Gmail kac attac Jorn—CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC POLICY kac attac Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 1:52 PM To: Stefan Kac CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC POLICY Asger Jorn This section, apart from a few rearrangements, was published in French by the Situationist International in 1959 and dedicated to the Danish syndi- calist and workers' leader Christian Christensen, who in my youth, when he lived in Sejs near Silkeborg, was like a father to me and taught me what economics, economic critique and organization are. The Marvism which is criticized here is what made Marx maintain that he was not a Marxist. The old basis, for international communism has today definitively broken down. Here I could say to all those who are seek- ing pure socialism, If you are going to the right, then I'll go to the left. I have already indicated in my book The Natural Order that this statement should not be perceived in the traditional sense. The illusion that progress and evolution are the same has come to an end. This has meant that the communist movement is dissolving. I go in for progress, but in order to progress one must be able to regress. In his cultural history, Hartvig Frisch has demonstrated that the forces of progress do not always evolve from the top, but can shoot out as side-shoots from the trunk. My idea of progress is therefore based upon an out-and-out revolutionary conservatism, for I am going back to the composition of the First Internationale and maintaining that none of its three basic principles - anarchism or the principle of the evolution of personal freedom, syndicalism or the evolution of wise, social organizations and socialism or the knowledge of the context of all social phenomena - can be done without today. 178 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere The main points in my critique Production and reproduction are, like progress and evolution, two comple- mentary oppositions. Neither commodity value nor work can comprise the elemental concept of social value, which must base itself upon the human being as the source of value. Rare material cannot be constant or free capital, as capitalists and social- ists maintain. Rare material is in a continual reductive process. Use value is the opposite and negation of the article of utility, as quality is the opposite of value. Value in itself and forms of value The common criterion for truth for any socialist or anti-capitalist politics, the basis that is still recognized as valid by socialists as well as communists, is the Marxist analysis and critique of the capitalist form of value, the com- modity, perceived as the elemental form of the wealth existent in a society where the capitalist form of production is dominant. This manifests itself as an immense accumulation of commodities. This analysis was carried out by Karl Marx in his 'critique of political economy, a work that was given the name of Das Kapital. Marx does not just demonstrate that the capitalist form of wealth is the commodity, for that demonstration cannot take place at all without a precondition that wealth and value are the same. As wealth exists as the opposite of poverty, it is precisely this op- position between rich and poor that socialist politics wants to remove. However, as, according to dialecties, an opposition cannot be removed without thereby achieving the removal of or the neutralization of both oppositions, socialism abolishes wealth along with poverty. If wealth continues to blossom one can simply demonstrate that socialism does not exist. The idea of a socialist wealth is not just utopia. It is simply rubbish. The present crisis of socialism has its starting point in the tact that Marxism's identification of commodity, wealth and value make the Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 179 abolition of value as such the ideological goal of socialism. Thus the con- cept of value itself becomes an absurdity in socialist terminology, whilst socialist politics is forced to become a permanent politics of devaluation, the end purpose of which can only be the absolute abolition of all values. Nothing in Marxist economic dogma contradicts this goal in a scientifi- cally logical way. This absolute and all-embracing devaluation is, indeed, altogether unavoidable and will happen of its own accord whether people wish it or not. This natural evolution forms the scientific basis of socialist theory. This tendency is the basic definition of socialist development itself, the one by which the consequences of all socialist actions are justified, and is the justification in itself of socialist politics. We will here attempt to indicate that it is possible to accept the Marxist analysis and critique of the capitalist form of value, the commod- ity, without thereby taking over the identification of this form with value itself as a concept and a reality. This is to say that it is possible to accept the purely scientific side of Das Kapital without thereby automatically taking over the political conclusions that Marx drew from it. It consists of perceiving the Marxist critique not as a critique of value in itself but of a specially occurring form of value limited in time and space. To get to this new form of critique, it is first necessary to lay down a new and precise concept of value which does not contradict itself, and which is at the same time far more comprehensive than the Marxist one, a concept of value that harmonizes with the conceptual world of the natural sciences, something which the Marxist concept of value clearly does not do. In order to do this, We must find a corresponding definition of the concept of form so that we can clearly and unambiguously lay down what is meant by different forms of value. This leads directly to a necessary critique of the concept which in dialectical materialism goes under the name of objective quality. This is the purpose of this study. Concepts are concepts - actualities are actualities In order to avoid a thorough discussion about this question of concepts, Marx was obliged to exclude the whole question by saying that it did not exist at all, that it was irreal. He stated that value is not a concept but 180 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere an actuality, namely the commodity or the exchange value. Thereby he is really stating that all value is exchange value. Concepts are words which everyone has agreed to give one and only one meaning. This socialization of the concepts is altogether necessary to make it possible to explain some- thing to each other that we can agree on in fellowship. Therefore the whole socialist theory stands or falls on this tool, with which this theory is trans- formed to an ideology, becoming clearly and unambiguously socialized. In this argument Marx forgets, however, that he himself in Das Kapital defines value as a purely metaphysical and thus immaterial phenomenon, as an agreement by convention, and thus as nothing other than a concept. However, even this Marxist refusal to discuss concepts does not hin- der the rising depreciation in all areas which is a result of socialist politics. On the contrary. As the actual goal of socialism is the practical abolition of exchange value, socialism is not just moving towards an eradication of possible new value theories but towards a state where even the actual objects vanish, towards a state without actual values. Marx was himself the first to see this evolution and to go in for it at full throttle. He even perceived his own Marxist philosophy as the last philosophy for which there would be a use, and that only in the period of transition to the socialist society, where all philosophy, even the Marxist, would be abolished. Here one sees his own economic philosophy replaced by the greatest economy, as far as philosophy is concerned. His goal was to make all philosophy unnecessary, including Marxism. Thus this growing devaluation of everything, of even Marxism itself, is not anything unex- pected. It is both the conscious and unconscious goal of socialism. Marx's conceptual confusion is too great to be able to demonstrate the overall consequences of this consistently anti-progressive ideology. For example, he talks of the commodity's factors, the use value (defined as the substance of value) and the exchange value or value in itself' (which he identifies with the dimension of value). There can be no doubt that di- mension and value are here perceived as the same. However, he thereatter divides exchange value into two completely different factors, as he says, 'Any article of utility can be perceived from a double viewpoint, from that of the quantity and from that of the quality? As dimension and quantity are Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 