Altvater: That is true. Under certain presuppositions, the profit interest can
coincide with the social interest. But the converse is not true. The private pursuit of profit
on the market ignores social goals. Many of these social goals can hardly be expressed in
a market-based way.
“CAPITALISM CAN BE CURED”

Interview with Elmar Altvater

Our economic system is mired in crisis. The planet dies. It is high time to devise
something new, capitalism critic Elmar Altvater says.

[This interview published in: ZEIT Online 11/25/2011 is translated from the German on
the Internet, http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2011-11/interview-altvater-
kapitalismus/komplettansicht?print=true.
Elmar Altvater is an emeritus professor of political economy and author of many books
and articles on globalization and alternative economics. Is there an alternative to our
capitalist system? Altvater is a retired professor and untiring critic of capitalism.]

[Translator’s note: "The Occupy movement protests worldwide against the power of
banks. The Indignados in Spain demonstrate against the system that gives them this crisis
and high unemployment.. No saying has been criticized more vigorously than Margaret
Thatcher's sentence there is no alternative to the present system. We must begin now to
radically rethink and reorganize our life and work. The necessity was never greater and
chances for a change were never better than today." ]

ZEIT Online: You are 73 years old and have spent your life criticizing capitalism. At the
end, do you have more friends or enemies?

Elmar Altvater: I have few friends and few enemies.

ZEIT Online: Have you lost friends?

Altvater: One always loses friends when one enters into alliances. When I joined the Left
party (Die Linke), many turned away from me. Sometimes I am not invited to dinner
parties. But my enemies are also few. With age, one simply becomes less dangerous for
rivals.

ZEIT Online: Since your student days, you have been a persistent critic of capitalism. On
the other hand, some of your compatriots at that time have made their peace with the
system, Joschka Fischer for example.

Altvater: Fischer is a merciless opportunist. It is a wonder that he is so popular in


Germany.

ZEIT Online: Have you remained faithful?

Altvater: I have always tried to be authentic. I have constantly examined and changed my
positions. I have always emphasized thinking radically and going to the root of the
problem.
ZEIT Online: The FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung newspaper) editor Frank
Schirrmacher asks whether or not the left may be right. But he also writes: leftist social
criticism “ran itself into the ground.” How did you personally experience the years before
the crisis?

Altvater: I expected nothing else. As a political scientist, I was accustomed to being


marginalized. I was the confused colorful bird to whom people were friendly at
congresses and sometimes affirmed. But research projects, for example, were blocked
when hard money and power were involved.

ZEIT Online: You were regarded as a political diehard.

Altvater: I was called “grandpa” or a “traditional Marxist.” Such terms leave me cold.
That funds for research projects were withheld affected me. I could not research as I
wanted. In the meantime, this has changed, thanks be to God.

ZEIT Online: Does it give you great satisfaction that conservatives like Frank
Schirrmacher admit the assumptions of leftists were not completely wrong?

Altvater: Why shouldn’t that give me great satisfaction? Obviously that is a confirmation.
On the other hand, that isn’t so important to me. I already knew that my analysis of the
financial crisis was better than the analysis of neoliberal economists.

ZEIT Online: You have written many books in which you criticized capitalism.
Capitalism is more alive than ever. You must be frustrated.

Altvater: That doesn’t frustrate me. Rosa Luxemburg once said: capitalism will collapse
when the sun falls to the earth, which is never. Capitalism is an extremely stable social
system. Otherwise it wouldn’t have existed for 400 to 500 years. However that doesn’t
mean that it will survive for many years.

ZEIT Online: You prophesy its end.

Altvater: Capitalism as we know it comes to an end. The western capitalist system is


dynamic and flexible. It has created and satisfied many needs and has made many people
rich even if the price was and is an increasing inequality. But the system rests on the
exploitation of fossil fuels – and fossil fuels are now running low. Destruction of the
environment is so great that life cannot go on this way. The crises that could arise are
much more threatening than the financial crisis we are now experiencing.

