How To Secure A Mirror On Mantle

4. Competition and emancipation

4.1 Illusion and debacle of an "abolition" of competition in the labor society

After so many decades, the interpretive scheme that relies on the categories of the state and the economy of war is impressed as a mark of fire on the skin of Marxism. The fundamental criticism of Marx's commodity-producing system was removed and forgotten. Consequently, the debate about the collapse of socialism, the foundation common to both systems, or the society of work, in the shadows just as the determination of its basic forms, the system calcified economy of war with all its TARE is judged by the yardstick of its Western counterpart, far more developed, and not in the light of a critique of it in a way that commodity-like.
In particular, the left - who fell in his Waterloo and whose conceptual universe, even that of its more radical leaders, it is still child's world view developed from the old social democracy - it should be noted in this regard for colossal misunderstanding. The logical absurdity, always hidden behind the pseudo-concept of "planned market, is now in the light but for the umpteenth time in the form of distorted and unrealistic ideology that is already on the verge of falling in free fall. It is hard to believe his ears when, for example, some economists in the GDR - suddenly torn lullabies to their children about the so-called "political economy of socialism" - say without hesitation that they had sunk to being just a 'natural economy "(!) or a false" immediate communism "(Land et al. 1990). The economy command and the barracks - which is still based on the commodity-form - is routinely confused with a form of social reproduction that is not based on the goods, although all the basic categories of goods-producing system have continued to exist, rather than critically analyze the ' existence of these categories, they are repudiated as inauthentic and then stealthily concealed, to be risalutate then again in a different form presumptively (Western).
But when it comes to marketing categories "inauthentic" which should therefore only be made "genuine" and established successfully, giving birth to a misunderstanding of the ideological consciousness of the history of both the real bourgeois swing between statism and monetarism. Since, at least outwardly, appears to have come the time of monetarism, the state primary, complementary to it, is rejected as "incorrect" harmful and hinder the "real" market, it is a claim that is particularly exhilarating the mouths of people who until recently the same way as the first ironclad Marxist babble. Of course, the state primary is abundantly present in the west of the market economy academics and tourists from Poland and the GDR, they would have rubbed my eyes after examining more closely, for example, the agricultural sector of the European Community.
Statism, as part of the commodity producing system, far from being a degenerate development, external and alien, brings together both the real socialism now shattered, as the West within a continuum of modernity. This continuity extends from absolutism enlightened West, to today's "State of Growth", passing through the real socialism with its war economy, and their goal is always the same as simply imposing the subjugation of needs, goals and of human purposes with regard to the abstract of a national wealth Goods-producing system and its systematic growth and training of men in this "end in itself" nonsense.
The difference between the two systems, as claimed, does not lie in state control as such, and even in his temporary head that even the West experienced repeatedly, but only in the freezing of alternate statist element with the element of monetarist , already present in accordance with its basic form. This element does not overlap with the mere existence of money, but its existence within a system that is producing goods in the specific context of modernity. Here the money is linked to the functional mechanism of competition, and is primarily expressed in this what I have designated as the monetary item. Curiously
ideologues and apologists of socialism showed themselves proud to have dismantled this functional mechanism. Marxist ideology of the old workers movement, competition appeared as pure negativity, both from the moral point of view as a principle of social Darwinism and destructive "war of all against all", both from an economic one, embodied in the infamous "anarchy of the market" which was to be supplanted by the "planning" rational. However, this critical economic competition, but on the basis of principles moral, touched only on the outside base of the system producer of goods but also systematically evaded the question of social emancipation of the "working class" which, according to the lesson of Marx, he should act in the way of their autosoppressione; the real Marxist labor movement On the contrary, pushed himself to the resulting self-assertion of the worker.
But at this point a paradox emerges so far unresolved at the heart of Marxist theory. The claim that Marx's labor movement as a movement of "workers" and as "the worker's point of view" and "class" and so on. and through all his work, is of fact inconsistent with his critique of political economy that effectively debunks this very working class as a social category, not ontological but be the capital itself. If the ontology of the work and criticism of abstract labor are mutually exclusive, then the same applies to the "point of view of a worker, and criticism of life as a worker.
In reality Marx was facing two different historical logic which interpenetrate each other and that he failed to distinguish clearly: on the one hand there was the process of realization of the commodity labor-power under the system of producer goods that Thanks to the actions of the labor movement, led to the emancipation capitalist of employees of any debris that is feudal and patriarchal in their life today as monads of money and democratic citizenship, on the other the tautological self-movement and no subject of money with its inherent limitation.
From the point of view of the intrinsic logic of the historical development of commodity-producing system, the "working class" could not even be conceived in view of its effective abolition. The concept of social emancipation remained imprisoned within the system of abstract labor, and could only be understood in its category - and this is still visible in the rhetoric of moral social justice that characterizes a bloodless jargon union now. The rational element of this constellation, which has now exhausted its historical role, it was only the emancipation of the masses for paid work and not by it.
But precisely for this reason a prospect of this kind could not possibly count as real criticism of the goods-producing system and could only result in a reductive tendency towards moralizing quackery. The criticism, not logical, but purely empirical existence as a worker involved as immanent critique of competition, but remained confined to the negative empirical phenomena, but the absence of any conceptual link between the two elements of criticism, which could not be effectively mediate on the theoretical and practical, they must necessarily rely on the crutch more moralistic.
But on the basis of this background, the critics of competition was to meet a fatal ambiguity, since the suppression of competition was not quite the same outcome as the social emancipation. The workers are still employed, even under the dictates of the market economy and even militaristic Europe even more than competitive in the economy of the West. This fact was certainly not escaped the attention of those critical observers - think in particular to Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School - which was not included in the group some of the ideologues of the Cold War nor the apologists on the left. However, they believed that the basic logic of the company's negative working with the statism of socialism and statist related phenomena are also present in the West in the era of two world wars, had been sealed as "false" principle of rationality, in the form of "totalitarianism" and that through the command state had been successful the "false" overcoming of the capitalist contradiction, thus the functional mechanism of abstract labor would really set up for eternity as a system can operate smoothly and self-regulate its procedural

