First published in English, afterwards in German and then also in languages
of Central and Eastern Europe, the article by millionaire and philanthropist
George Soros, “The Capitalist Threat”,1 came as a surprise to both the
political classes and the intellectual elites in the countries of Eastern
Europe. They responded with some embarrassment; it was as if the billionaire
father of the Soros Foundation and the Open Society Institute had committed
high treason by criticizing the deployment of liberal capitalism. It is
true that after the demise of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union the great majority of the elites there underwent
a conversion from the cult of the multilateral development of socialism
to the cult of multilateral exaltation of capitalism in a matter of days.
The new ideas, concepts, ways of behaving were presented to these peoples,
flung at them like slogans; in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan,
meanwhile, the general validity of the capitalist model of development
is now increasingly the subject of controversy.
Instead of creating and reinforcing the open society, which George
Soros so ardently wants to bring about and for which he sets aside hundreds
of millions of dollars, the effects of laissez-faire capitalism,
in tandem with the globalization of the economy, are a source of grave
concern to him because of the continuous damage they are doing to social
cohesion in both the West and the East. As a result, people are deprived
of the democratic control they can exert over their own destiny and become
bound more than ever before by economic necessity. The result of this domination
is a reduction in the sphere encompassed by politics.2 Thus, an intractable
contradiction has arisen between economic development and the prerequisites
of political democracy since the former decided to adopt as the basis and
framework of its arguments an assumption whose validity is questioned by
no-one, or almost no-one. Moreover, the demise of communism seems to have
given this assumption virtually the status of a universal, timeless truth.
The truth of the market thus appears almost like the invisible hand, and
this has discernible theological overtones.
In the United States, the article by George Soros inevitably provoked
acerbic remarks on the part of some mean-spirited commentators, who reproached
him for criticizing the very system which permitted him to amass his huge
fortune. Some commentators even accused him of supporting former communist
converts to the delights of liberalism to the detriment of the “real” democrats.3
These writings all bear the mark of ideologues who are blind to the socio-economic
reality of the United States and who, safely ensconced behind their privileges,
present capitalism as a mechanism which “naturally” enriches the few and
not, as we thought for a long time, a socio-economic system enabling the
many to achieve prosperity. If these ideologues had their way, they would
put an end to the politics of the New Deal along with all legal intervention
on the part of the State (or by whatever political authority) aimed at
redistributing wealth and thereby mitigating the devastating effects of
the economic and social Darwinism, which results from the pursuit of maximum
profit. In reality, meanwhile, the initiated are well aware that the kind
of hyperliberal capitalism whose theoretical foundations were set out by
Hayek and Milton Friedman uses politics for its own ends and never hesitates
to call for political intervention when the interests of capital are threatened
by those of labor or even—an unthought-of contradiction—by those of capital
itself. It is against this destructive tendency which Soros directs his
criticism, and in doing so, he takes up the line of argument put forward
by his philosophical mentor, Karl Popper, who defined totalitarianism,
whether Stalinist or Nazi, by the fact that the political authorities claimed
to be in possession of the ultimate truth concerning all human affairs.4
Written at the end of the Second World War, Popper’s writing bears the
hallmark of its time, when the Western democracies, having emerged victorious
from the battle against Nazism (with crucial help from the Soviet Union,
let us not forget!) saw for themselves the failures of the communist revolution
in its outcome, that of a power which has been reduced to a dictatorship
of the Party incapable of resolving its social crises without recourse
to violence, terror, and mass deportation. Soros thus regards the current
belief in the immanent harmony of the economy under the aegis of the invisible
hand as a kind of truth, which is in the process of bringing about a new
form of totalitarianism, a totalitarianism of the financial markets legitimized
by a univocal set of scientific arguments mimicking the model used by the
natural sciences. “But in trying to imitate the accomplishments (and win
for itself the prestige) of natural science, economic theory attempted
the impossible.” (p. 49) For economic activity is not something totally
separate from the social sphere; it plays a role in shaping social organization,
urban development, and integration into society (and these are articulated
via unions and state bureaucracies), as well as shaping the political system,
which not only guarantees its legitimacy but also the exercise of democratic
control over a whole range of conflicting interests. This balance was not
achieved without struggles, and sometimes bloody ones at that; nevertheless,
in the 1950’s, a compromise was reached between the interests of capital
and those of labor. In turning laissez-faire economic theory into a set
of “natural laws” we make it impossible to recapture the social subject—the
individual—in the effects generated by these “laws”. According to Soros,
“Economic theory has deliberately excluded reflexivity from consideration”.