ZEIT Online: Isn’t the financial crisis alarming?

Altvater: The financial crisis is ominous and ensures instability. The best idea would be
regulating the financial markets and limiting the power of the financial industry by
prohibiting certain financial businesses. But the crucial difference is that the crises in the
money system can be repaired. Enormous sums are destroyed but they can be replaced.
The destruction of nature that occurs with our present form of capitalism is irretrievable.

ZEIT Online: How would y8ou explain to the billions of people in India and China that
the capitalism that makes them rich is not a good invention?

Altvater: That is a hard question. I would tell them the economy doesn’t only consist of
money circuits, that growth also increases the inequality of incomes and assets and that
with our growth we consume nature that wont be available a second time. We pollute our
rivers, poison our food cycles and expel carbon dioxide in the environment which will
first disappear in 120 years. In 2010 the amount of expelled CO2 rose six percent. The
CO2 increased and didn’t decline although its decline was internationally agreed with the
Kyoto protocol. Some time or other, the system will be so full of pollutants that we will
reach a tipping point. Maybe we have already reached that moment.

ZEIT Online: The question is whether this is a crisis of the market economy. If so, it
would be useful. Take the shortage of gasoline. More people will accept the shortage
when the price soars to ten Euros per liter (forty Euros per gallon) more than when the
government reduces the fuel.

Altvater: I know those arguments. I would tell them one thing: market-based instruments
do not help at this point. The emission trade has not functioned. There are too many
people who use the market mechanism to increase their profit, partly with semi-legal
means. Forget the market. The market isn’t the crafty idea through whose application
private vices change into public virtues.

ZEIT Online: You urge a stronger state that prescribes what we should do and allow.

Altvater: Rules are inevitable. Whoever constantly complains that there is too much state
should remember that we tolerate infinitely many prohibitions in road traffic. No one gets
excited about this. The state has to regulate how much we may fly, how much CO2 we
emit, which financial speculation we must accept and where we must say “stop.” The
regulations must be democratically agreed. This is not an authoritarian way.

ZEIT Online: How do you explain that no one puts the system in question – even after the
great crisis?

Altvater: That is a great question. What is now happening is very astonishing. On one
hand, we have the Occupy-movement that protests worldwide against the power of banks,
the Indignados in Spain who demonstrate against the system that gives them this crisis
and a high unemployment. But when voting occurs, the conservatives dominate the
government – as now in Spain. This is an obvious paradox. The only explanation is that
people are afraid of experiments. Conservatives simply promise security in times of
crisis.

ZEIT Online: Have we lost imagination for another system?


Altvater: Not necessarily. There will be designs of utopian society in the future. No
saying has been criticized more vigorously than Margaret Thatcher’s sentence there is
“no alternative” to the present system. We have probably become accustomed to
capitalism without considering utopian or alternative thinking. Governementality is
Foucault’s term for the acceptance of social structures by the ruled. The rulers and the
ruled become accustomed to a system. But this also means conversely: capitalism can be
cured.

ZEIT Online: What could then appear?

Altvater: No one can say today what the system will look like. But there are inspiring
ideas. In Bolivia and Ecuador, the governments have anchored the principle of buen vivir
(the good life) in their constitutions. This can be understood as an alternative concept to
the model of the West and to the consumption habits that we know. Cooperatives that
manage energy, real estate or other necessities arise everywhere in the world. There are
even more radical ideas. Modern planners believe a centrally controlled economy could
be organized with today’s computerization that would function better than in the sixties or
seventies. I regard that as nonsense. The market will continue to play a role, even if a
more limited role. Still these ideas are important. We must abandon the ideology of the
unchangeability of the prevailing conditions that hold us captive.

ZEIT Online: You propagate “socialism of the 21st century.” That sounds ideological.