181 the same, value and quantity must also be so. In dialectical materialism, the concepts of quantity and quality are themselves the key concepts. It is therefore strange that Marx cannot keep to them when he has to talk of value and commodities. The reason hits one in the eye. It is altogether impossible to classify considerations of value, be it under the concept of quantity or the concept of quality. Even the most diligent materialistic dialectician falls down here. Is value then really, as Marx himself suggests, just a purely metaphysical concept? There are only two possibilities. Either this is the case and then Marxism is neither materialistic nor scientific in the strict meaning of that expression, or Marxism's concept of value is out-of-date and must be replaced by a new one. It is this latter perception that I want to attempt to develop here. In order to do this we must look a little closer at what could lie in the concepts that Marx is manipulating. What do, for example, substance and dimension, the two concepts which in Marxist doctrine are the two factors of form, mean? Substance and process are in the Marxist sense the same In order to able to understand Marx's concept of substance, it is neces- sary to place it in relation to what he calls form. As we are keeping to a purely materialistic evaluation and conceptual world, we can in the main confirm that what the Marxists call matter is perceived as substance, and is normally perceived as being the same as the material's characteristic of rare material for something, and not in a true sense as an element. In the Marxist sense, all material is actually or possibly raw material and nothing else. On the other hand, the form of the material designates its character as a material different from all other materials, which can be determined or united in a special object. In this way one talks of different forms of energy, etc. These forms of energy stand in a dialectical opponent relationship to the substance of the same energies. But it is here that Marx is wrong. In Marx, the concept of form is, so to speak, never placed in relation to the concept of substance. He prefers to operate with a completely differ- ent opposition: form and content. Thus he talks of the value's form and the value's content. A content is what is enclosed in a form. Thus Mars 182 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere declares that the content of value is work and adds to this description that the true form is the form of the content, which logically makes formal truth identical with work or with content in the value question. However, he also says somewhere, We now know the substance of value. It is work!' We must thus state that in Marx, substance and content are the same. However, he also declares that use value is the value's' (the exchange value's) substance and at the same time explains that work is not the only source of value for the use values it creates, for material wealth. It is the father. The earth is the mother' But in order for a use value to be able to be transformed into a true 'value, an exchange value, he himself empha- sizes that it is necessary to eliminate or completely devalue one factor, the material character of the commodity, to deny the mother, the earth, which is the original source. The transition from use value to exchange value happens by the devaluation of the article of utility's material actuality. The deficient understanding of the materialistic significance of this operation can be seen even more clearly in Marxist theory, if one goes a little closer into the Marxist perception of form. Here it is stated that the use value is the natural form of the commodity. What does that mean? Mars adds, however, that the commodity possesses a form of value of a quite special kind that contrasts sharply with the various natural forms of the commodity, namely the form of money. If we accept that the use value is the commodity's actual substance, then it is impossible to perceive an article of utility as being identical with a natural form. An article of utility is not a natural form but a cultural form, otherwise a wooden table would have the same form as a tree. The more one reads Marx, the more one becomes clear that he hasn't an inkling of what a use value and an article of utility are. He believes that they are the same. One can excuse him. In spite of his unique ettorts in the cultural history of humanity, it was not given to him in practice to immerse himself in either the world of wealth or of use values. Nevertheless it is precisely this lack of knowledge of the artistic and the artificial elements in the article of utility's character of wealth that reduces the extent of the Marxist theories to a limited period in history which is now past. Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 183 We can accept the fact that articles of utility represent the substance or raw material of commodities. There is, however, just the important thing that use value is something more and something more essential than just commodity substance. It is in itself a value that is certainly devalued in the instant of barter, but immediately takes up its intrinsic value again in the consumer's hand, when the exchange has taken place. Once bought by the consumer the article of utility is no longer a commodity. It has again become an article of utility. This determination is necessary for all articles of utility except money. He who manufactures articles of utility does it primarily because he has use for them. If he makes more than he can use himself, then he has created a utilitarian surplus value. This surplus production is directly valueless to himself. If others are interested in it, then he can give it away. This is called potlatch. However, it is this productive surplus value, and only this, which is made into commodities, first by the exchange of surplus products in barter and then by the surplus production being exchanged for money, this again being exchanged for other articles of utility. Exploitation arises when a person is not allowed to give his surplus production away to whom he will. Slavery consists in the person no longer being allowed to decide what he has a use for himself. One can thus be exploited before one becomes a slave. The Marxists have not discovered this. However, if one has no right whatever to decide what, how much and why one produces, then one is simply an instrument. What Marx discovered was that all the processes mentioned here is artificial, that is, discovered by people, and that the article of utility also has its substance which is the forms of nature. However, nature exists, as Lenin maintains, independent of our sensing it and our use of it. This means that nature is not in itself a substance. It is so only in its relation to the human wishes and abilities that create the articles of utility. Nature itself is not a means, and has not in itself an end that serves humanity. Nature is simply the first unavoidable condition for all production. Nature exists in natural forms. The destruction of these natural forms is the pro- cess we call the manufacture of articles of utility. One can destroy natural forms without manufacturing anything. But the manufacture of articles ionist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere 184 COSM of utility is impossible except by a destructive incursion into the natural order. This incursion is called culture. So the foundation of socialism in the order of nature makes its theory a denial of art and culture. This is apparent above all in socialism's complete lack of understanding of the agriculture problem. Use value is the negation of the article of utility Marx is forced to eliminate the whole problem of consumption to avoid seeing the holes in his theory. He does this by simply and primitively maintaining obstinately that there is nothing at all that one could call use value and what one does call use value is in reality what should be called the article of utility. If Marx in the beginning maintains that value and dimension are the same, then he also ends by identifying value with quality or article, which in reality abolishes the difference between qual- ity and quantity upon which dialectical materialism is built. In no other place has Marx used such an agitated tone and such cheap arguments as in this question and, oddly enough, no postulates have been lapped up with greater joy than precisely this rubbish, be it by communists, socialists or capitalists, priests and popes and artists, the whole caboodle. Marx asserts that the use of the word value in connection with ar- tiles of utility is just as crazy and pre-scientific as the pre-chemical use of the word salt not just for true salt but also for substances like sugar because there is a purely