ABSTRACT
When Karl Marx investigated how social wealth was produced and distributed in his time, he discovered a strange entity that keeps itself alive only by continuous growth and by progressively transforming the entire world to fulfil its life requirements, namely capital. Marx was convinced that, as this entity grows, it ‘saps the original sources of all wealth: the soil and the labourer’.2 The production and distribution of social wealth under capitalist conditions was for him technicalized and scientific production. He noted that it destroyed all forms of a purely natural ‘metabolism’ between human beings and nature, while at the same time science and technology endowed this exchange process with a ‘form adequate for full human development’, operating as a ‘systematic law of regulating social production’. Although, according to Marx, this transforms the instrument of labour into a ‘means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer’, and transforms ‘the social combination and organization of labour processes’ into ‘an organized mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence’, Marx nevertheless shared the faith of the rising bourgeoisie of his time in science and progress, and was firmly convinced that the expansion of the capitalist mode of production would be accompanied by the development of world society towards ever higher forms. For him, capital was not only an exploitive but also a civilizing force. His revolutionary optimism was rooted in the firm conviction that capitalist modernization would reimburse humanity a thousandfold in multiplied and enriched form for that which had been stolen from labourers and nature. Behind capital, the revolutionary thinker discovered something much more powerful and valuable: human productivity and creativity. Marx hoped that the dynamics of capitalist expansion would open the pathway to the realm of liberty, to the socialist society of the free and the equal. Today such tidings echo like dreams from a lost world.
