Preface

I. The purpose of work in a market economy: Money for those who have to work and those who have others work

1. Equating benefit with property: The private power of money as the principle of society’s division of labor
2. The two sides of gainful employment: Applying one’s own labor to create others’ property — Applying others’ labor to increase one’s own property

II. The profitability imperative — or: Subsuming the productive force of labor under its effect on business success

1. Work under the regime of others’ property
2. How employers are very reserved when it comes to valuing work but most demanding when making use of it

III. The role of technological progress in the market economy — or: The productive force of labor as a weapon in companies’ competition for returns

1. Society lives on and for the capitalists’ competition to draw on its ability to pay
2. The decisive weapon in competition between companies: Technologically increasing the productive force of labor to dispense with the need for wages and wage earners

Digression on the relationship between forces of production and relations of production under capitalism

3. Technological progress and its consequences for labor — or: Capital holds its source in contempt and treats it accordingly

IV. Working under the credit system: More and more work to do, it has to bring more and more profit

1. From companies using credit to compete for the most profit-making labor, to companies deploying profit-making labor to compete for credit
2. The particular politico-economic nature of the financial business, and what it achieves: Setting economic growth free by socializing the private power of money
3. The necessary collateral damage of economic growth unleashed by credit: after the boom comes the slump
4. Credit’s contempt for its basis, wage labor — and labor’s system-conforming response: helpless requests for employment

V. The world market (1): The price and productive force of labor when compared between nations

1. Competition across national borders: Businessmen see how they are dependent on the productivity of their location’s total capital and enlist labor to deal with the consequences
2. The one world of the market economy: Multinationals take advantage of the national conditions of profit-bringing labor, thereby creating a global proletariat together with a “precariat” and a “world hunger problem”

VI. The world market (2): Work and poverty as a means for state competition

1. From the government goal of “full employment” to nations competing for the world’s profit-bringing labor
2. National business policy (I): Competition between states over the value of their national money
3. National business policy (II): How states cope with their competitive troubles and crises at labor’s expense

© GegenStandpunkt 2023