RUTHLESS CRITICISM

Shouldn’t criticism be constructive, helping to improve what it criticizes? Do we just want to be negative? It is not our program to contribute well-intentioned suggestions for the success of what we criticize:

• that people have to work for an employer because they need money to survive, and anybody who seeks employment has to live under the constant pressure of making themselves completely suitable for the demands that a capitalist economy makes on them;

• that if they lose their lousy job they don't have enough money to live on and need to find a new job right away – because employees gain nothing by working for others and their poverty is never escaped;

• that this endangered existence is the necessary basis for wage labor;

• that this dependence is reproduced on a worldwide level as the whole planet is subsumed to its logic and there is more and more absolute impoverishment as the free-market economy sorts out those who are useless for it;

• that the entire globe is analyzed for what is good for business, so that some areas are useful for industry and four fifths of the world have no other use than supplying raw materials;

• that nature and the sources of life are also resources for business, so the air, water, food supply and even the weather are ruined in a sustainable way.

These are not unfortunate side effects, “problems” that our politicians must continue to work on. The causes are also not:

• something called “neoliberal,” “financialized,” “hyper-,” or other hyphenated capitalisms;

• a moral defect of the capitalists called “profit greed”;

• corrupt and irresponsible politicians;

• and certainly not the unwillingness in each of us “to begin with one's self” in order to improve the world.

All these are inevitable consequences of an economic system, the so-called free market economy, which aims at nothing as trivial as providing for human needs, but only and exclusively the accumulation of capital.

Because one cannot make this system better – on the contrary, it already functions too well! – we have no suggestions for improvement. We insist that these problems exist because of the system.