external similarity between sugar and salt. This parallelization is not, however, a scientific argument but a piece of chi- canery that the socialists have also used recently in Denmark to assert that one cannot compare the amounts from the national wealth used for military purposes with those used for cultural institutions like the National Museum, because the military, as everyone can clearly see, has nothing to do with culture. No arguments seem to have so great a carrying capacity as such mental short-circuits. Of course, Marx himself believed in his own argument. However, he did not follow it. He could not solve the problem. But if he had re- ally followed his own theory in Das Kapital and written article of utility every time he wrote use value, then he would have swiftly discovered the Asger Jon Critique of Economic Policy 185 absurdity. But he was careful not to do that, and Marxists since have not dared to do the experiment, but have all faithfully continued to swallow his assertion. One has to hinder discussions about this problem. When Marx says, "Use value is realized in use or consumption', then it would be quite meaningless to imagine that he is talking of the article of utility, for the realization of the article of utility is after all because of its production and not its consumption. One does not realize a roll by eating it. The use value of bread is realized in the digestion, in the dissolution and thus in the process of digestion. This is all that can be said directly about use value. Use value must therefore be exactly the opposite of arti- cle of utility, the negation of the article of utility as article or object, or as actual form. Marx elaborates, 'As use value, the commodity is above all of differing quality. As exchange value, it can only be of differing quantity. Here we have arrived back at the concepts of quality and quantity. Does anyone, after this presentation, doubt that use value cannot be the same as the article of utility? If one uses an article of utility one cannot at the same time preserve it as a commodity. In order for an article of utility to be rec- ognized as a commodity in the modern sense, it must be unused, remain intact, and it is thus this intact object that Marx calls quality. We will keep to this unambiguous definition of the concept of quality. However, it is thereby impossible for use value to be the quality of an article as one likes to maintain. Quality, if this word is to have one unam- biguous meaning, must simply mean the article in itself, the extent and duration of its body, which in reality are the same, its condition. If I buy myself a pair of shoes, then their consumption and destruc- tion by wear cannot really be their quality. On the contrary, one perceives their quality as their resistance to destruction, their permanence or con- stancy as an article. It is obvious that the shoes will hold their quality best if one never uses them, if one puts them in a cupboard. This is the way the shopkeeper has to treat them. The least use diminishes their price to a degree that no Marxist law can explain. However, if I don't use my shoes, then they are at the same time without value to me. The value is created in the use but not by the wear or consumption in itself. I buy good quality 186 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere shoes precisely to avoid them being swiftly worn out, even though this is, despite everything, unavoidable, if I am to use them. One cannot thus directly identify use or consumption. For bread the problem is even more complex. I do not bite the bread into pieces to destroy it but to produce thereby strength with which to build myself up. Only that part of the bread that gives me strength is a value to me. The rest is pure garbage. Value is process Marx says that 'as an article of utility the commodity is quality and as exchange value it is quantity. This formula, perceived by dialectical ma- terialism as a renewal of the scientific concepts, would, however, remain completely static and unusable, if Marxism did not reckon with what it calls the transition from quality to quantity and vice versa. This process has not been given a clear scientific formulation in the ideology of dialecti- cal materialism. What evades the attention of Marxists in this formulation is that Marx's so-called exchange value has no more to do with value than the article of utility has to do with use value. The Marxist pseudo-value, ex- change value, is nothing other than the neutralization of two values in a condition of equilibrium which is called equivalence or equal value - equal validity. Two values which are equally valid abolish each other's value and make each other valueless until they are again torn from their established opposite number. This opposition is fixed in the object we call currency. Money in itself as an object is valueless. But it is an article of utility, a form. 'The special thing about it, however, is that as it is gradually liberated in its pure form, where there is no material covering for it, it has only a purely metaphysical value based exclusively upon belief, upon everyone believing in it. In the socialist society the banknotes themselves become the measure of what people believe and value, nothing more. One could abruptly agree that one no longer wanted to believe in the particular banknotes. One could make others and the first ones could be ripped up. They would be valueless, on the metaphysical ground alone that as a matter of pure con- vention one has agreed not to believe in them anymore. Asger Jon Critique of Economic Policy 187 The market value of things is not conditioned by their quality, far less by their amount. It is conditioned by their differences, their variability. To reduce this variability, to standardize a commodity is therefore to say that one is devaluing it. This process of standardization is called econom- is. The exchange value of two commodities is thus not their equivalence but the dissimilarity in the conditions they offer and this is expressed in the price difference. By reducing this difference to a price difference of a purely quantitative nature, one can fix the price. In reality this means that everything has the same price and thereby there is nothing that has a price anymore. The price no longer exists. The real exchange value exists exclusively in the change or variability in price. When all prices are fixed, trade has become meaningless. The commodity no longer exists. This is the purpose of socialism. It should thus be correet to put forward the perception that value and process are the same and that which Marx calls the value's substance is the true value and not the dimension of the value as he claims. Dimension is nothing more than the quantity of a particular quality. However, value is a particular quantity of qualities undergoing process or change. Matter or natural forms first become substance in the process that changes them not to quantity but to other forms or qualities. Outside the process each substance is, in its own nature, just a special quality or form. The concept of substance is thus characteristic of nothing other than the process itself or the transition between two states. Substance is the material actuality of the change or the transformation. Let us test the possibilities for a deeper knowledge of the production problem that this opens up. The cycle of production and consumption Marx declares that barter implies the following change of form: Commodity - Money - Commodity (C-M-C) But this process necessarily presupposes a deeper lying change of form: Article of Utility - Commodity - Article of Utility (A-C-A) 188 COSMONAUTS O ant in Scandinavia and Elsewhere Behind this lies a third change of form: Natural Form - Article of Utility - Natural Product (N-A-N) The most primitive human life form was based on this simple cycle: N-A-N. The city society's trade added a new element to the chain in a cycle N-A-C-A-N. The Greco-Roman money system made the cycle one notch longer: N-A-C-M-C-A-N. What new element have the social- ists added to this cycle? It is not our task here to indicate this. We would just like to stress that only the study of this cycle is able to give us a real scientific picture of the relationship between production and consump- tion in modern society. At the same time, it has, however, to be pointed out that, in contrast to agriculture, industry gives nothing back to nature in a rebirth of the values it consumes. Industry's consumption of nature is irreversible, as the natural products it leaves behind have always been definitively devalued in human and cultural terms. Industry therefore has a direct contact with that rising depreciation of matter which is called the expansion of the universe. This is the reason why its advocates do not see their own place in a cyclic development, and this is the reason that those who are not in the running must be wary of whichever cycle industry may now find to launch itself into, for behind that grows no grass. A commodity is a socialized article of utility The bourgeois revolution against the nobility, the court and the Catholic Church had its point of departure in indignation at the wealth, plenty and luxurious living of these privileged groups, and it set up against them the bourgeois virtues of modest simplicity of conduct, of thrift and frugality. Marx did not even discover that it was this sudden and compulsory thrift in consumption which was the source of capital-creating savings. This tendency did not come on the agenda at all in the revolutionary ideas of socialism. On the contrary, there was a tendency to promise all the people what the privileged classes had before the bourgeois revolution. According to Marx, the luxury consumption of the individual capitalist plays no role at all in economic considerations. Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 189 It is only against the background of this fact that one can under- stand why socialists feel themselves so dependent upon capitalists that they assume a bourgeois-capitalist revolution to be a necessary prelude to a socialist one. The two revolutions are just two sides of the same af- fair. Of course, there are purely tactical reasons for not getting too close to the problem. No one makes a revolution to be frugal, especially not poor people. But the reason that it is at all possible for socialists to suppress this problem is that they already assume certain bourgeois-capitalist traits of character as an obvious necessity amongst the people who are to shape socialism. This means that what is called capitalism is nothing other than a particular form of socialism or socialization: a form of socialization really just as deep-seated as the working class's socialization of industry's means of production and what complements it, namely, the socialization of the means of consumption, for a commodity is nothing other than a socialized means of consumption, a socialized article of utility. In this way the socialist revolution is nothing other than the completion of the capitalist revolution. The only element removed from capitalism by this completion is private savings, nothing else, for the true wealth in the course of life, its variability in consumption, has already been reduced through the capitalistic mass production of the same article. It is rare today to find a capitalist whose consumption exceeds a petty and bigoted life-form. The difference in the standard of living of a grand duke in the 17th century and a great capitalist in Rockefeller's period is grotesque and is becoming steadily greater. If socialists do not therefore need to deal with the socialization of the article of utility, it is simply because the capitalists have already saved them the labour. This socialization allowing the characterization of an article of utility as a commodity has the three following characteristics: a) Only articles of utility of a common interest to the members of society can find a sufficiently large market to be able to be used as commodi- ties. The ideal commodity is the article that everyone wants. b) Only an article of utility which is found in sufficiently large numbers of uniform examples can be recognized as a true commodity in the Marxist sense. Industry is only interested in serial production and the interest COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere rises with the number. To open the way for industrial production to such a socialization, capitalism has had to fight the idea of rarity value and make people believe that the special value of handcrafted and in- dividual production was a formalist superstition. This is the reason for Marx's remark about the enmity of capitalism to art, an enmity that has become absolute only in the socialist society, where one maintains that the reproduction is just as valuable as the original. c) Finally, capitalist production is characterized by the use of art to an immense extent for propaganda on behalf of popular mass produc- tion. The advertisement for socialized production is therefore only the natural consequence of the capitalists' advertisement for a socialized consumption. Socialists also avoid taking this economic significance of art into consideration. Therefore they cannot explain why there are types of wine in France that are half as dear as others even though they are just as good. The explanation is that because of the lack of advertise- ment they are not known and cannot therefore be sold for a high price. The lack of advertisement is due to the limited number of commodities. The container principle and the concept of form When we maintain that socialism excludes savings from the capitalist con- sumption system, then this is really just a propaganda cliché without mean- ing, for socialism is in reality constructed on the principle of absolute savings. This can only be understood if one includes the article of utility in the economic considerations, and this is probably the most important reason why socialists avoid it. We have been able to establish that the article of utility becomes a commodity in the instant the producer cannot use it himself and it thus becomes directly or immediately of no use to him, and therefore where the direct causal relationship between production and consumption is broken. Only the article of utility saved up in this way (placed in reserve) becomes a commodity, and this happens only in the event of a sufficiently large number of uniform articles of utility existing in the depot. This system of accumulation is the process of commodity genesis and is not eliminated by socialism. On the contrary, it has become an absolutely common principle for all production. The socialist system Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 191 is based upon a common accumulation of the whole production, without exception, before it is distributed. This occurs with the intention of achiev- ing complete control by such a distribution. No one up to now has analysed accumulation, which is the same as saving, in its own form, which is the form of the container. Accumulation is dialectical interplay between container and content. We have noticed that substance is often identified with the concept of content, but it is re- ally nothing more than process. Substance, in the form of a real content, means the latent power, restrained energy or matter available to be used in a process. But we have always perceived form as constancy or stability. A container's form is a form that exists only as a direct opposite to the content, its function being to prevent the content entering into a process except under controlled and severely limited conditions. In this way, the container form is thus something completely different from the form of the material in itself, where only the content's own form exists. It is only in the biological world that the container becomes an elemental function. The whole of biological life has, so to speak, occurred on the basis of a development of this opponent relationship between container form and the material's own form. It is this path that technology is continuing in an artificial way and is definitively systematizing through what we call the measurement processes, for any goal whatsoever is nothing other than a form of container, and what is called by that strange expression scientific control is only the establishment of a constant relationship between objec- tive forms and artificial container forms manufactured by man. These measurements or container forms are established as purely conventional oppositions to the forms being measured. Generally the con- tainer hides the content's own form and thus possesses a third form, the sensual form or the apparent form. In the discussion about forms, these three forms are never clearly separated. But all three forms are actual and make up sides of our experience of matter. They make up a scale of opposi- tions that allow us to distinguish between the matter of the unorganized world, the forms of biological nature and our own purely sensory world. But another world unites with these three actual forms, the world of imag- ined forms, formed by thought and fantasy, the symbolic forms. 