Oldal 52 [52]
OCR
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.