(...)

From the reference to the past and mercantilist Jacobin state control on the market would Horkheimer able to infer the impossibility of the elimination of competition (the item and the reason for that is opposed to the monetarist statist) the reproduction of capitalism, because it never really does not succumb. But on this point Horkheimer remains faithful to the traditional view of Marxist labor movement and the empiricism of his day (only in a negative version). He interprets the story of modernity as the contradictory process of capital whose contradictions are exacerbated during the course of history and prove unresolvable on the basis of its own foundations, but as the ascent, logic, unilateral and compelling element to become a statist " totality "in which" the movement is abolished. " This reminds
illusion through and through not only the positive conception of the possibility of a "planned market, but also its present negative version, in which the apparent lack of competition in the" planned market "is assimilated in the blink of 'eye in a pure state economy of distribution (economy natural, instant communication), without a movement. Is nothing more than yet another manifestation of that astonishing blindness theory that confuses the existence of improper market categories by their absence. But the attempt to plan the movement does not coincide with its removal.
Authentic abolition of the movement should logically coincide with the abolition of money and the institution of the market in general. But if this really occurs then, just as logically, it would drop the need or even the possibility of the state since the latter, in the process of modernity, is nothing but the element inherent adversarial system of producer goods. Those who might think that the abolition of the movement only in a form of State and can not get out of this vicious circle logic, they end up being contradicted by the facts as thanks to the modern state, we had the statement and the outbreak of money and circulation (and hence the market).
The modern state is the facility that the national wealth to the abstract of which, it is foolish to focus on the needs and aspirations of men stems from a total stranger to them. The money is nothing but the embodiment of abstract wealth that multiplies as dead and it does not work can only exist in the market and circulation. If the country really meant to abolish money and the movement would ultimately eliminate its very raison d'etre.

