Economics, Science, and Religion 3

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Just a decade after Darwin, in 1867, Karl Marx, consciously or not, (re-) instated the idea of human divinity by declaring human labor within the production process to be the sole creator, more or less, of what he named "added" or "surplus value", and therefore value per se.

This extra value was then, as he proposed, extorted from its producers by the exploiters of labor as something called money or capital; and this forever until the exploiters would be done away with, and the means of production (machines et al) were socialized into the collective of laborers.

Now, if humans are the sole creators of value, then this exploitation of labor can affect only humans, not animals or powered machines; even though the latter "means of production" were at the time just beginning to replace, not just complement humans as a main factor of production (as had hitherto animals - all three requiring an input of energy, often in the form of similar carbohydrates - but then these concepts were still widely unknown).

The work of humans, animals and machines is physically indistinguishable. And of course, humans did exploit animals; but no-one would have seriously thought of letting them keep their self-generated added value - or even of defining it; and, at the same time man became the "exploited" extension of machinery, he was equivalent to an animal in the exploitation of his labor.

But all the while humans were becoming increasingly similar to animals and machines as means of production - and might even perform the same labor resulting in the same product - the idea of exploited humans as the sole creators of value, and therefore entitled to its possession, reinstated in them that earthly likeness to God, by which man, to this day, continues to first "create" values, and then money - the latter, it seems, actually "from nothing", i. e. by fiat.


Every attempt to turn the consequences of this doctrine into "pure" economic practice, i. e. as socialism or communism, paradoxically has so far resulted in poverty, and often in mass death; the simple idea that human labor, exploited or not, creates value is obviously deficient - were it otherwise, owning slaves would be a sound economic model, and no free, working population would ever be poor.

Even more intriguing, its de facto counter-doctrine, the capitalist market economy - while being far more productive - is run on the same basic principle, namely, that added value is generated by work; beyond that, it has a rather more pragmatic, on the issue of wealth creation and its distribution almost Darwinistic approach, and as far as possible lets (and let) machines do the value adding work.

Again paradoxically, the shifting of the work load from humans to machines also took place in socialism, failing to clearly explain why the value previously created by exploitable humans could now be created by non-exploitable machines - and what the supposedly "added value" was based upon, except on a market evaluation.

Even more paradoxically, the more successful capitalist market system seemed to be "unsustainable", in the way that it could not be kept stable over a longer period of time; it seemed to rely on (real or imagined) "constant expansion" to outrun its self-generated problems, destroying vast sums of the self-generated money along the way; sometimes even, as in war, an instrument of mass death all by itself, the accumulated physical wealth.

Furthermore, and inexplicably in both systems, debt built up regularly; for this, too, there was no convincing explanation - where did all this debt come from, when added value was being produced, by machines obviously even more easily than by humans?


Now, if the two post-industrial economic systems as antagonistic as Capitalism and Communism bring about similar undesirable and detrimental results, to the point of seeming to "converge", then these "side effects" should have a common cause; and the common basis of both systems is the idea that value is created by labor, human or otherwise - an idea fraught with internal contradictions and unexpected consequences. 


Marx himself seems to have noticed that, for he and his successors made "discrepancies" and "contradictions", which would then have to be resolved socially, a central subject to their theory; but no coherent solution could be found for them, as they turned out to be as real as they were insurmountable by humans in practice (and as will be shown, in principle).

But - why was that?

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