Capital

Even more serious, however, is what Dirk Baecker considers in the context of his book review [⇒ Sovereignty Effect] to be too brief a version of the understanding of Capital.

The fact that capital, like any economic activity, has something to do with provisioning for an uncertain future, as has been discussed in sociology since Max Weber, not only remains unclear, but is downright obscured by the idea that capital can be reduced to the precondition and result of private strategies of enrichment.

Here, Vogl is too quick to follow an economic theory that restricts economic activity to the handling of scarce resources, and to supplement this theory with the Marxist reference to profit interests, without taking into account that both only make sense against the background of a present provision for an unknown future and only deserve to be called calculation for this reason, to which social aspects of overreaching and competition are subordinated just as much as factual aspects of the decision about different investment projects in each case.

Vogl reduces the role of the unknown future to occasions for the emergence of passionate speculative opinions, without again sufficiently taking into account that only in the medium of these opinions it can be calculated which investments seem to be worthwhile and which not, and for how long, and for what reasons. The enigmatic ontology of public credit, the mystery of an all-too-fungible money, the political sensibility of finance and thus the monstrosity of central banks are deciphered as soon as one takes a look at the division of labor, which is disputed again and again, within which politics and economics, framed by education, art, law, religion and science, argue about currently promising futures and the necessary provision for them. >> capital monstrosity central bank politics economics frame education art law religion science

⇒ Singularity of Modern Finance

BAECKER, Dirk, 2015. Der blinde Fleck des „Kapitalismus“: Zu Joseph Vogls Buch „Der Souveränitätseffekt“. Zeitschrift für Germanistik. 2015. Vol. 25, no. 3, p. 635–642.

⇒ Sovereignty Effect