192 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere Scientific and philosophical systems differ from each other in the way they confuse and mix up these forms, which, as forms, have nothing to do with each other, if the descriptions are shaped into clear and unambiguous concepts. If one can establish that there is an opposition between quality and quantity as two opposite characteristics of matter which is also the opposition that exists between units and similarities, then it is precisely the principle of container form which permits people to be fooled that this opposition can be abolished as the similarity and uniformity of the con- tent is neutralized by the container's function as a unit. By this one comes to the formula; the greater the unit or quality, the greater the similarity or quantity, as the law of probability abolishes the meaning of the differ- ences to the same degree as the units are increased in number. In the unit container-content the opposition between mass and amount is abolished. This storage of accumulation or box principle, this insurance or sav- ings principle, is the basis for the whole of the modern tin-can philosophy which sees progress as the tendeney towards greater and greater simi- larities. One has just to extend the container, to make it bigger and bigger, which isn't so difficult as it can be changed independently of the content because its form has nothing at all to do with the form of the content. This is the capitalist as well as the socialist principle of development and all their reflections about the relationship between form and content only serve the purpose of developing this tinned goods industry. Surplus and economics The word state means condition, the static, the quality or the form. The great discrepancy of Marxism is that it has not understood what the state in its innermost being is, that it is that purely biological form, the con- tainer. The biological cycle in nature is called ecology and it is the mistake of the Marxists not to have seen that unpolitical economies, ecology and the pure doctrine of the state are the same. Despite the opposite being maintained, socialism therefore becomes the society of the pure state. This cannot be otherwise. The day that the lie is rooted out, everything is true and then truth is abolished. Really this is the way that the socialists wish to abolish the state. Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 193 Marxism is the first philosophy that has stressed the economic problem as the most important, as the basic condition for human con- duct. In order to avoid the direct consequences of this theory's fusion with socialism, a distinction was discovered between higher Marxism and what was called vulgar Marxism. Vulgus means people, just like populus, and this more lowly regarded popular Marxism, which in reality is not taken into account, probably corresponds to what were called the vulgar or folk democracies in eastern Europe after the war. I here have to make this absolutely vulgar perception of Marxism my own, for I am an adherent of democracy. Since industrialization, economics and economic problems have played a steadily rising role in human activity. It is therefore appropriate for once to examine thoroughly what this new dominant concept truly covers. If one goes back to the original speculations about economics, one discovers that they limited themselves to only one of the three sides that today comprise economics, namely the ordering of expenditures in a housekeeping. Neither incomes nor savings were dealt with at that time. It was only later that the concept of economics was moved over to the savings achieved by limiting expenditures. These savings are called economizing. The question of from where the savings that are to be made or distributed are to come has not yet been posed. This undefined dimension is called wealth. However once the eco- nomic question is posed in its entirety as the relationship between income, saving and expenditure, the basis has been created for the development of what is called political economy, which deals with the question of the production, distribution and consumption of wealth. Expenditure - saving - income We have already indicated at the beginning that wealth has nothing to do with what is necessary for the maintenance of life, and thus with the economic in its true sense. Wealth is surplus, abundance, multiplicity or what modern economics calls surplus value. If this wealth had always been used from the dawn of time in accordance with its own essence, as waste, unprofitable consumption and superfluous luxury, then an economic 194 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere problem would never have existed, but neither would technical develop- ment. Economic problems first arise the moment wealth is saved, collected and stored, thus taking on the character of a reserve. It is through the ac- cumulation of wealth that one economizes. Thus this is immediately just a question of a choice between consumption and non-consumption and it is this problem that occupies the thoughts of most people. Karl Marx was the first person to move the main interest in economic considerations consistently over to the relationship between production and saving. He maintained that the saving of products from time im- memorial has been the source of all humanity's misfortunes and that the equivalence between human production and consumption is the formula for happiness, as it hinders the accumulation of wealth. Strangely enough this leads to the demand for absolute saving. A completely equable economics would thereby arise, a true econo- my, and a new economic science, no longer interested in wealth, but, on a purely economic basis, able to control the harmony between the various parts of the economic whole. This would make economics an absolute unit, a quality, by excluding the problem of variability or what we call the concept of value. Human economics has hereby become identified with biological ecology and can be perceived as natural, and an integrated part of the natural sciences. This socialist economics is far superior in its theory to political economics, because the latter systematically avoids analyzing the source of wealth. Its success has led to a pure doctrine of political eco- nomics hardly being found anywhere in the world anymore. Everything is consciously or unconsciously stamped with the principles of socialist economics. Economic policy versus political economy In order to understand this development, it is necessary to understand what the concept of politics really means in its basic essence. What in Hellenic city society was called polities, and is still the fundamental mean- ing today, are those actions carried out within a social community without any regard whatever to economic considerations. Politics is surplus fellow- ship or a social unit's anti-economie actions, the variability in the actions Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 195 of a social group. Gathering the description of all these unique and inces- santly changing events together is called the writing of history. Politics is thus the medium for introducing something new and unexpected into the pattern of actions of a whole group. This is called historical development and is a purely artificial or artistic phenomenon. The 'critique of political economy of Das Kapital is in no way a cri- tique of economics as such. On the contrary, it is a critique of the control of economics through the purely uneconomical activity called politics that is still frustrating all objective economic calculations. As an antidote to the political consequences, which are always uncertainty, instability, cri- ses, social and productive disorder, Marx suggests a socialist politics or more precisely an anti-political economic system, which must necessarily remove any possibility or necessity of making politics. As communists see that the state is used as a political instrument, the socialist movement reckons that one can dissolve the state by rooting out the class which dominates politics. The political goal of Marxism is therefore to replace the state with an inoffensive and automatic adminis- tration or a system of distribution of those things which could be of com- mon interest. As in socialist terms that is everything, this is to say that this administrative apparatus would control everything. Statistics robots will compute, guided by effective soundings of public opinion, in accord with the wishes or otherwise of the majority, and in the society of the future secure us a perfect and effective dictatorship of the majority, without the least possibility of fooling the people, that is to say, of making politics with them and thereby allowing people to dominate other people. The problem will be solved. There is just the snag that this technical administration which to- day has developed with growing speed all over the world to the east and the west, although it abolishes the politics of cultivating polities, does not at the same time, as was believed, abolish the state. On the contrary. Everything becomes the state. What was overlooked was the fact that the state is not and