Altvater: The term comes originally from Latin America, not from Europe. Venezuela’s
president Hugo Chavez emphasizes it. It doesn’t matter to me what we call the alternative
as long as we begin reflecting about it. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently
declared we will not be able to build any fossil power plants from 2017 if we want to
reach the two-degree goal of maximum global warming. In other words, if we don’t want
the avalanche to be at our feet, we must begin now to radically rethink and reorganize our
life and work. We may not fritter away any time.

ZEIT Online: Do you have more hope for change or less today than in the past?

Altvater: As a young man, one always has great hope. With age, one becomes satiated
with experience. Still I am hopeful when I analyze social conditions. The necessity was
never greater and the chances for a change were never better than today.
THE FALSE MODEL

Europe cannot survive as a monetary union without solidarity regulation

By Elmar Altvater

[This article published on 9/14/2012 is translated abridged from the German on the
Internet, http://www.monde-diplomatique.de. Elmar Altvater is an emeritus professor of
political economy at the Free University of Berlin who has written many books and
articles on the myths of neoliberal capitalism and solidarity economics.]

[Translator’s note: Sooner or later “peak soil” will follow peak oil. This kind of mastery
of the economic and financial crisis leads inevitably to a food crisis and even to a hunger
crisis in many poor world regions. Isn’t expanding public services commanded for
ecological and social reasons instead of expanding material production? Aren’t there
many investment opportunities creating jobs in the public health and public education
systems, in caring for children and older persons, in solidarity- and citizen work, in
mediation of conflicts or the formation and development of the community?]

…The dream of reason generates a monster. Neoliberal rationality produces economic,


social and ultimately ecological disaster.

“The European house is in flames” and “firefighter Merkel puts out the fire with
kerosene,” Joschka Fischer scolded. [1] One can sympathize with his frustration because
his party ardently supplies the kerosene. The majority of the Bundestag Greens approved
the fiscal pact and the future bailout umbrella ESM (European Stability Mechanism). No
wonder that many are reminded of the 1930s. First, there was the financial crisis and then
the Bruning austerity policy as the ultimate economic rationality. That bumped off
democracy at that time and paved the way for a barbaric dictatorship. Are we condemned
to make the same mistake of saving-to-ruin on the European plane?

The explosive mixture of desired accelerated growth and the debt brake, the Euro bailout
umbrella and the fiscal pact is responsible for the foreseeable knock-out of the euro and
the breakdown of the European monetary union. As a stop gap, banks are stabilized with
unimaginable amounts of money in their slide into bankruptcy. The crisis of the euro
should be overcome after the stormy speculations by the actors on the global financial
markets – from bonds and banks, rating agencies, advisors, think tanks and brokers.
Nevertheless the cheerleaders of the euro-zone believe there is “no alternative” to the
economic demands defined by neoliberal expert idiots [2] – no matter that the social
cohesion is destroyed and the political consensus is undermined, no matter that states –
along with state territory, state power and state people – are removed from the euro-zone.

The fiscal pact received an eternal guarantee at the Euro-summit in May 2012. Through
the mouths of its high priests, the neoliberal religion commands “there is no alternative”
(TINA). No parliament and no sovereign are sovereign enough to loosen the pact and
enforce a minimum of political-economic transparency and flexibility. If one sees politics
as the capacity for alternative organization of social futures, the euro-zone today is forced
to an anti-political authoritarian path. The neoliberal expert idiots offer themselves as
boy-scouts. The dream of reason becomes the nightmare of the rational…

People could have learned from history and theoretical reflections about an “optimal
monetary zone” (Robert Mundell from the early 1960s) that a monetary integration
cannot function in the long run without real economic adjustment and shared economic-
and fiscal policy. [3] Economic, social and political stability in the EU is only possible
when the productivity of countries like Finland and Portugal, Spain and Holland
increases so the differences of competitiveness between branches and regions diminish
and the economic tensions in the monetary union would be controllable.

