Page 187 - Contribution To Phenomenology

180 ULLRICH MELLE

engendered by the ingenious mechanism of the free market and the
capitaUst money-economy. The driving motive in this economy is the
transformation of natural resources and Uving labor into goods that can
be sold on the market for a profit, and which profit is then reinvested
to create more profit and so on. The use-value of the goods and the
satisfaction of concrete needs is only a side-effect in this money and
profit-oriented economy. Freedom of the market means freedom from
arbitrary intervention in the autonomous functioning of the
market-mechanism. It is the inexorable competition of the free market
to which all participants are submitted that sets everything in motion.
Capitalism is, in effect, an economy of war. The market is a battlefield,
markets are conquered, competitors are annihilated. It is the universal,
always present compulsion of competition which leads to the total
mobilization of the productive forces of human and non-human nature
alike.
Real existing socialism attempted to replace the anonymous compulsion
of competition in a modern money-economy by arbitrary bureaucratic
steering and control. The result was, in the words of Robert Kurz, a
German Marxist, "a Capitalism, whose blood-circulation had been
interrupted, whose circulation then had to be permanently mobilized by
a heart-lung-machine.'^^ The human and ecological costs of this attempt
of a planned money-economy have been horrific.
Modernization has been and still is in many parts of the world a very
painful process for the subjects who are to be transformed into modern
money-subjects. Traditional value-systems, age old forms of life and
traditional community-structures are destroyed, the emancipated subject
finds itself handed over and at the mercy of anonymous economic and
bureaucratic forces. The natural environment is degraded and uglified by
industrialization. Modernization is virtually equivalent with alienation.
Alienation from the traditional environment, human and natural, from
others and society, from oneself. Alienation brings with it the other
typical afflictions of modernization, e.g., a rising crime rate, and other
forms of deviant social behaviour, psychic disturbances and depressions,
addictions etc. But in spite of all the pain, frustrations and massive
unhappiness, the process of modernization seems irresistible. The secular

^^ Robert Kurz, Der KoUaps der Modemisierung. Vom Zusammenbnich des
Kasemensozialismus zur Krise der Weltokonomie (Eichborn Verlag: Frankfurt a.M.,
1991), 119.