never has been a directly political instrument. The state's function has always been to avoid or at any rate diminish and even out the misfortunes that polities brought with it. The state was created to create 196 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere stability and this stability is precisely the same as what is called econom- is. The statesman in his pure form appears neither as emperor, nobleman nor capitalist. He comes into history under the name of major domus, the householder or the economist. In this category we will find all the really great statesmen of Europe. He is the economist, the bureaucrat, the first model for the statistics robot, even though he is encumbered with faults because he is only a human being and not a machine. If the socialist goal is itself in this way in absolute conflict with the progressive ideas of the working classes, this is because of this misunderstanding of the concept of the state, and their great illusion about being able to liberate themselves from this apparatus by perfecting it. In order to come to power, the socialists have worked out a political programme. They are therefore forced to accept the political perception of the state, a perception which contrasts completely with those perspec- tives in which Marx believed and which came from the theory of the swift dissolution of the state. They wish to utilize the apparatus of the state and thereby become themselves utilized for just the opposite of what they aspired to. In the Soviet Union, they believed that they were on the way to abolishing surplus value, but without knowing it they have created the greatest and most sensational completely unusable surplus value in the history of humanity, a star that could lift humanity above its attachment to the earth. The danger of this situation is that they themselves believe that they have done this of necessity, to defend themselves, and thus for military reasons. For this reason, they are blind to the fact that this new human possibility for expansion could not under any circumstances be coupled with the production of H-bombs, but on the contrary must defini- tively close this chapter of the history of humanity as the final mistake for this new perspective to have any possibility at all of development. Instead, however, bureaueracy swarms everywhere. As the true so- called power factors' within the areas of capitalism, socialism and com- munism, these snotty little functionaries are increasing more and more. Like the counter-revolutionary armies of socialism, they are spreading out over all branches of human existence, for bureaucracy is the container sys- tem of society. In the name of economic control, and to preserve their OWn Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 197 meaningless little existence, they sit by the innumerable serews and taps of the whole system of pipes. They have all the power' except one, the one able to change anything at all, and this is really the only power that counts. That the social justification for the sputnik and the atom bomb is the same everywhere, even though they open two quite opposite perspectives, is the fault of that ridiculous flock of politicians, economists and generals which in the USA carries the delicious name of the power elite. Value is inconstancy - quality is immutability What must now be the consequence of our new definition of value? Firstly it must be that we can maintain that value never under any circumstances can be a state of things, a constant. Thus value does not exist in the same way as things. Values arise and pass away. One cannot therefore own val- wes, as it is so nicely put. One can only own objects containing a latent value, a possible value. A substance is a possibility of value. Thus in theory all objects in the world possess values, if people are able to extract them. This is thus dependent exclusively upon people themselves. On the other hand, one could say that everything is value in itself, because everything is in process. This is just not in people's direct interest. All matter is in constant emergence and disappearance. Value can therefore be character- ized as an objective property of matter. Or, more correctly, if quality is the property of matter then value is the material characteristics or abilities, the dynamics of matter. The value of a form or a quality thus depends upon the ease with which one can dissolve the form and liberate its latent energies, whilst its character of quality consists in its resistance to this. The ease with which a quality is transformed to another quality is thus its value. The socialist attack upon the right of private ownership thus comes from the will to destroy a system that blocks the free play of values by making them private, which is to say socially inaccessible. However, the law of mechan- is says that a form of energy cannot be counteracted without the energy gathering itself after its liberation into an even more inaccessible form or quality, which thus becomes more valueless and precisely therefore of higher quality. It is this opposition to which the socialists close their eyes. 198 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere Fixed values do not exist. If they are fixed, that is to say that they are qualities and not values. In his analysis of industrial society, Marx demonstrates how variable capital is transformed to constant capital, that capital from being a value is transformed into a quality, and that it is precisely this transformation that shows that the transformation of the capitalist society into a socialist society is unavoidable and necessary. The socialists have shown their theoretical superiority for it is extremely easy to demonstrate this process purely scientifically. Value perceived as process can only be progressive or regressive. It is here that the socialists have allowed themselves to be fooled, for this means that value can only exist in the form of rising surplus value or depreciation, as inflation and deflation. The fixation of a form through a rising reproduction of the same form is the neutralization of its value, its transformation to quantity or 'Entfremdung. Uniform work is valueless - only new ideas create surplus value Marx maintains that what is called constant capital is the apparatus of production, and thus the industrial machinery. This apparatus is in itself unable to enter into a process, to create wealth or surplus value. It can only repeat the same production in the same tempo. The more industrial production develops its technical apparatus the more production becomes valueless as a commodity, until complete automation makes the product completely free of charge. In this way Marx has shown that it is not the ma- chines that produce value, in this case surplus value. Surplus value arises exclusively in variable capital and this variable capital is manpower, the human being. This statement makes Marx draw the conclusion that it is the worker closely where this surplus value really comes from. Where is the variable, the element of variation that makes the rising profit possible? It cannot exist in the abilities and diligence of the individual worker, his personal and professional characteristics. Neither capitalists nor socialists reckon with this in the industrial production. The workers are not exploited in their abilities or in the quality and value of the work, Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 199 but exclusively on the basis of the amount of work, the quantity. Work is measured in man-hours. As it is thus in the exploitation of man and not of machine that profit and wealth occurs, Marx perceives the content of value as the work put into it and the standard of measurement for the object is one hour's human work in capitalist as well as socialist industry. But even Marx was clear that it was not because the workers could be made to labour for longer and longer periods that profit rose. This has become even more distinct after the organization of the working class and the reduction in working time, for profit is still rising. How do the Marxists explain this condition? The explanation is enormously simple. The precondition for this explanation is that every producing human in the world has the right to what he himself produces. If this basis, which is Marxism's great, humanistic achievement in world history, is removed, then the whole meaning of Marxism vanishes. Now it is demonstrable that the industrial worker can produce far more than he himself consumes to maintain life, and with technical development he takes less and less time to achieve the production necessary for himself. As he nevertheless con- tinues to work at the same tempo, there is, however, a steadily increasing surplus of production, and as this is taken from him he is