An adjustment of the living conditions of people (with simultaneous acceptance of


linguistic and cultural differences) is the presupposition that they – as economic citizens –
can exercise the same citizen rights and duties in the common Europe. This must be
actively and politically sought and is not a side-effect of market- and money integration.
The same is true for the social rights in the world of work or for protection of the
atmosphere.

The integration process takes a paradoxical course. For a long while, advances were
realized as “negative integration” through liberalization of markets and deregulation of
politics. However that is a discontinued model. The crisis brings this to light. There is
only progress in solidarity. Redistribution of income and assets or a financial equalization
between regions and nations may not be declared taboo.

Redistribution would be a political alternative to the anti-political authoritarian


integration guided by the financial market from which the “monetarists” [4] promised
real economic, social and political adjustment in Europe. It would also be a present-day
alternative to the fiscal pact with its forced savings and permanent ESM, Euro-bailout
umbrella and other bureaucratic monstrosities of neoliberal rationality.

A monetary union requires more than a monetary convergence measured by the


Maastricht criteria. [5] It necessitates a political union. Nevertheless many actors do
everything to block political integration. The monetary union is not developing by itself
into a political union as the “monetarists” believe. [6]

However there are no alternatives to be negotiated and decided in the neoliberal


integration arena. There are only severe practical constraints that could turn out less harsh
under special circumstances. In Germany, a great coalition of nearly all parties (with the
exception of DIE LINKE, The Left Party) resolved a very rigorous nation-state debt
brake. The annual new indebtedness of the state is limited to a maximum of 0.35 percent
of the gross domestic product (GDP). Many EU partners had to accept an indebtedness
limit of 0.5 percent – anchor this in their constitution according to the German example –
and sign a binding international agreement. In his 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom,” the
“pope” of modern neoliberalism F.A. von Hayek recommended codifying liberal reforms
contractually and constitutionally to prevent any state incursion in the market.

After the outbreak of the 2007 financial crisis, the crew at the helm of the Euro ship
hardly acted consistently. They stepped on the debt brake as the Maastricht treaty
ordered… Braking and accelerating at the same time does not bear up the most stable
ship.

The policy of budget cuts brings about the opposite of what was intended and promised.
No stability mechanism can keep from skidding into recession. Disillusionment in the
population soars. Because “the markets get nervous,” the risk charges increase for all
state loans… Spain had to take new debts whatever the cost. In 2012 more than 60 billion
euros in old state loans were due and 51.5 billion in 2013. Bankruptcy is foreseeable with
more than 7 percent interest and dwindling growth without help from the outside. Politics
has generated a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thus inequality in the EU grows between Central Europe and the periphery in the South
and East, not only between poor and rich, paid labor and capital or between the genders.
On account of the bank bailouts, nation-states are also threatened by bankruptcy.
Somewhere they must get money for the interests that increase state indebtedness with
every euro and every devaluation of credit-worthiness by the rating agencies. The debt
brake prohibits the reception of new debts. Taxes as the only other source of state revenue
constantly fall owing to the tax competition that favors the mobile production capital
factor.

The European Central Bank and the ESFS and ESM bailout umbrella are the sponsors of
the “last authority” – since the Euro summit at the end of June 2012 – providing financial
institutes with cheap trillions, feeding them with much money at a free fare so they do not
collapse. On the other hand, the EU commission functions as an administrator of the
economy and “debtor of last resort,” the strapped governments say. Their debts are really
system-relevant. What would the banks do with the cheap money from the European
Central Bank, the ESFS and the ESM if no one is forced to become indebted and pay
high interests for that?

The method that guarantees debt service to the financial institutes has a name: austerity.
That can be translated as austerity course or rigor and privation. Social spending will be
cancelled and mass income lowered. Public goods come under the hammer and are
privatized. The states subjected to austerity abandon elementary democratic rights and
hand over the population to a new form of financial dictatorship. The national
governments are obliged to serve the debts of mostly external creditors, often big banks –
which they must justify to their voters, often grudgingly and muttering under their breath.

