Freddie from Barmen is a greatly undervalued thinker. I wonder what would have happened it he had not met Marx—or if he had not decided that Marx was smarter than he was: Friedrich Engels (1843): Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/outlines.htm: 'The productive power at mankind’s disposal is immeasurable. The productivity of the soil can be increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science.... Capital increases daily; labour power grows with population; and day by day science increasingly makes the forces of nature subject to man.... Here a new contradiction in economics comes to light. The economist’s “demand” is not the real demand; his “consumption” is an artificial consumption. For the economist, only that person really demands, only that person is a real consumer, who has an equivalent to offer for what he receives...
...Every adult produces more than he himself can consume... children are like trees which give superabundant returns.... Each worker ought to be able to produce far more than he needs and that the community, therefore, ought to be very glad to provide him with everything he needs; one must consider a large family to be a very welcome gift for the community. But the economist, with his crude outlook, knows no other equivalent than that which is paid to him in tangible ready cash. He is so firmly set in his antitheses that the most striking facts are of as little concern to him as the most scientific principles.
We destroy the contradiction simply by transcending it. With the fusion of the interests now opposed to each other there disappears the contradiction between excess population here and excess wealth there; there disappears the miraculous fact (more miraculous than all the miracles of all the religions put together) that a nation has to starve from sheer wealth and plenty; and there disappears the crazy assertion that the earth lacks the power to feed men...
#noted #2020-02-02