4.2 Division of labor and commodity production in the history

Both the market as money and its movement arose in the course of history as a social relationship outside for the exchange of products of individual producers and unrelated isolates in their production immediate and therefore historically the market and money are merely the expression of a relatively undeveloped division of labor, with a modest degree of interconnection. It 'just the opposite of what is commonly is assumed and the reason for this is that it uses as a touchstone only primitive societies that breed almost entirely without division of labor.
contrast would be the case to call into question the division of labor in modern industrial society, to recognize the logical contradictions of the modern system of producer goods, comparing it with the creation of original historical and money market categories. There is no reason that a system with a highly developed division of labor should result in "natural" generalization and a corresponding expansion of the categories of goods and money. A conception of this kind needs an identity immediate division between social work and commodity-form that is actually not at all obvious. Among primitive peoples there are categories of goods as their division of labor is still underdeveloped while the same categories that appear only in civilized societies for the system of division of labor had initially taken the basic shapes relatively rudimentary.
Of course we can speak of socialization as early as this stage, it is still embryonic and external forms of socializing, made only a posteriori through the "exchange" and which overlapped the relationship of dependency and taking "natural" (system slave, feudal etc...) The productions are so real partly dependent on each other but do not engage each other and are not mediated through aggregate total social logistics. But when the division of labor in the process of modernity definitely exceeds its primitive structures, industrial production are integrated directly with each other on an increasing scale and grow up to become a total and immediate, fueled by social aggregates (science, education etc..), not just an organization that stands integrated and universal system of division of labor "substantial", "technical", "material" no longer corresponds to the original categories of market and money, because its development has finally overwhelm them. Now the division of labor has joined the real production (and this is the process of modernity on a "material") in a system of direct socialization, while money market and are certainly an expression of indirect socialization and only in retrospect, productions based on a real system of division of labor between producers grossly underdeveloped and isolated individuals. It is logical that the continued existence of the market and money, far from being an expression of the new and higher forms of division of labor, material and substantial, is in an irreconcilable conflict with the latter.
The more immediate socialization of real production is accompanied by its universalisation of formal categories of socialization that is indirect and retrospective of the goods and money. This is the absurd contradiction of modernity. Social reproduction, turns on its contents, the money order to become himself against the concrete world and sensitive. Only on this ground competition can act as a logical necessity and the principle of the system dynamic producer of goods. The products are no longer in their social context, what really are, on the material and sensitive, and their production is only production of surplus value. Obviously the exchange market still appears as a purchase and sale of tangible goods but necessary in terms of social mediation, this is only the realization of surplus value embodied in goods, its transformation in the form of representation that is proper or in cash. The property of use are degraded to a mere transitional stage in the process of metamorphosis of the economic value of formal abstraction. Competition is the only form in which this self-movement of money is imposed on the subject as "law enforcement" external (Marx), resulting in an acceleration of social dynamics which is contradictory to be explained from the relationship of production and circulation in the context of a producer of goods.