Zapetero, Papandreou, the Dutch government and Berlusconi learned that this
justification does not always succeed. Eight governments broke down since the outbreak
of the crisis. In some cases they gave way to technocrats – “experts” – like Monti in Italy
and Papademos in Greece. The Athens government is told what’s what in prescriptions
from the Troika of the EU commission, the European Central Bank and the International
Monetary Fund.

According to the German European central banker Jorg Asmussen, the IMF brings that
expertise gained with the World Bank during the debt crisis of the third world in the
1980s into the poker around the euro-crisis. The impoverishment of broad sectors of the
population and a “lost decade” in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia were the
terrible results. Thirty years later this prescription has become the blueprint of politics in
the European debt crisis. Nothing demonstrates more clearly that the financial crisis long
ago changed into a serious political legitimation- and regulation crisis.

PRACTICAL CONSTRAINTS ARE NOT ALWAYS CONVINCING

Not surprisingly, no Europe enthusiasm has sprung up and rightwing populists find their
frustrated public. The Europe project is on the verge of bankruptcy because it was
delivered up to the practical constraints of the market and the authority of money. In the
1980s Jacques Delors, one of the great commission presidents, raised the question: “Who
can fall in love in a domestic market?” The Brussels and Berlin austerity dictates are
certainly not love potions. However a majority of the European population is still for the
Euro monetary union (52 percent in May 2012) while 40 percent is against. Only 40
percent believe things are developing in the right direction (32 percent believe the
opposite).

The skepticism is understandable. At the end of June 2012, the Euro countries resolved
that ESFS and ESM directly support the banks and not indirectly by the respective
government… The transfer union and the ESM have lost their terror for Merkel.

Supporting “system-relevant” banks is a good deed. Supporting social states is not. The
deficit in the state secondary budget where debt service is registered is tolerable because
a surplus is realized through austerity in the primary budget of normal state revenue and
expenditures. Until recently, ESM stood for the “European Social Model,” not for the
“European Stability Mechanism.” But this obviously disappeared in the Orwellian
memory hole. Oh Europe!

The state adjusts the macro-economic order so losses of private micro-economic


fraudsters are minimized. The entries in the state budget are not glass-bead games. They
change the income streams and living conditions of individuals, social groups and
classes. Conflicts occur since these are affected differently. This is not new. We witness
this now in Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy and other countries of the crisis-shaken euro-
zone.

In Athens at the beginning of the 6th century, the wise statesman Solon tried to settle
conflicts by “shaking off burdens” (seisachtheia). Debt relief could not be avoided in
ancient Athens because the excessively indebted small farmers and artisans had to sell
themselves into slavery to pay their debts and make possible a new beginning for their
families.

No just community can arise. A balance between the poor debtors and the rich creditors
was necessary. The unbearable debts had to be shaken off. This has not changed in
principle in modern Athens and in Europe altogether. “Shaking off burdens” can be
carried out in the scope of a debt audit – a kind of declaration of bankruptcy for states –
that should regulate a just distribution of losses. What succeeded in ancient Athens must
also succeed in modern Athens and in Europe’s EU states knocked about by the financial
crisis.

European central bank chief Mario Draghi attempts bailout-boats called “Growth Pact”
instead of “shaking off burdens.” Whether they are seaworthy and bring the euro-
passengers to new shores is completely unknown. The underlying idea is simple and
attractive on first view. The debts should be gradually paid off out of a growing GDP. The
attempt “to grow out of debts” did not function in the debt crisis of the South in the
1980s. Nevertheless some hope for such a recipe for success – possibly dressed up as a
“Green New Deal” guiding growth-oriented investments in ecological areas. [7]

Green investments must also be profitable in a capitalist economy. Without profit, there is
no investment incentive. Green businesses will also try to lover piece-labor costs, extend
working hours and force down wages and salaries. They also strive for superior
competitiveness in the global competition. They push back the less successful businesses
and contribute to over-production. Thus the attempt to master the crisis starts the next
crisis.