exploited to an ever increasing degree. If we now stick to the capitalist and socialist evaluation of industrial labour as a purely quantitative dimension, where human characteristics play no role, then it is also quite obvious that the purely mechanical work could be carried out to a greater and greater degree by machines and thus carried out free of charge. Then the conclusion becomes in reality that in principle mechanical work is valueless. Within mechanics the concept of work is the product of quantity or tension. If it is possible to disregard tension as a factor in industrial labour and to perceive labour purely quantitatively, then this is because the whole of the factory installation keeps production in a constant tension common to all. This is the reason that there is an equivalence between one man-hour and another. No variability of any significance is possible in the tempo of work. Thus the machine represents the inertia or the resistance to changes in the working process. The valuelessness of labour is conditioned by this 200 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere constancy in tension. If one man-hour is equivalent to another man-hour, then all human labour is free of charge or valueless. This is the weakness in the Marxist theory of exploitation, for if industrial labour is without value in itself, then the worker represents a higher human value than other hu- man classes, not as maintained because of his work achievement, but on the contrary because he has preserved his human values intact despite the work, because these values are not utilized or introduced in the process. If there is something correct in Marxism's theory of value, it is in no way connected with work. If the measurement of value is perceived as man-hours and this has nothing to do with work, then it simply has to be the human being's time and nothing else that is the variable capital to which he himself owns the property rights. Surplus value is not created in the work but in the variability of the work. In reality this is well known. Movement, change, and not the price dimension, creates the profit. But where does this variability come from? It cannot come from the machines working with clockwork precision. It cannot come from the workers either, who labour with their accustomed constancy. It is just as unlikely to come from the capitalist or the manufac- turer who makes the factory yield its utmost, which is also constant. It is thus the transformation of industry itself as such that creates surplus value. Therefore surplus value is, as we have seen, the result of a rising accelera- tion of production. But who creates this acceleration? It is those who have a new idea, those who discover new machines and processes, the inventors. Here we are at the true source of rising surplus value, human ingenuity and imagination. A new invention has already lost its ability to create surplus value the day all the competitors own the machine, when it is common to all. The socialist countries have been able to overlook this question because they have been able to exploit the exploiters in the capitalist countries for their inventions. But this problem has become topical today. Time - space - and event Trade is exchange. Transport is displacement. These two processes are basically different. Unilateral or what is called irreversible transport, and thus a transport where neither interehange nor return transport tales Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 201 place, is called progress. Progress is thus pure transport. This progressive movement is necessary in order for a movement to be oriented. Without it, a rudder has no function at all, even though a boat without a rudder is also oriented by the advance of the water, as it drifts with the current. In order to give possibilities of orientation, progressive movement must be movement collected from within in relation to the surrounding element. Progress is neither necessary, absolute nor ideal. Einstein explains that a uniform movement in space is without orientation, and that in a space speeding off into outer space we can only locate up and down, as we do on the earth's surface, if the speed is still rising. This explains why what is called general progress also appears as a general increase in speed, a con- stant acceleration. The whole of our conscious orientation is conditioned by this rising acceleration, which unites our universal experiences with our most primary conditions and thereby creates our ability to experience the connection called causality. If the idealistic belief in progress is bankrupt stock today, this, however, in no way abolishes the significance progress still has for us. We have just lost certain illusions and must in the future base our perception of the whole question upon quite new principles, which have to be combined with the three basic factors, time, space and event. We have to demonstrate that time becomes space and space time. We now know that a star observed at a distance of 40 light years is just as old in time as the distance is long. To observe through the instrument of time or of space is thus a simple interchange. Time is change which can be regarded as a progressive movement in space whilst space appears as a constant which can only be observed if one is participating in that movement called time. Thus neither time nor space possesses an actuality, existence or value outside this change or process, that is to say, outside the active combination called the time-space continuum. The action of time-space is the process and this process is in itself the transformation of time to space and space to time. These trans- formations are called events. The rigidity, inertia, constancy or quality in matter rises with the speed of movement to the degree that one could put forward the claim that quality and speed are the same. Value is thus found not in the speed Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 201 place, is called progress. Progress is thus pure transport. This progressive movement is necessary in order for a movement to be oriented. Without it, a rudder has no function at all, even though a boat without a rudder is also oriented by the advance of the water, as it drifts with the current. In order to give possibilities of orientation, progressive movement must be movement collected from within in relation to the surrounding element. Progress is neither necessary, absolute nor ideal. Einstein explains that a uniform movement in space is without orientation, and that in a space speeding off into outer space we can only locate up and down, as we do on the earth's surface, if the speed is still rising. This explains why what is called general progress also appears as a general increase in speed, a con- stant acceleration. The whole of our conscious orientation is conditioned by this rising acceleration, which unites our universal experiences with our most primary conditions and thereby creates our ability to experience the connection called causality. If the idealistic belief in progress is bankrupt stock today, this, however, in no way abolishes the significance progress still has for us. We have just lost certain illusions and must in the future base our perception of the whole question upon quite new principles, which have to be combined with the three basic factors, time, space and event. We have to demonstrate that time becomes space and space time. We now know that a star observed at a distance of 40 light years is just as old in time as the distance is long. To observe through the instrument of time or of space is thus a simple interchange. Time is change which can be regarded as a progressive movement in space whilst space appears as a constant which can only be observed if one is participating in that movement called time. Thus neither time nor space possesses an actuality, existence or value outside this change or process, that is to say, outside the active combination called the time-space continuum. The action of time-space is the process and this process is in itself the transformation of time to space and space to time. These trans- formations are called events. The rigidity, inertia, constancy or quality in matter rises with the speed of movement to the degree that one could put forward the claim that quality and speed are the same. Value is thus found not in the speed 202 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere but in the transformation of the speed, and the less this speed is the easier the speed and the direction can be changed. The general acceleration thus creates a rising progress but is in itself the tendency to greater and greater inertia. This is the double-edged effect of the general tendency of progress. A real development of value thus cannot be identical