Competition of Capitalists
Overview

§ 1 What the industrial capitalist does

Accumulation of money as the purpose of production — Wage costs as a barrier to profitability, work performance as the means for it — Extra-economic preconditions for business, which bases its economic necessity and power on what political force achieves

§ 7 Growth

Growth: The capitalist’s natural need, dictated by his source of revenue — The turnover of capital: The necessary requirement for additional capital as well as the source of it; Profit is reinvested, thereby guaranteeing income — This means more work, for the industrialist as well; The profession of ‘executive officer’

§ 13 Reducing unit costs

The dictate of the market: reduce unit costs — The remedy: even more advanced capital so that fixed costs lead to a saving of labor costs — From the market price determining the rate of profit, to the profit-rate calculation determining the selling price — The method: radically changing the production process, and systematically applying the formula to the use of wage labor and its payment

§ 19 Concentration of capital in one hand

Size of capital: a company’s prime means of survival, because it is the weapon that excludes others from using the market and its ability to pay — Growth before and instead of competing? Or after and without? In any case, it is clear that the capital of others is a barrier that has to be removed — “Fight” for investment spheres — Monopoly; Expropriation

§ 25 The right of the capitalists to success, and to the world as a condition for their success, recognized by the guardian of rights and set on its feet: Recruitment of capital by and for the supreme power

Capital growth: A question of power

§ 2 The market

Not an economic system, but the circulation of capital — Competition over achieving profitable prices — Supply and demand: On the free play of these forces and what it is about — The “job market”

§ 8 Expansion of the market

Trusting in buyers’ ability to pay, and competing for it — How the merchant class serves the business of industrialists, and the price of this service: A new front in the competition for sales and market price — Liquidity for a growing market: Replacing money by money tokens; Bank (deposit) money — How the need for more work is served in a cost-saving way

§ 14 The market: Where capitalist progress does its work and is put to the test

Demands on the market, effect on the market: Price, mass, and speed of the turnover of goods pass their judgment on the capitalistic usefulness of productivity — Competing for an attribute called ‘competitiveness’ — A progress-geared labor market through and for a progress-geared capital growth — The public’s buying power: both demanded and restricted; two top products of the market: customer and advertising

§ 20 The struggle for control over the market

Strategies for overcoming free competition — How commerce contributes to the fight to control the market — Sovereignty over the price of labor, undisturbed — This is not the exclusive control over the market that is desired

§ 3 The bourgeois state

Within its borders

A monopoly of force for free competition — Freedom and equality: The protection of person and property — A constitutional state for all classes of citizens — The economic means of state power

Beyond its borders

Sovereignty beyond the state’s borders: Territorializing business — On the independence of the people — Military

§ 9 State tasks

Within its borders

Capitalists’ demand that society serve their needs for growth: An agenda for the public power — The first service of the bourgeois lawgiver: equipping the money interests of citizens with the necessary quantity of proper force according to their class position — First requirements for the national budget: The country and its people must be tailored to capitalists’ drive for growth — State money with a fixed exchange rate, for the liquidity requirements of money dealing; The first necessity for a national treasury — Ensuring sufficient state funds while sparing capital and its growth (1): The tax system

Beyond its borders

Contracts between force monopolists for capital growth beyond national borders — Government revenue from the commercial success of foreign capitalists: Tariffs — How states settle cross-border trade between each other, and the second function of the national treasury — Subjecting the globe to the necessities of growth: Imperialism & colonialism

§ 15 Growth through progress: a new catalog of tasks for the lawgiver

Within its borders

Legal assistance for the competition over progress through technology, in the factory and on the market — A public foundation for science and technology — Legal conditions for using society’s workforce to promote growth — Forming and maintaining a serviceable working class — Dealing with troublesome protest from “the grass roots”: rejection but also recognition, and treatment as a collective welfare case — Making sure that capital, land ownership, buying power, and the environment work together to serve the common good — How the state budget divides the working class

Beyond its borders

Benefit and disadvantage of progress in international competition — Growth policy based on protective tariffs and free trade — Modern location policy — The imperative to be competitive, and the conditional validity of local patriotism in capitalism