4.3 The competition as a historical process driving

The money represents the real social abstraction, the ultimate incarnation of abstract labor, completely divorced from the actual content of the production. How real total abstraction, money is the thing immediately social, as it becomes the other hand, the concrete production, highly scientific and interconnected, while men are not social as monads of money moving to the surface of their social organization, which opposes them from the outside, and estranged in objective form. The social nature of money which, in its total mass, is abstract national wealth, however, mean its universal "fluidity" as opposed to the heaviness of the universe of real goods.
For now the ultimate goal of the entire organization is no longer the mediation of real property but the transformation of money (more) money, there is a particular division and inconsistency between the production of surplus value and its realization in the sphere of movement. Abstract wealth as money, in his latest avatar , is already instantly and then so is the social surplus value. In its form of representation only transient, that of concrete products, on the contrary it is still particularly non-social, "unfinished."
Competition, as a conflict between the special business units for the realization of surplus value arises from this tension between the different states of aggregation of capital gains. The shoemaker in the shelter of his corporation, with its unchanging production methods and its rigidly fixed prices could rely on the fact that it was worth fixing for bakers, butchers and so on., Then he could count on a mediation goods for use, without friction, but stable and durable, compliant at the time. But today the modern market system is no longer able to provide such guarantees and fixations.
In fact, the single business unit is not not rewarded with the same mass of surplus value that has incorporated in its production of specific goods, or how many hours and minutes of abstract labor employed. Genres like shoes, bread and meat are no longer subject to the mediation of the market in certain proportions, unlike the goods for use products are left at the mercy of the tremors in the process of self-movement of money. In other words, the single business unit can not "share" his "" surplus value in the form of goods for use against a corresponding amount of money, as a shoemaker could trade their shoes with bread and meat. Instead it must "steal" the movement of a share of the total social surplus value, in its monetary policy (use of abstract processes from past work and now live), through the sale of its products on a market which, because of his change of purpose, can not be fixed and guaranteed.
production and appropriation of surplus value collide both on logical and practical terms: the dualism between universality and particularity of the product of money, such contradiction between use value of the abstract form of money, material and capital gains. But this inconsistency becomes a driving force for the entire process of modernity, the source of a stunning dynamic social. The real added value is more than the sum of the surpluses in the use of special living labor, is not a given magnitude and a stable but changing size, button, in constant oscillation, the phenomenal form of a continuous social process. The single business unit can appropriate only a portion of more or less the final form of surplus value - the monetary - was incorporated into its products. From this we immediately decide its success or failure on the market that is in the sphere of circulation.
In principle, as is known, enjoys more success on the business unit which proves to be able to "offer at the lowest price "(apart from problems of non-economic nature that in any case can never completely supplant the basic logic). This may depend on his part to productivity, higher or lower, the company itself. High productivity does not mean anything other than the ability to produce a large amount of products with the least amount of work alive. The competition for the appropriation of surplus value, or its transformation into the money form, requires a constant increase in productivity worth the sunset of this or that production unit, but precisely because of the introduction of this social mechanism, was suddenly put in a push bike extraordinary, a violent explosion of productivity in a very historic moment, which lasted less than two centuries, has increased more than during the entire prior history.
Precisely this dynamic is the "meaning" hidden competition. In the Marxian critique of political economy this is clearly stated. Marx has nothing to do with that sentence only external competition, partly moralistic part of socio-mold technology, which is typical of the concept of the labor movement. For Marx, on the ground of the goods-producing system, competition is necessary for it to begin the process of human emancipation from the mere natural foundations, from working as labor as the suffering of the "sweat of the brow," though in a form still unconscious and fetishistic.
In pre-capitalist social formations, there was no general motivation, for driving the development of productive forces, on the contrary the production methods have always been specifically determined, with the threat of punishment against any attempt to change. The naive idea that men had to plan, within their traditional relations, a development of modern productive forces in a different and less drastic, consciously and collectively, the "circumvention" of capitalism, presupposes a subject that could not not yet exist. Only the competition as "silent compulsion" (Marx) of the commodity producing system, which was founded and operates "behind" the subject, could set in motion so the productive forces, albeit in a stark contrast of destruction and emancipation.
