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50] THE Purtosopny or Eco-Pourtics
“real” cost of production factors.** Whoever does not agree with this
should at least accept that the real price is what is paid on the market
— and the measure of pay depends primarily on the balance of power
between the partners. In certain cases, it depends on whether they are
able to persuade governments to allow the most blatantly polluting
sectors to acquire profit through various open or veiled price subsidies,
tax evasion and other means of “boosting the economy”. Or it depends
on whether the elites of the indebted and overpopulated “developing”
countries can be sufficiently intimidated, corrupted or played off against
each other so as to keep the price of the raw materials and labour
available to them at the desired low level. However uncomfortable this
is to hear for market-friendly green ears (greenhorn friends of the
market), the truth is that not only do power relations not distort prices,
but it is exactly through them that they are expressed the most clearly.
In other words, prices reflect political, social, cultural and even military
strength. Exploitation definitely exists, but it is not a matter of
economics, but rather directly of politics, viz. power. This fact is merely
hidden by abstract economic argumentation, which considers market
conditions in isolation from their connection to society.
This connection is thematised by the mainstream as the relation
between supply and demand and immediately turned upside down as
though the increase of supply were induced by the increase of demand
and not the other way round. Even if it is proved that the need to grow
is not due to the unquenchable greed of consumers (people degraded
into consumers), but to the logic of the cycle of capital, they still
maintain that what drives the progress of humanity is the increase of
economic performance, which is also the essential condition for the
increase of prosperity and the defeat of poverty. The latter statement has
a section of this book devoted to it (The Ecology of Poverty). As regards
the connection between growth and development, it is worth clarifying
that ecological considerations render impossible only the growth of the
22
György Bencze, János Kis and György Márkus prove the untenability of the Marxist
value theory of labour in their book Is a Critical Economics Possible? (T-Twins — Lukacs
Archive, Budapest, 1992.). If the “necessary social working hours” cannot be established,
then labour has no substantive value independent of the fluctuation of market exchange,
which the capitalist either rewards with an honest wage or pockets. The source of its gains
therefore lies not in the production process but in market transactions, not least through
keeping labour costs down, which is made possible for the employer — be it the state or an
individual — by the power imbalance between the negotiating parties. This imbalance, the
vulnerability of the employee, is only increased if a system of state redistribution takes the
place of market deals.