(p. 49) In doing so, it has distorted its objectives and opened up the
way for laissez-faire capitalism to take over. Moreover, his conclusion
points out the economic theory’s distinct and inexorable slide towards
totalitarianism: “What allows economic theory to be converted into an ideology
hostile to the open society is the assumption of perfect knowledge—at first
openly stated and then disguised in the form of a methodological device[...]
Whatever its form, the assertion of perfect knowledge stands in contradiction
to the concept of the open society (which recognizes that our understanding
of our situation is inherently imperfect).” (p. 50)
This essay by Soros deserves better than the petty remarks made about
him in the north American press, because it is a perfect exposition of
the metaphysical illusions harbored by all thinkers who have journeyed,
in one way or another, via the political philosophy of the Enlightenment,
the philosophy which puts forward a theory of ethics in a system of pure
thought unconnected to the economic reality which shapes the world. Soros
specifies the extent to which the “common good” is abandoned to its fate
in the name of the laissez-faire policy dictated by the “natural laws”
of the global market economy, abandoned to a purely economic kind of predatory
competition, whose sole aim is to maximize personal gain. In the developed
countries, this form of competition undermines the fabric of society, while
in third world countries and the former communist countries it fosters
and legitimizes “robber capitalism”.5
With touching naiveté Soros discovers that the collapse of repressive
regimes does not lead automatically to the establishment of an open society,
since “the combination of laissez-faire ideas, social Darwinism, and geopolitical
realism that prevailed in the United States and the United Kingdom stood
in the way of any hope for an open society in Russia.” (p. 51)6 In actual
fact, open society is the product of a long and complex historical process,
marked by a succession of violent and bloody conflicts.
In the atmosphere of excitement following the collapse of the long-moribund
communist regimes, and in the financial euphoria of Western European
laissez-faire, a fundamental fact about the development of Western
democracy was conveniently forgotten, namely the violent nature of democracy’s
founding and of its survival, a fact which even the Greeks themselves recognised.7
The way everything happened, it was as if, once the communist regimes had
imploded, democracy would automatically follow in their wake as the “natural”
future shape of the socio-political environment.8 This is why the dysfunctions
typical of the transition period (which, incidentally, has no foreseeable
end) are always interpreted as the consequences of the previous regime,
as obstacles impeding the development of democracy. This naive, ideological
vision also overlooks the fact that the economic powers of south-east Asia,
the so-called Asian "tigers", came into being under the auspices of brutally
tyrannical political regimes. In this state of oblivion, it seems to be
taken for granted that in Western Europe and the United States modernity
simply arrived all of a sudden in the form of ready-made, irenic democratic
societies. Meanwhile, of course, every social historian knows that all
forms of human governance are the result of complex historical processes
and that the midwife assisting at the birth of history is called violence.
Western political democracy has the same genealogy: it was never given,
always won at great cost, and it has taken several centuries of bloody
strife for people in the Western world to realize that their interests
are better served if they settle their socio-economic conflicts by negotiation
and compromise rather than by armed combat.
The recent article by Richard Rorty, “Back to Class Politics”, refers
precisely to this genealogy.9 Deeply concerned about the social disintegration
in America, which makes it increasingly difficult to find what George Soros
calls Open Society, Rorty reminds us that the primary objective of an open
society is to establish a balance between the interests of capital and
those of labor, between the forces of capitalism and the labor unions.
However, in the face of the social dereliction resulting from laissez-faire
policies, Rorty acknowledges the “human, all too human” shortcomings of
the system: “... the last hundred years of our country’s history has witnessed
a brutal struggle between the corporations and the workers, [...] this
struggle is still going on, and [...] the corporations are winning...”10
The corporations, the multinationals, are winning because: “the wages
of European and American workers are ridiculously high by world standards
[as a result of the unions’ endeavors].11 There is less and less need to
employ any of these workers, since the same work can be done elsewhere
for a fifth of the cost. Furthermore, the globalization of the markets
in capital and labor means that no nation’s economy is sufficiently self-contained
to permit long-term social planning by a national government. So the American
economy is passing out of the control of the American government, and thus
out of the control of the American voters.