While the competition takes away the breath to men, it also rejects the dullness and stability on a low level, it destroys the lives massively but at the same time, makes obsolete every relationship of corporate existence and rough, all relations of personal dependence, it separates the masses from the satisfaction of their needs, different each time scale, but also develops new needs and mass them "Makes it cheaper (!)" (Marx) transformed the luxury goods of a few elite in mass consumer goods, it dehumanizes people and makes them merely masks the character of money, but also humanizes the subject (above abstract , put up, consisting of) destroying all the natural fetishes and institutional domains in which men germinated as appendages of land free of subjectivity. Most importantly though
competition forces and whip men into abstract expense of their workforce, it is both dynamic principle that can tend to overcome the work, making it obsolete through his drive, forced and ruthless, always advanced to new and highly scientific productivity, it becomes destructive forces in the productive forces but simultaneously drives the appropriation of human nature known so far beyond all measure. Marx has never disowned the positive, progressive, emancipatory competition, marking it as "civilizing mission." Joseph Schumpeter observed almost wonder how Marx, in spite of his fundamental criticism, even in spite of his "death sentence" of the capital had both [...] (Schumpeter 1942)
In fact, the Marxian critique of political economy simply takes account ambiguity the dynamics of capitalism. Despite its destructive force directed against man and nature, the car is competitive at the same time as negative emancipation, through a continuous process of development of productive forces, inevitably leads to the threshold of the 'abolition of work "that is the production work abstract and repetitious, which is limited to "create value", but in doing so it also suppresses its own domestic fundamentals making itself obsolete. The interconnectedness of the playback of content up to a total system of social stands in direct opposition to the categories of merchandise, but it is the system of producer goods become end in itself to create this highly scientific and this interconnection, generating its opposite in an effort to pursue its limited purpose and "meaningless." The competition works in an unconscious and unintentional destruction of its bases spread.
In other words, the abolition of work, wrapped in the goods-producing system, it makes its appearance as a carefree and joyous event, but only in a negative way, namely as an absolute crisis in this form of reproduction, heralded by a concatenation crisis and its historical ancestors of the modern society of work, during its phase of affirmation. The capitalist world society is so close to his trial Fire and explosion, as it approaches the point where (in the eyes of his contemporaries look like a process) it dispenses with abstract labor in its function of social substance of economic value. But on the other hand, it wants to remain with the force gathered into the form-value and its derived categories (wages, prices and profits) despite having lost all substance.
The Marxist labor movement has not so distinctly perceived ambiguity - a real head of Janus of modernity - in accepting the word of the Master, perhaps reluctantly and in a general sense, as part of his nature. This contradiction in Marx manifested itself again in the form of an unresolved conflict between the "point of view of the worker" and the critique of political economy, but the followers of Marxism almost totally eliminated the decisive formal criticism of Marxian labor producing goods and held firm to its obstinacy on the company's work. Moreover
until the second half of the twentieth century development did not provide any empirical support point to the logic of the Marxian critique that, for this reason it seems unclear. The development of productive forces had not yet reached the threshold beyond which the basic principle of labor society becomes obsolete. So the criticism of the competition on the horizon the company's work remained, for a long time, wrapped in a light ambiguous. But by virtue of this construction, the emancipatory side of competition could not be identified.
Capitalism was conceived in the abstract or as a training "historically necessary" within the company's work (thought of as ontologically unsurpassed), which had now run its course, or (and by the very currents that assumed particularly radical and critical ) as a simple mistake from the beginning "that could and should have corrected at any time, of course, the" point of view of the worker. " Here, too, makes its reappearance on charges senseless revolt by the "radical left" that is against the Bolsheviks did not have materialized utopia (nothing but the bourgeois ideal), which, according to them, but was achieved at any time.
In this way the competition instead of a driving force appeared rather as a moral scandal and a bad principle, purely negative, and to abolish as soon as possible. The Marxist labor movement never understood to have freed the workers from competition, but only for it, and instead, paradoxically, sought to terminate and liquidate competition, absolutizing one of its segments - namely the working class - which as such could only arise through to it.
In developed Western countries the old labor movement acquitted of most of its mission - after having once and for all of discarding any emphasis of each objective transcendent - it became a commonplace element of competition within the bourgeois society. Instead, the Soviet Union and other countries of real socialism, the bourgeois modernization recovery led to a new paradox of social reproduction. The internal contradiction of capitalism was not exceeded at all but on the contrary, even doubled. The October Revolution gave birth to a modern producer of goods but not allow him to obey its functional mechanism, the competition between the participants market was eliminated and replaced by state control.

