Re: [AG-GOuFP] "Schon wieder"

[moneymind <moneymind AT gmx.de>]

> Bürgerliche Ökonomen der erste Stunde haben es geahnt. John Stuart Mill 
> formulierte die Überzeugung, kapitalistisches Wachstum sei wichtig, 
> erreiche jedoch irgendwann die Grenze, an der weiteres Wachstum nicht 
> erstrebenswert sei und man zur Kontemplation zurückfinden müße, um 
> Zeit zu haben für sich und die Natur."


Siehe Karl Marx im "Kapital":

/"Das Reich der Freiheit beginnt in der Tat erst da, wo das Arbeiten, das 
durch Not und äußere Zweckmäßigkeit bestimmt ist, aufhört; es liegt 
also der Natur der Sache nach jenseits der Sphäre der eigentlichen 
materiellen Produktion.

Wie der Wilde mit der Natur ringen muss, um seine Bedürfnisse zu 
befriedigen, um sein Leben zu erhalten und zu reproduzieren, so muss es 
der Zivilisierte, und er muss es in allen Gesellschaftsformen und unter 
allen möglichen Produktionsweisen.

Mit seiner Entwicklung erweitert sich dies Reich der Naturnotwendigkeit, 
weil die Bedürfnisse sich erweitern; aber zugleich erweitern sich die 
Produktivkräfte, die diese befriedigen. Die Freiheit in diesem Gebiet 
kann nur darin bestehen, dass der vergesellschaftete Mensch, die 
assoziierten Produzenten, diesen ihren Stoffwechsel mit der Natur 
rationell regeln, unter ihre gemeinschaftliche Kontrolle bringen, statt 
von ihm als von einer blinden Macht beherrscht zu werden; ihn mit dem 
geringsten Kraftaufwand und unter den ihrer menschlichen Natur am 
würdigsten und adäquatesten Bedingungen vollziehen. Aber es bleibt dies 
immer in Reich der Notwendigkeit. Jenseits desselben beginnt die 
menschliche Kraftentwicklung, die sich als Selbstzweck gilt, das wahre 
Reich der Freiheit, das aber nur auf jenem Reich der Notwendigkeit als 
seiner Basis aufblühen kann.

Die Verkürzung des Arbeitstags ist die Grundbedingung.“ K. Marx, 
Kapital III, MEW 25, 828./

Oder John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren 
(geschrieben 1930, auf dem Höhepunkt der Weltwirtschaftskrise):

/"Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his 
real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing 
economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound 
interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them 
into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can 
keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself 
and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to 
enjoy the abundance when it comes.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to 
the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been 
trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for 
the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, 
especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the 
beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour 
and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the 
world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our 
advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of 
us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed 
disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but 
no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been 
set them.

I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found 
bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it 
to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than 
theirs.

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody 
will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more 
things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to 
have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall 
endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there 
is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts 
or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For 
three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! 
(...)

Perhaps it is not an accident that the race which did most to bring the 
promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has 
also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly 
loves this most purposive of human institutions.

I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain 
principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, 
that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is 
detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane 
wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value 
ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those 
who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, 
the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in 
things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred 
years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and 
foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and 
precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can 
lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest 
change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for 
human beings in the aggregate. But, of course, it will all happen 
gradually, not as a catastrophe. Indeed, it has already begun. The course 
of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger 
classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have 
been practically removed. The critical difference will be realised when 
this condition has become so general that the nature of one's duty to 
one's neighbour is changed. For it will remain reasonable to be 
economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for 
oneself.

The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be 
governed by four things—our power to control population, our 
determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to 
entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the 
concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin 
between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily 
look after itself, given the first three.

Meanwhile there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our 
destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as 
the activities of purpose.

But, chiefly, do not let us overestimate the importance of the economic 
problem, or sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater 
and more permanent significance. It should be a matter for 
specialists—like dentistry. If economists could manage to get themselves 
thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that 
would be splendid!" 
(http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-essaysinpersuasion/keynes-essaysinpersuasion-00-h.html 
)/