This new situation is fine with the 1 percent of Americans who own
40 percent of their country’s wealth. Their dividends typically increase
when jobs are exported from Ohio to South China, and from North Carolina
to Thailand. The strength of the dollar does not matter to them, because
their investment advisers can flip their money into other currencies at
the touch of a button. They have less and less at stake in America’s future,
and more and more invested in an efficient and productive global economy
— an economy made ever more efficient and productive by the constant expansion
of the global labor market to poorer and poorer countries. There is little
reason to believe that what is good for GM or Microsoft is good for America.”
(p. 32)
This is a brutal description of what is nothing less than the end of
politics in the modern era (i.e., the end of democracy) in favor of the
empire of economics. It is about the application of a phenomenon which,
essentially, derives from late modernity and which provided the setting
for the fall of communism. How, then, can the politics of democracy (i.e.,
where people are in control of the decisions which affect their destiny)
be instituted in weak countries when the most venerable political institutions
in the most powerful states are becoming increasingly incapable of maintaining
any control over a world economy which operates against the interests of
their own peoples while at the same time reducing the peoples of the third
world to poverty?12 The erosion of the social sphere appears to have advanced
to such a degree that Robert Reich, a former American employment minister
(January 1993–January 1997), seems to have recognized the catastrophe.
“It is a social contract which defines nations. To sacrifice all that at
the altar of the central bankers is a major failure. And he adds that never
in the history of humanity have the sentiments expressed by one street—Wall
Street—had so much power.13 In the East, the counterpart of this acknowledgement
of failure is to be found in the Unicef report on Children at Risk in Eastern
Europe, which concludes with the following comment by one of the report’s
authors, Gáspár Fajth: “In many respects the fate of children
now is worse than under communism, and that is a scandal.”14
The warning sounded by George Soros thus proves to be not only naive,
but blind, since long before laissez-faire economic liberalism of an unrestrained
kind (that is, without ethical limits and therefore without political limits)
began to be an obstacle to the establishment of an open society in the
former communist societies, in the West it was gradually destroying all
that had been achieved by decades of struggle on the part of the unions.
As far as the modern era is concerned, then, it is an existential phenomenology
of becoming in the West that we must have recourse to if we are to understand
the workings of the world which is given to us.
If the notion of laissez-faire denotes a totally free market, then
it is appropriate to remind ourselves here that it derives its legitimacy
from a belief in a kind of invisible hand which, by virtue of some unheard-of
power, is supposed to regulate the relationship between supply and demand
in a harmonious fashion. This invisible hand, a latter-day version of Platonism,
brings together and unifies in its palm all notions of Goodness, Beauty,
Virtue, and Truth. The masters of the world economy, however, are well
aware that things are not quite as simple as that, and that the invisible
hand is more likely to be that of politics, reduced to the role of serving
the economy and policing social order. Indeed, although the champions of
laissez-faire might wish to ban all intervention on the part of the
state in the economic sphere, they do not hesitate to call in the police
and the army to defend their interests the instant they are threatened
by the forces of labor. Nevertheless, if we proceed along this line of
argumentation we are still only touching the surface of things, the crumbling
of a scattered factual reality where knowledge is fragmented into ever-smaller
categories, and becomes increasingly detached from the wider, prevailing,
all-encompassing movement. laissez-faire would not be able to prevail to
such an extent if the force which at one time was able to contain it, politics,
had not already been weakened, destroyed, or consigned to oblivion.
In contrast to Popper, Hannah Arendt argues in her book, Between Past
and Future,15 that it was breaking with the political tradition inherited
from ancient Rome which opened the way to the possibility of totalitarian
regimes. This then poses the problem of the possibility (in the Kantian
sense) of such a break. Hannah Arendt ascribes this break to modernity
itself, which has used science and technology to construct a world which
is alien to people and at the same time has alienated people from the world.
