View in one of the bedrooms of a luxury lock near Lake Geneva
Photo: dpa/Jean-Christophe Bott
Private property forms the basis of all today’s societies. At the same time, the term is vague: ownership of a children’s toy can be meant as well as the majority in a corporation. And he does not care about who created the (multi) value and whether owners have legally acquired their property. Nevertheless, ownership of most left -wing movements and parties has come from the field of vision. It is better to argue about secondary questions such as tax tariffs, social benefits or rental price brake.
The abstract category, on the other hand, is the focus of Heinz-J. Bontrup. The word “property” appears exactly 278 times. In the primary company, the prevailing way of life for people was still collective work, writes the emeritus professor of work economics at the Westphalian University in Recklinghausen. However, the more the productive workers developed in terms of labor and finally a surplus product of collective human work was generated, some have acquired this with brutal violence. This is how private property was created out of collective. One aspect that Bontrup discovered at the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as with Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
Today the accumulated capital is distributed in an unequal manner than ever. “The gigantic concentrated wealth, which can only be explained economically by exploitation and cannot be justified, is a bitter poverty and debt,” complains Bontrup, who has long been active in the alternative economic policy working group. The eight richest men worldwide have accumulated as much property today as half of humanity together owns their own.
Such bizarre conditions are of course also complained about by many liberals. However, these answer the question of ownership differently than Bontrup and rely on supposed equal opportunities, which then means “everyone of his luck.” It is a difference, according to the economist, whether a person is legally guaranteed the rights of use on a sofa or his CDs or the disposal of means of production that other people need to maintain themselves. This aspect is still important if the means of production are not widely distributed to a variety of owners – as classic liberalism had in mind – but focus and centralize due to the accumulation. This criticism runs through Bontrup’s entire creative period, which, as a work director in the steel industry, also got to know “the one down there”.
In his book, however, he also does not pass secondary issues such as the rental price brake. It does not solve the housing market problem, he states. »Politics must eliminate the cause of the problem. And this means eliminating the shortage of housing with publicly financed and provided apartments. ”However, this would conflict with private sector benefits from apartment owners.
Ultimately, Bontrup, similar to his French colleague Thomas Piketty, connects his considerations with a superordinate target: If the capital property were distributed from a strictly egalitarian point of view and each employee was given the same share in the profit in addition to his wages, the question of the relationship between profits and wages would (almost) nobody would be interested.
With regard to the current crisis reactions of the federal government, Bontrup wants “that not the poorest are sanctioned, but the wealthy”. In this way, the citizenship money threatens to lose its function as an existential basic security and become a quarry for the financing of tax gifts. Meanwhile, the rich of “their captured added value” would not have to give back anything.
The bottom line is that the author shows his findings with empirical results from over 30 years of research. And warns in essays and interviews, of which this band gathered a stately selection, of economic policy “impairment”: increasingly market radicality in neoliberal destruction, including a precarious worker, shows with massive expenses for armor and military. This is opposed by the word -powerful economist – especially his favorite concept for more democracy in the economy.
Heinz-J. Bontrup: captured wealth – ways from neoliberal destruction, Papyrossa Verlag, Cologne, 459 pages, € 26.90.