The Twelfth Hour of Capitalism by Kuno Renatus

Author:Kuno Renatus [Renatus, Kuno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000693591
Google: 5EDCDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49130434
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

TOWARDS A CONCLUSION

We recall that we found Dalbergs "fundamental impulse" inadequate. The shifting of a purchasing power of two milliards of gold marks from one State to another was not, in our view, a sufficient cause to account for the troubles of the world's trade and industry. This shifting would soon have corrected itself, and after a few disturbances due to the readjustment it would have left scarcely a trace. We asked where the amplifying energy could come from that would so multiply the shiftings of the two milliards as to make them responsible for losses of many times that amount in the world market.

Now we have discovered the amplifying energy. It was not provided by the shifting of the two milliards from country to country, but in what thereafter happened to the two milliards within the economic system of the receiving State, and also in the other shiftings, many times greater, that arose from the internal debt service. It is not enough to have regard only to the external debt service.

The internal debt service

1. releases the milliards which had been tied up in the war loans. These milliards seek reinvestment.

2. On the other hand, the foreign claims are far from sufficing to meet the internal debt service, and the bulk of the expenditure on this must be withdrawn from the country's trade and industry through the taxation of productive industry.

It is, in very truth, no new discovery that production has been burdened since the War with an extraordinary increase of taxation. German employers usually make the burdens of social welfare organization responsible for the burden of taxation and accordingly demand a retrenchment of the social organizations. America, however, has no social organization of the German type, and yet the taxation burdens of trade and industry have grown similarly.—Regarding the question from the point of view of capital, the productive capital of the world has to provide out of its yield not only the sums required for its own interest dues, but also the sums for the interest and amortisation payments on the dead capital of past war loans. It has thus to try to extract a higher income yield from the process of production. In other words, to try to increase the yield of production in relation to wages. The only way out seemed to be offered by rationalization.

In our criticism of the theories of the crisis we asked whether the economic leaders had completely taken leave of their intelligence when they cried out for increased production and urged on rationalization without asking whether the market for the increased production was assured—and now had the spectacle of only a fraction of the newly provided apparatus of production able to be used, and the outlay on the costly plant cursed as a blunder. We came to that question in consequence of a theory of the crisis which represented rationalization simply as a gift of technical progress—a progress which this time had unmasked to reveal itself as a devil after it had been worshipped throughout the nineteenth century as a god.

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