“In losing the world, man has lost himself”, in other words, using science
to construct a representation of the world as the truth regarding the object
represented, the subject of the representation prohibits himself from questioning
the "egocogitant" certainty which forms the basis of this truth. From that
point on, nothing is sacred any longer and any object of knowledge can
become an object of unlimited production. Moreover, all limits become moveable
since nothing is allowed to stand in the way of attaining this representational
truth, which is always a truth in the process of becoming since it is the
product of an ego [self] anchored in the will. This is how Nietzsche interpreted
the essence of nihilism. The modern is indeed always presented as a negation
of the past, as superseding whatever had been achieved previously, as the
scrapping of things which should be preserved and maintained for future
generations. In short, modernity (or progress, if you prefer the more ideological
term), has always been articulated via the medium of the tabula rasa. This
is why the famous words of the Internationale, “Du passé faisons
table rase”, or “No more tradition’s chains shall bind us”, as the US version
goes, is nothing but a popular re-hash of a formula suggested much earlier
by Leibniz with a view to transforming the Russia of Peter the Great. The
break which Hannah Arendt conceives as the bearer of totalitarianism encompasses
all those breaks with the past carried out by modernity as the implementation
of the notion of “everything is possible” which allows totalitarianism
to come about. Before it became the possibility for totalitarianism, however,
this breaking with past tradition was also what made modernity possible,
and modernity has never been anything other than the expansion of capitalism,
as is discussed in the second volume of the trilogy which Hannah Arendt
devoted to the origins of totalitarianism and which is entitled, On Imperialism.16
Thus, the notion of “everything is possible”, as a Beingness (Seiendheit)
peculiar to modernity articulated as such, manifested itself first of all
in the discourse of avant-garde aesthetics. With the intention of unifying
thinking and existential experience at its most everyday level, the avant-garde
artists proposed and indeed implemented a radical departure from the aesthetic
and ethical boundaries established by the Renaissance and which had become
part of an artistic academicism which was devoid of any relationship with
reality, an academic art whose mimesis was no longer to render a glorified
reproduction of nature perfected, but to illustrate a way of thinking lost
among the illusions of mythologies degraded to sentimental, moralizing,
Épinal-style images of greatness or heroism, or reduced to decorative
pieces for the private collections of the bourgeoisie. In shattering academicism,
the avant-garde artists brought about a break with the Renaissance Andenken
vis-à-vis antiquity. By offering to the gaze of his contemporaries
the ready-made as an object for exhibition, Duchamp embodied and prophesied
the ungodly violence inherent in the radicality of the notion that “everything
is possible”, that of the Being (Seiende) in its double techno-industrial
guise, both the object of repetitive, mass production and at the same time
an objet d’art possessing a special and unique value (its aura, according
to Benjamin) because of the surplus value it acquires in terms of the exchange
value it gains as a result of being exhibited in a museum or gallery. Almost
simultaneously Western societies, flinging themselves into a new kind of
war, subjected the whole of Europe to devastation by fire and blood, making
use of all the means of destruction which science and engineering had to
offer. The First World War epitomized a general mobilization of power,
knowledge, science, technology, and industry on a hitherto unknown scale,
far surpassing the limits which people in the 19th century had imposed
on the outbreak of war. For the first time ever, on a continental scale—that
of the continent which had invented, created and implemented the modern—war
became one single gigantic techno-industrial enterprise in which men, reduced
to mere cogwheels, were completely integrated into the machinery of production
and death: the scholar and the engineer, the writer and the teacher, the
laborer and the soldier, civilians and military personnel alike, each participated
according to his or her specialization in this grand enterprise, in which
the Worker (der Arbeiter)—thus termed by Jünger—becomes the emblem
of the Gestalt of the Modern. The dynamics of this “total and general”
mobilization are thus contained in the notion “everything is possible”
as its fulfilment under the aegis of a philosophical reasoning which had
already been around for a long time but was camouflaged, tarted up to look
like an apodeictic moral principle detached from the basis of this possibility
of totality. In other words, never in actual practice did the categorical
imperative of ethics restrict the “general mobilization” brought about
by scientific planning and its techno-industrial implementation.17
While Arendt’s term, “everything is possible” takes into account the
effects of permanently superseding the political and ethical limits engendered
by techno-scientific praxis, it is less useful in enabling one to grasp
the essence of the topos where this superseding takes place. This topos,
first defined by Nietzsche under the name of nihilism, is never nihil—nothing—but