4.4 The breakdown of socialism in capitalist dynamics

The ideology of the labor movement - which was the embodiment of social socialism - he simply oppose certain types of their real middle-class polo additional "work" against "capital", the state primary against the monetarist principle of competition. But this ideology drew its raw material and raison d'être from the reports themselves and also his statement in the concrete relatively underdeveloped regions of the world capitalist socialization in its infancy, it was absolutely a "mistake" but a consequence of such their relationship. The logical paradox
of a producer of goods without competition had its basis in historical paradox that in the early twentieth century, a new independent national economy could only develop through the element absolutization Statist. The competition was to be deleted just because of the competition in order to compete against external relatively more developed Western countries - so as not to be absorbed or degraded in these marginal regions weakly developed - the competition was to be internal deleted through the command in the sense Stalinist state. The conveyance of masses of surplus value, strategically "planned", generated by the process of accumulation, set in motion with brutal methods inward towards the core areas of infrastructure and basic industry, it was possible only if you disable the principle functionality of the production of surplus value.
But the paradoxical result of this suspension of competition within the system of the Soviet economy, was the instrument that ended up turning against his own purpose, but moreover to achieve that end, there was no other tool available. The same logic that produced the absolutization and the petrification of the Soviet state with its economy of war, it also caused the inevitable obsolescence. All that the command economy had built through the strategic planning of capital gains, ended up crushed under the unbearable weight of stagnation.
Throughout history, this logic tragic futility could not immediately leap to the eyes and above for two reasons. On the one hand during the first phase of expansion of the extensive system of producer goods were actually made of Soviet successes in the form of high growth rates. It was too easy because the peasants were [ hineingepeitscht, gebrandmarkt-,-gefoltert ] in the abstract expense of their workforce, in the words of Marx. Huge masses of fruit production in part of a subsistence economy to a very low level of needs, and that would never have been recorded by modern economic statistics, were incorporated for the first time in the machinery of social work and metabolized by the .
same time were made huge investments in heavy industry and basic infrastructure, or where no one could almost make mistakes - despite all the deficits of the command economy, which was already perfectly recognizable - and guarantee itself a growth wide strides. Since raised that these processes, at least partially, the level of needs and generates the elements of the "civilizing mission" of the capital, hidden under the mask of war statist socialist economy, rampant in the Soviet Union, albeit temporarily, a sort of euphoria building that would be repeated later in some Third World countries - and even more so ephemeral - and that created a whole superstructure of socialist literature edifying.
In addition, during this phase and not only because of the high growth rates, might have seemed that the nascent Soviet economy was able to riagguantare the West and in a historical period predictable. At the time, even the West was experiencing a rise in statist who embraced the first part of the twentieth century. The structures of the war economy, typical of the period of the two world wars, forced to retreat to the mechanism of competition characteristic of the monetarist principle antagonist, although not in the West statism never crystallized to become instead a system as happened in Soviet Union, also the last crisis - and the largest - the system of producer goods, which broke out in the middle of his rise to global capitalist form of socialization, slowed development, strengthens the state-run trends and created an atmosphere of order that era permeated all ideological reactions, to Critical Theory. The situation changed radically after the Second World War, during the Fordist era, the heyday of capitalism, now in its final maturation as a global system total. Under the aegis of the Pax Americana competition once affrancatasi structures of war and economic crisis and from a higher level of development, in a series of major new advanced stimulated the development of productive forces and the highly scientific, to the more recent introduction of microelectronics and information technology with potential for automation hitherto unthinkable in all areas of social reproduction. For business units that process is the "silent compulsion" of an increasingly competitive global market refers to the sphere of direct and intensification of the production process, or the compulsion to rationalize ever new, highly scientific and automation.
In this process of dynamization of capitalism during the war, the intensification of production of surplus value is increased up to empirical completely new dimensions. But this way the system crystallized in the production of goods of socialism, with their economy of war, were no longer able to keep the pace of the West. The barracks and command economies of the Soviet system, oriented from the beginning to the extensive production of surplus value - and that the increase in productivity, constantly alleged, could be invoked only by ukase state and moralistic propaganda campaigns -, lost Soon the ground and consequently their decline became unavoidable.
Now she takes it half of his own purpose, the abolition of the principle of internal competition, which is necessary for the establishment of "recovery" of a national economy in the form of labor society is echoed not only on external competition (between systems) but also on the complex of social reproduction. Irony of history: in the words of General Secretary Gorbachev's "Life punishes those who arrive late", in other words "life" of capital punished those who had stolen the soul of the mechanical principle of competition, passing off all for socialism.
equally ironic absolutization of the capitalist principle of the work carried out by Marxism, resulted in the increasing disability of the expense of workers and employees of companies of real socialism on the level of world society, this is because such an expenditure had fallen far below the standard of overall productivity. The alleged overcoming of nature contradiction of capitalism, but on the basis of its own assumptions, instead of abolishing capital as such, had done nothing to suppress a long time that "contradiction" along with its internal dynamics. So
real socialism, during dynamization of the capitalist war, ended increasingly darkened, haunted by an idiot historical work and in this respect would be the most capitalist of capitalism. The glorification of work, deprived of the principle of competition, far from being able to "meet and surpass" Western capitalism after the war or even usher in a qualitatively new alternative society, generated at best a grotesque Fordism bonsai, whose emblem might well be the small car, foul-smelling malcongegnata East German car industry.
In a long rearguard action - made up of reform efforts but ultimately was limited only to make some concessions in one way or another to the principle of competition, but did not affect the basic economics of the system of war, crystallized in his Government - the economies of the West in pursuit of the barracks and threw their own plans, but with hopes for success increasingly laughable. This phenomenon, it can be documented easily and Empirically, for example, using as benchmarks the GDR and the FRG. In a study published in 1985, the comparison of their productivity, with a fairly accurate forecast for 1990 shows a sharp fall down of the GDR (in percent, FRG = 100)