The crisis spills over to areas of life beyond the economy. Sustainable growth cannot
manage without consumption of nature. Since “Peak Oil” is reached, the supply of fuel
may still grow through re course to renewable fuels from biomass. However this only
intensifies the competition over land use. Sooner or later “peak soil” will follow peak oil.
This kind of mastery of the economic and financial crisis leads inevitably to a food crisis
and even to a hunger crisis in many poor world regions.

Isn’t expanding public services commanded for ecological and social reasons instead of
expanding material production? Aren’t there many investment opportunities creating jobs
in the public health and public education systems, in caring for children and older
persons, in solidarity- and citizen work, in mediation of conflicts or the formation and
development of the community?

These tasks demanding high competence must be organized and extended as non-profit
activities. They cannot be carried out in a profitable capitalist way, even with subsidies
that must be branched off from growth with the help of tax revenues. “De-growth,” the
withdrawal of growth advocated by growth critics alone is not enough. Thus the
alternative to austerity requires the transition to “post-capitalist” terrain. The “system
question” cannot be avoided.
CAPITALISM AND ITS CRISIS PROCLIVITY

By Elmar Altvater

[At the end of October 2014, isw (Institute for Social-Ecological Economic Research)
had its fall seminar with answers of Marxism to burning questions. For two days over 40
participants discussed three addresses by Elmar Altvater. Ursula Dersch summarized the
main statements by Elmar Altvater. This article published on October 25, 2014 is
translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.isw-muenchen.de.]

[Translator’s note: The liberal economists of the 19th century claimed no crises could
occur in capitalism since every supply creates its demand. On the other hand, Marx and
Engels recognized early on the causes for crises in capitalism. The contradictions of the
accumulation process lead to crises. Capitalists want to minimize wages as much as
possible... The present crisis is a system crisis, possibly the most severe in the last 500
years. While economic crises have a cyclical character, crises of nature have a cumulative
character.]

1. THE CRISES – THE CONSTANTLY RECURRING `WORLD MARKET


THUNDERSTORM’ AND THE PECULIARITIES OF FINANCIAL CRISIS

The liberal economists of the 19th century claimed no crises could occur in capitalism
since every supply creates its demand (Say’s theorem). On the other hand, Marx and
Engels recognized early on the causes of crises in capitalism. The contradictions of the
accumulation process lead to crises. Capitalists want to minimize wages as much as
possible which tears open the discrepancy between the economy’s production capacity
and the market’s consumption capacity. Crises are “ambivalent.” Workers lose their jobs
and fall into distress. On the other hand, crises remedy malformations and stimulate
technical, economic and social innovations.

Marx assumed crises will always occur in capitalism. He distinguished between small
and great crises. The massive crises can involve the form of money, market and politics.
On account of the anarchy of the market, there will always be disproportions. For
example, crises arise through under-consumption because of very low wages. The
opposite situation also leads to crises: successful wage disputes lower the profit rates.

No crisis repeats itself. The present crisis is a system crisis, possibly the most severe in
the last 500 years. The whole world is affected by this crisis. Repercussions result for
nature and politics and not only for the economy. European integration is endangered:
anti-foreign breakdowns increase along with the tensions in the Euro zone. Limits,
perhaps even the end of growth, are reached. The crisis seizes both the real economy and
public finance.

The 2007 sub-prime crisis was the trigger for the current crisis. In capitalism, a little
shock can have great effects. At the beginning of the crisis, there was private speculation
that led to private debt overload whose solution raised the public indebtedness. The rating
agencies played a fatal role. Limitations of incomes and living conditions, decay of
public institutions (schools, hospitals), loss of budget sovereignty and de-democratization
are manifest as consequences of the austerity policy in the impacted states.