rather a permanent brimming-over of an overflow valve of deeds and things:
a state of perpetual planned overproduction, organized in and by the Gestalt
of the Worker, to put it in a more phenomenological manner. This is why
this permanent superseding has nothing in common with what Hegel called
Aufhebung, the harmonious resolution of contradictions where the negation
of the negative gains positivity in the inevitable fulfilment of the scheme
of History. Under the label of “everything is possible”, this superseding
is never dialectical, always algebraic and quantitative. In this we see
the articulation of the manifestation-incarnation-appropriation (Ereignis)
of an ideal state of affairs, which has its root in the very origins of
techno-science as possible. It is an ideal whose nature has been exposed
definitively by Gérard Granel as infinity, recalling that
what made Greek science open up in the direction of contemplation rather
than production as articulated in the Aristotelian axiom that it is not
the infinite which governs. It is this difference in which, unmindful of
the political and ethical traditions of Ancient Greece, the implementation
of the modern can be understood.18
The founding deed of the commonality (i.e., the collective existential
experience) of capitalism—in other words, of the modern—is contained in
the conceptual pairing of productive labor/capital, which embodies the
mathematical ideal of a calculation in the form of a universal equivalent,
money. Thanks to this equivalence, labor has the value of a commodity and
commodities have a value expressed in capital, thus establishing the following
equation: capital – labor + surplus value, an equation which Marx’s phenomenology
revealed without getting to grips with the genealogy of its ideals.19
The end of the craftsmen and the peasantry is contained in this equation;
for them the ultimate goal of the intention at work in their endeavors
was not the multiplication of capital, but the biological and social reproduction
of a group of human beings. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, contrary to the
craftsmen and the peasantry, (and the only social class ever to have implemented
capitalism) based its activites on the circulation of commodities under
the protection of capital. This explains why the first bourgeoisies were
made up of bankers, money-changers, money-lenders and insurers, who established
an equivalence between commodities, money, and the duration in time of
the loan or the insurance policy, thus divesting these ancient ritual circular
relationships of their temporal quality and projecting it in a linear telos
into an infinite future. Although it may rely on industry, technology,
and science, capitalism is, in its essence, always financial in the sense
that only money, subjected to the calculation of infinity, reduces all
objectivation (i.e. all human activities, whatever they may be) to itself,
i.e. to money, thus making itself the transcendental of the immanent in
terms of naturalizing the “laws” of economics. Thus if capitalism remains,
in its financial essence, part of the ideal of infinity (even though it
is illusory, as Granel reminds us), it cannot be implemented without superseding,
exceeding, shattering the boundaries set by the other determinants of social
life, both the political determinants, the means of regulating differences
and conflicts among diverse socio-economic groups, and the less immediately
utilitarian (i.e., religious or aesthetic) aspirations of human beings.
Thus all the progress which has been made towards the mechanization of
labor, which was to have liberated man from certain tasks, has ended up
binding him even more closely to the law of the necessity of production
(instrument in the struggle against the tendency of profit rates to fall),
and this in turn subjects labor (and this applies to non-labor, i.e. unemployment,
too) even more firmly to the dictatorship of surplus-value. Of course,
as Rorty reminds us, as a consequence of the violent and courageous struggle
on the part of the unions, workers were given more leisure time, but this
very time was simultaneously transformed into an industry, into commodities
under the name of leisure, sports, and tourism. As the union movement declines,
it is not difficult to envisage a future where capitalism is unencumbered
by any brakes or constraints whatsoever, with no foreseeable end, as long
as man and the world he has brought about—and who henceforth thinks this
way—is reduced to a potentiality of objects of knowledge to be exploited
and quantified solely in terms of the universal equivalent, money, the
embodiment of a techno-financial future, whose only goal is to expand its
own domination into infinity. Here we have the application and illustration
of the analysis of the historical Dasein of modernity whose principal characteristic
was identified by Heidegger: technology, the essence of which is not technicity
but metaphysics, understood as the double of the physical world—as Descartes
described it—or, as Granel puts it, that which replaces “the elucidation
of the nature of things with a methodically constructed and deliberately
fictitious tale, a ‘World Fable’”, a fable whose effectiveness has gone
beyond all expectations, reducing the whole world and all human beings
to its one and only truth.20
To understand the naive optimism of George Soros, therefore, one does
not have to follow the specious arguments of his small-minded critics.