_________1960_1970_1984_1990
Produttività__70__55___46___35
Wages reali___78__58___44___35

( Source: Wirtschaftswoche No. 36, 30/08/1985)

The ratio is even more favorable if we take into account only the key industries, particularly the automotive industry. A summary of the situation is afforded by this report Horst Sieber, president of the for the World Economy in Kiel:

While in the past two decades, the Federal Republic, the number of industrial jobs has declined steadily 10.1000000-8000000, in the GDR, this number is even increased. Siebert cites the automotive industry as an example of low productivity: the IFA-Kombinat, with their 65,000 employees, producing only 200,000 cars a year. Toyota, with the same number, it produces four million. With a productivity rate of 1 to 20 this industry is in no way able to compete. (Handelsblatt 25/05/1990).

appears as obvious as the "home work" Socialism barracks had frozen and maintained on a standard now long past, an "honor of the work" increasingly obsolete. Only in this way it could ensure full employment, hailed as an alleged "power of the working class," and even prove naively proud that reigned the scarcity of labor, which is now exposed as the pride to work unproductive. The
increasingly drastic fall in productivity of labor society of socialism goes hand in hand with a corresponding delay in the integration process of reproduction. Advanced integration is a prerequisite for overcoming the production of goods and effective revolutionary transformation of bourgeois society. This delay can be seen from the degree of outsourcing which today represents a highly scientific level index. While in 1987, yet 58% of those employed worked in agriculture or industry of the GDR, and only 42% in the tertiary sector, in West Germany only 46% were engaged in material production compared to 54% of the tertiary sector. This delay in the development of integration can be observed even in the depths of the interconnection industry. They are known for some time the results of a research Institute for Economic Research of North Rhine-Westphalia (RWI):

the interplay of individual industries with each other and with business and commercial services is more faint in the GDR in the FRG. [...] One reason is that the Kombinat have to react to the difficulties in the supply of semi-finished products through independent production. In the Federal Republic, on the contrary, the division of labor across sectors has intensified. (Handelsblatt 05.08.1990)

The irony of history is also evident in this respect: in socialism socialization real material, is much weaker than in the West. In the same way that the relatively low productivity, unlike in the West deprived of the stimulus of competition, is paralyzed well below the critical level necessary to overcome the work, even the relatively weak interconnection is paralyzed below the critical level of tolerance of the commodity-form. The economy of the barracks has not only kept the expenditure of labor power but kept separate from their individual firms on the technical-material. The internal contradiction of capital is so depleted well before reaching its "critical mass". But as the capital, at the height of its development, can exist only on a global scale, the crisis and the collapse of the East were provcate own exhaustion of this dynamic.
From this it would be wrong to expect a more serious solution for now catastrophic deficit of socialism, the realignment and adaptation, apparently on the agenda, the economy competitive Western "victory." This rather superficial view completely ignores the fact that these deficits were already a historical result of capitalist contradictions. The abolition of internal competition was not a "blunder", a "mistake" and would now be simply "correct".
the contrary, the crisis that led to the collapse of socialism, the level current capitalist socialization is tied to the stage of development of the global total. Now more than ever is a consequence of "no time" for such a system. The crisis of labor society of socialism marks the incipient crisis of modern society's work and its outright in the West because the mechanisms of competition were so effective as to undermine and erode the foundations of the system producing the same goods. It was the logic of this system that the parts most vulnerable with regard to productivity and interconnection were the first to fall into the abyss of systemic collapse, but sooner or later the advance of the highly scientific process that goes beyond the logical limits of the system producing the same goods surprise the West and along these lines are visible for a long time.
It 's true, life punishes those who arrive too late. But if the countries of the former real socialism, with much zeal but little weight, they head resolutely towards the competitive world market economy, hoping to find salvation, unfortunately for them arrive late for the second time and "life" seems to have in Serbia for their punishment more terrible than those tested so far. In fact the entire modern society is now working together to come to an end and it also the basic categories of the money form and the commodity-form. The analysis of the isolated final crisis of socialism completely ignores the logic of the crisis of the principle of competition that will rage as a negative emancipation in the coming crisis of the advanced world production of goods.