2. THE CAPITALIST WORLD MARKET AND IMPERIALIST CONFLICTS

The capitalist world system developed between 1492 (America’s discovery) and 1648.
With the Westphalian Peace, a system of nation-states arose that arranged a mechanism
for their mutual relations. The capitalist world system was always colonialist and
expansive. To the European states, the plundering of raw materials (plantation economy)
and the plundering of people (slave system) were central in the “long 16th century.”

In his imperialism theory, Lenin described the competition of imperialist states for
colonies that ultimately led to the First World War.

In the present, the discussion about free trade is provoked again. Although free trade
promises to improve the wealth of nations, many people live in misery and distress. The
ideology of free trade dominates in the universities, media and in political decisions.
Liberalization, deregulation and privatization are urged. Free trade is a means for
enforcing the capitalist production method and the profit principle globally.

TTIP is the continuance of free trade ideology in finance-driven capitalism. It begins a


new stage in global class conflicts. The negotiations on TTIP are conducted in secret and
democratic control is excluded. If TTIP takes effect, businesses could sue states when
industrial safety acts or pollution control laws possibly reduce the expected profits of
firms. The lawsuits take place before courts of arbitration filled with lawyers from large
economic law offices, not before regular courts of the states. Social standards and
ecological standards can be suspended by big corporations.

While economic crises have a cyclical character, crises of nature have a cumulative
character. The development of a capitalist economy is not compatible with the natural
courses. That the powerful capitalist states may force other countries to renunciation with
violence and even wars and not renounce themselves is conceivable as a possible reaction
to finite raw materials. Oil states still accept the bond of the oil price to the dollar and
thus strengthen the hegemony of the US. It is foreseeable that capitalist development
could end in an ecological cul-de-sac.
3. HOW GREAT IS THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF CAPITALISM TO A
GREEN CAPITALISM?

3a) GREEN CAPITALISM

Wise capitalists on principle are not enemies of transformism. They believe everything
must change if we want everything to remain as it is. In the past, there were two
Promethean revolutions: the first consisted in the settling down of people and the second
in industrialization.

The Greens assume fewer raw materials and energy will be used in green capitalism and
more recycling will occur. They hope for lower costs which will affect profits positively.

Professor Altvater is convinced green capitalism develops completely unsatisfactory


strategies and ultimately prevents the development of alternatives. The certificate trade
with CO2 emissions is one example of counter-productive reforms. Too many certificates
were awarded in Germany and the toxic CO2 emissions were not reduced. Corporations
use the certificates like securities that can bring profits. The certificates have become
legitimate speculation markets in rivalry to the financial markets. The climate cannot be
improved through certificates. In Altvater’s opinion, green capitalism is impossible. A
growth pressure exists in capitalism that leads to more and more resource consumption.
The crisis proclivity of capitalism is not overcome in green capitalism.

3b) GREEN SOCIALISM

We find ourselves in an age formed by people that could be called “capital ozone”
because the capitalist economic system is dominant. “Solar” and “solidarity” are
important terms for green socialism. Energy production should forego on fossil energy
and hearken back to solar energy, wind and geo-thermal. All over the world there are
already cooperatives today. This lets us hope socialism is possible in regions before
capitalism arrives. A “moral economy” often exists in countries under great distress as
temporarily in Argentina.

The socialism of the 21st century must be ecological and not cling to centralized forms of
property, centralized planning, dependence on fossil energy, ecological destruction as a
result of contempt of nature, growth fetishism and the precedence of investment goods
over consumer goods.

The following aspects are important for the way to ecological socialism:

• People respect nature.

• People support social and economic equality.


• Acceptance of the commons and common interests grows among people.

• Foreign-controlled work is abolished and self-determined work introduced.

Professor Altvater ended with a quotation from Rosa Luxemburg: “Freedom without
equality is exploitation. Equality without freedom is oppression.”

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