VI. The Future of Capital and Human Labor

It might seem as if, in the events of the great world catastrophe, which today is at the “Versailles” stage, the topic: the future of capital and human labor, seems somewhat unfounded. However, following the events in their depths, one might perhaps point out that these two topics: world catastrophe and that to which today's reflection is to be devoted, are intimately connected. For it must be more or less clear to anyone who has observed the events of recent years with an open and alert mind that something of what could be called world capitalism on a large scale has led to this so-called world war, that this world capitalism behaves, as you painfully know today, in its own way within the so-called conditions of peace, and that through a large part of the civilized world today, what could be called the demand directed precisely against capitalism is already going like a mighty historical opposition. Thus, the contradiction between capital and human labor is perhaps the deepest, most significant problem of our time. Capitalism ultimately rose to what can be called, and often has been called, imperialism. Human labor gasped under the rule of this imperialism. And if you take a closer look at the most significant characteristic of capitalism, you will find that it effectively came to an end in the terrible world catastrophe. What is one of the main characteristics of the capitalist world economic order? It is this: that man's working life, his enrichment, is based on the so-called profitability, the investability, of capital. Now I ask you: how much of the causes of the horror of the catastrophe can be traced back to the investability of capital on a large scale? To what extent were the struggles actually fought for the expansion of the investability of capital by certain imperialisms? And so it is already apparent, and will become more and more so, that from the depths of humanity rises and will rise the demand: How do we come to a reorganization of human existence, after those forms which the world economic order under capitalism, imperialism, has assumed, firstly, to such a high degree have shown themselves to be a disaster for humanity, but secondly, have long been leading to their own destruction? And so, with what we are discussing today, we are actually discussing the contrast between capital and labor, a declining world economic order on the one hand, and a rising world economic order on the other.