with rising devalua- tion or acceleration even if it is dependent upon the same. A person's lifetime or span of years is his personal property. But this property only becomes value if this lifetime is realized, and the realization of a lifetime happens through its variation, its changeability. Therefore the perfect industrial worker realizes nothing of his life during the work- ing process, as this is completely eventless. Seen in purely human terms, working time in its industrial form is active waiting time. Therefore the abolition of the right to private activity only makes the person more and more valueless. This is the reason why socialization can only have a stand- ard of value in the activation of humanity's leisure time, if socialization is to have any human purpose, something which is not necessary. Leisure time is therefore the only thing that has value in modern society and the modern form of exploitation is concentrated upon precisely this one point: how can we steal the individual's free time from him? This is the greatest problem of modern state politics. Progress and change. Value is transport That I bother at all to concern myself with something as deadly boring as economics and into the bargain do myself the even more killing inconven- ience of translating what I have written and then publishing it in Danish, then, of course, this is from the conviction that this ought to be enormously significant to the Scandinavian people. Whether this is right or wrong is not my business. With me any responsibility stops at the purely personal question of conscience, to get it said and especially to get it said at a mo- ment where it could, if wished, be included in the economic deliberations which it seems are to bring in their wake deep-seated political changes in Scandinavia's relationship to the surrounding world, and because these political deliberations are said to have been concluded upon a purely eco- nomic basis. Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 203 As I set out my theory of value in connection with my theory about the natural order, it is very evident that this is created from an analysis of the Scandinavian cultural tradition as compared with other cultural traditions, and that it is an attempt to take the fundamental Scandinavian attitude to these problems. If I therefore make the assertion that value is the transport of forces and not the size of these forces, nor their quantity, then this is a direct critique of economic policy in postwar Scandinavia, for, by tying itself to the belief in the superiority of dimension and quantity over variability, this policy has denied the economic principle which I am setting out here as a Scandinavian contribution to the problem. If this theory does not have general validity, then there is always a chance that it has Scandinavian validity. The unique context of Scandinavian cultural development from the Stone Age to the present day makes it enormously simple to demonstrate that our periods of full bloom have always coin- cided with those periods when we have concentrated all our wealth, our surplus of human enthusiasm around the problem of transport. This is especially apparent in the Nordic Bronze Age, the art of which is one long tribute to the holy transport, and it is apparent in the Viking period, where the positive element was not the plundering, rapine or trade but transport and especially the transport of precious goods. We have already indicated previously that the great humanistic discovery that Marx made was that only in humanity, never in machines or instruments, arises wealth or surplus value. This is the reason that human transport, especially if it is superfluous or unnecessary, is the best source of human wealth. This can be studied in the immense pilgrim transactions of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, which created all our wonderful church art. The same is also true today where, with its rising surplus, the car industry is on the way to making car traffic impossible. I have found, however, the most shattering commentary to what is being prepared today in Scandinavian politics in Palle Lauring's fantas- tically clear analysis of Scandinavia's economic decline at the end of the Middle Ages in his book about The Sons of Valdemar and the Union. Every Scandinavian politician ought to read the section on our child- ishly rash indifference to the transport problem: our self-important Viking 204 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere conservatism and chivalrous enthusiasm tor the jata morgana of the German regional farmer. History repeats itself. Nothing is learnt. Nothing is forgotten. I will not go into historical considerations here. The only thing I would indicate is that a people that voluntarily renounces valuing what is the most precious element in its own being, in which it has shown itself to be superior to all other peoples over millennia, has thereby sinned not only against itself but against all humanity, which develops precisely through the wealth of differing abilities and contributions to the development of humanity by the various peoples and cultures. Only by the development of this our special ability are Danes and Scandinavians as a whole in the same boat. This is the only boat we have. Without it we are wreckage and bodies washed ashore. And with uncomfortable clarity this too can be read in our history. To an overwhelming degree our fame abroad is unfortunately a stressing of this side of our existence and hardly without reason. However, this is outweighed by Scandinavians having, on the strength of our special culture, all the natural preconditions for being the best and most secure transporters in the world. Who owns whom? Let us now sort right from wrong. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx has shaped a scientific analysis of the economic character of the commodity. The treatment of this concrete subject is a scientific achievement which can never be shaken. In this limited area, Karl Marx has realized a scientific knowledge that corresponds to Heisenberg's demand that it has universal validity and can be neither changed nor improved: At the same time, with the economic perspective gradually being realized more and more, as Marx foresaw, the political programme of Marxism has lost its interest. In the focus of events, it has already become past and history. A third value in this work, which can never be dimin- ished, is hereby liberated, the artistic value, the literary human value. In human sympathy, even, I dare to say, in poetic and dramatic force, this work surpasses most of what the poets of the same period have de- picted. If, through the rich knowledge and the careful documentation, one is able to decipher the terrible tension of this striking document of its time, Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy 205 then one cannot avoid seeing life in a different way. I mention this not to appear as a literary critic, but as just the truism it is for me as it must be for all humanity. In this area too the value of Das Kapital is universal. It forms a stage in the history of humanity. In its demand for the protection of the weak against the thoughtless and violent exploitation of the strong, it is an accusation and at the same time a rule of conduct in direct continuation of the doctrine of the New Testament, which it outdoes at exactly the same point that Christ outdid the Pharisees of the Old Testament. This is why Christianity is just as little able to condemn Marxist socialism with any right as the Pharisees were able to shape a legal judgement over Christ. In the struggle against social- ism, the Christian church has had to use the same means as the Pharisees used against Christ. The Pharisees' demand for forgiveness was outdone by Christ. Marx simply maintains that no individual has the right to draw up accounts over his efforts in the community. Everything must be forgiven when everything is owed by all to all. Against this demand, the champions of Christianity stand just as disarmed as the Pharisees did before Christ. This is why the principle of socialism is spreading all over the world. 'Communism is a classless societal system with uniform ownership by the people of the means of production and complete equality of the members of society; it says in the Soviet Union's Communist Party pro- gramme. This resembles what is also in the American constitution and no one can ignore the fact that the means of production in the West are being more and more socialized. But what about the exploitation of the strong by the weak? Verdi og skonomi. Kritik af den akonomiske politik og udbytningen af det enestäende (Copenhagen: Skandinavisk Institut for Sammenlignende Vandalisme & Borgen, 1962), pp. 6-43. Translated by Peter Shield