Neue Debatte - Special Edition - Long Essay on Left Strategy #002 - 04/2017 | Page 69

12 Strategic main goal: Eliminate financial capitalism
12 Strategic main goal: Eliminate financial capitalism
12.1 The Taboo
What is the ultimate question of all questions in history for econom-
ics and politics, the mother of all social questions since civilisation
dawned? It is about a Taboo nobody ever has broken without being
haunted by all demons of the ruling classes in history: The Taboo is
about the question who creates the material wealth in society. Who
works for the livelihood of mankind? And who does not but makes a
splendid living of it nonetheless? In every civilised city-state society
and early divine kingdoms which came up in Bronze Age times
around 5000 years ago, ruling upper classes exploited the masses of
lower class producers, i.e. took possession of their output without
compensation, leaving them hardly enough to subsist. They were so-
phisticated social parasites, themselves been completely dependent
on their providing hosts while the working people could have done
well without them, but must never get aware of this fact: hence the
Taboo.
I cannot list all psychological and religious methods and abstruse
theories that were invented in the past to maintain and perform the
Taboo. Sometimes it was broken by courageous men, for example by
the apostle Paul when teaching the early Christian communities “that
if any would not work, neither should he eat.” 50 And there was the
insurgent priest John Ball who asked in a sermon addressing the re-
bels of the Great Peasants’ Rising in England 1381: “When Adam
delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The economic
sciences emerged parallel to the rising economic significance of the
bourgeois Third Estate. The Taboo was questioned openly firstly by
the classical economists in favour to explain rationally how the
“Wealth of Nations” (Adam Smith) was produced and secondly by
Karl Marx who disclosed convincingly the tabooed secret of how capi-
tal “works”; how a capitalist manages to extract surplus values off the
wage workers without himself being forced to labour. In a sense, the
organized Marxist and socialist labour movements 51 handed to offi-
50 NT, 2 Thess. 3:10.
51 I have mentioned above the Socialist International of 1889: see p. 17.
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