§ 21 The state: Guardian of a capital location

Within its borders

How the state objects to cartels, monopolization, and the like: Principles and practice — Granting a license for the power struggle between the classes

Beyond its borders

The state makes corrections to its anti-monopolistic economic policy in its capacity as a ‘trading nation’ — Monopoly competition on global markets leads the state to identify and drop any misplaced consideration for welfare cases

§ 4 Commercial credit

Continuity and effectiveness of productive money accumulation as a liquidity problem and its solution — Trust in competitors’ continuous business success as a source of required liquidity, i.e., as a means of achieving anticipated business success — Productive force, and risk, of creditors and debtors trusting in the business of the whole business fraternity

§ 10 Loan capital

Lever for growth by separating the expansion of production from the turnover of capital — The equation ‘capital = credit’: The two-sided business with debt — Pitfalls of the cooperation between industrial capital and bank capital — The means of circulation: From money tokens to credit tokens

§ 16 Power and powerlessness of credit in the competition for competitiveness

Necessity and function of credit in capitalist producers’ competitive struggle for increased capital productivity — Speculative reality in the development of productive forces: The banking industry directs a competition that causes selection. Insolvency and bankruptcy

§ 22 The fusion of capital and credit

It is not only such governmental support that makes it unnecessary for capitalists to put up a real fight to attain the capital size they are after. Credit stands them in better stead — Joint stock and its company — The stock exchange — The company as an object of speculation; modern mergers — Not the end of competition, but rather preparations for it and additions to it — Instead of controlling the market, being indifferent to it — Crisis

§ 5 State support of competition that makes use of credit: legal protection for property endangered by the use of payment promises as money

§ 11 The state as creator of a national credit money

Within its borders

How the lawgiver recognizes and controls the use of debt as money and capital — The state as “bank of banks” with a “banknote monopoly”: Guarantor of doing private business with debt, and autonomous credit creator — Inflation (1): Necessary collateral damage from credit-financed growth — Ensuring state funds (2): State credit-tokens with the quality of money as the source of government debt capacity; Inflation (2)

Beyond its borders

Foreign trade on the basis of credit monies created autonomously by states — The central bank ensures convertibility of currencies — The state’s purpose for cross-border trade: Mass and quality of national credit money

 § 17 The state as promoter, user, and guardian of the credit system

Within its borders

New tasks for the law: Separating conscientious risk from fraud, and properly handling the regular exceptions to the required growth — Public debt to protect and preserve an effective credit system

Beyond its borders

“Strong” or “weak” currency: The abstract summary of the nation’s world-market successes and failures, and its significance — Everything for a “strong” currency

§ 6 Necessarily ‘false consciousness’ about money, profit, property, market, and state; both ordinary and scientific

Basic pattern of how people acknowledge that source of income, capital: they invoke achievements that have nothing to do with, but endorse, its purpose — The ‘dark sides’ as a problem: poor/rich, distribution, scarcity/excessiveness — Business administration: The market economy as an inventory of factors that a company plans with or puts to use, i.e., has to decide about in line with its “economic efficiency principle”

§ 12 The dogma of growth as the good purpose of all economic activity, and the solution to all the problems it creates

“Growth” in popular thinking: Growth is great, since it provides more of everything you need — So it's good if money works too … — … but bad when there is inflation, which is the government’s fault

“Growth” in academic thinking: Business administration does its own calculations to show how a company is supposed to calculate — while growing — Economists rave about I = S — On the contribution of foreign trade to growth & prosperity

§ 18 Success alongside failure, the standpoint of real and imagined victims & beneficiaries as an opinion-forming productive force

“Mismanagement” is popular business theory — “Rapacious” vs. “productive” capital is an entrenched part of cultural heritage — One is allowed to ask if the government should really permit some things, much less support them — It is lamentable that jobs end up elsewhere — Equally lamentable: the state of health of the environment, but saving it is compatible firstly with the economy, and secondly with technology, whose progress nobody wants to stop — The bottom line: The ethics of capitalism