Notes

1. The term "natural economy" documents the darkness that dominates the conceptual understanding of the Marxian critique of political economy. Already in the social debate of the First World War, the abolition of commodity-form was confused with an "abolition of money" only from the outside: but on the way the basic logic, completely misunderstood the system of producer goods are not absolutely had to be overcome but only brought to completion by the state, the material immediately in the form of a "natural economy" without the "veil of money" . The origins of this debate does not lie in the critical Marxist economics, but in the middle class whose political leaders still can not decide whether a system based on the exchange of goods "is inconceivable without the money or not, a way really silly to ask the question.
2. This is visible, not least in the fact that this conception of socialism work subordinate, of little value, dirty and / or mechanical devices are not even "abolished", on the contrary they are the bearers to be "recognized" as citizens of "equal value" and as men in all respects with the premise that all work equally contribute to national wealth and are therefore deserving of respect. Of course, behind the trappings of moral rhetoric, lies here too the actual indifference of abstract labor and that the grant of monads as possessors of the commodity labor power.
3. There have historically been the exception, quoted by Marx, societies and the Incas of ancient India where a division of labor, pushed beyond the fundamentals of a company primitive had not generated the categories of goods and money, the social glue in these companies consisted of religious institutions that had nothing in common with the modern state. These side branches of human social development can hardly be recommended as a perspective lost civilization or "totally other" on the contrary they seem to have generated only a division of labor of the lowest level (for example, the Incas did not even know the wheel). It is therefore of exceptions that prove the rule.
4. This contradiction in the modernization process, mediated by competition, made possible, in every stage of his claim, even in opposition conservative character, starting with the apologists of feudalism to get to the "conservative values" of our times. The opposition fought the reactionary side emancipation of modernization which is reproached the negative and destructive of that process.
5. And for this reason, the Enlightenment and rightly so, since the Enlightenment in its "inability to enlighten itself" (Hegel) was widely interpreted as a prior history "mistake" and a "deviation from reason" in this and other respects the 'ideology of the labor movement, including certain elements of Marxism, it is revealed only as a "second pass" Enlightenment bourgeois horizon of the goods-producing system, unsurpassed even on a theoretical level and as an expression of the immanent forms of consciousness which it formed.
6. This type of literature that served as "music to accompany" of primitive accumulation "recovery" could be sincere as his original intentions, soon degenerated into dull sound of state propaganda, on the western outskirts of the Soviet Union it was exposed from the outset as a cialtroneria misleading because in those countries forced the establishment of state-owned economy of the barracks could never rely on a historical basis, even if only relative, in terms of development.
7. The example cited is relativized a bit 'if you also include the Toyota supplier industries that are already partly integrated into the production structure of the conglomerate-ifa for reasons of complexity of the organization. From this point of view, the advantage in productivity of Toyota refers only to the relevant individual (at the expense of suppliers) and to society as a whole. However, even taking into account the effect of the superiority of the company overall productivity is still enormous.
8. About the collapse of the GDR, some apologists of the "critical" and the exponents of Western left has had the impudence to charge the catastrophic backwardness of East German productivity to the "unequal starting conditions" in the aftermath of the war, with all the disadvantages linked to it. In fact, it is the GDR, a country already developed, to offer the best criterion of comparison, figures, in the initial phase, which existed in the "worst of departure", the gap in productivity between the GDR and FRG was even lower and again until the '60s was not perceived as too dramatic. It has grown as the two Germanys were displaced from their initial conditions to get the test the strength of its foundations. This sterile argument only reveals the anachronism rooted in the constellation and the thought of this post-war left, which is totally incapable of making a critical concept (let alone a radical critique) of the goods-producing system and its logic contradictory.