The problem with his argument consists in his point of departure
for his economic and social apologia, since he remains within the horizon
of the same science, the same industrial, financial, and administrative
practices, suggesting thereby that there are good and bad uses of this
science and these practices. This is the error of all Aufklärer who,
led by an abstract ethical categorical imperative devoid of all basis in
the reality of the modern, since it is constantly superseding itself, is
incapable of understanding, ultimately, that the modern can only be the
event-advent (Ereignis, advent-appropriation) of the “everything is possible”
in circumstances where all political and ethical limits standing in the
way of its own quantitative dynamic are rejected. Soros ardently wants
there to be good science and good economics which would constantly maintain
people’s social concern in their economic future.21
Rigorous meditation on our century, however, teaches us that this form
of extremism (the modern hybris) has never concerned itself with ethics
and that for it the transcendent, whatever it may be called—Good, God,
Truth, Reason, Progress—has no value unless it serves to further the goal
of its own expansion.22 Perhaps one day, when people find themselves facing
the ultimate catastrophe, staring into the yawning abyss gouged out by
their hybris, they will recall the words of the first poet who, prophesying
the future in the Iliad, warned the noble, proud, and over-confident warriors
that Zeus blinds those whom he wants to be rid of.
Notes
* An earlier version of this article was published in the Romanian review,
Tribuna, Cluj/Kolozsvár, April 1998.
1 George Soros, “The Capitalist Threat”, The Atlantic Monthly, February
1997. pp. 45–54; The Crisis of Global Capitalism, London: Little, Brown,
1998.
2 Sarah Anderson and John Kavanah, “Multinationals: Towards economic
apartheid”. The Baltimore Sun, translated in Le Courrier international,
No.31, December 5–11, 1996. Both authors are researchers at the Institute
for Policy Studies in Baltimore.
3 Cf. Robert J. Samuelson, “Crackpot Prophet”, in Newsweek, 17
March, 1997, and Times Magazine, 25 April, 1997.
4 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, London: Routledge,
1945.
5 At a stretch this could also apply to the major countries of continental
Europe.
6 This observation was made a few years previously by William Pfaff
in his article, “US-British Capitalism or Europe’s Model of Social Capitalism”,
International Herald Tribune, December 15, 1995.
7 Cf. Anonimo Ateniese, La Democratia come violenta, Cellerio,
Palermo, 1982; Vittorio Altieri, De la tyrannie, Allia, Paris, 1992. Written
in 1777 and secretly edited in 1789.
8 It is gratifying to note that, mutatis mutandis, the communist
regimes themselves continuously blamed the effects of the fraught legacy
of the bourgeois or feudal past, especially when it was a question of problems
resulting from their own incompetence.
9 Richard Rorty, “Back to Class Politics”, Dissent, Winter 1997,
pp. 31–34.
10 Rorty, op. cit. p. 32.
11 My note and italics.
12 David S. Broder, “Le degré zéro de la politique",
Le Courrier international, No. 344, 5–11 June, 1997.
13 Robert Reich, “The Menace to Prosperity”, Financial Times, 3, March
1997.
14 “Les Enfants en danger en Europe centrale et orientale: périls
et promesses”, Unicef, Paris, April 21, 1997 (cited in Le Monde diplomatique,
May 1997).
15 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, London, 1977. See especially
Chapter VIII (The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man ).
16 Hannah Arendt, On Imperialism, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism,
London, 1967. Cf. also Luciano Pellicani, The Genesis of Capitalism and
the Origins of Modernity. New York: Telos Press, 1997.
17 Claude Karnoouh, “La fin des avant-gardes ou le triomphe du marché.
Valeurs économiques et valeurs esthétiques à l’époque
de la modernité tardive” in Adieu à la différence,
Paris: Arcantère, 1993.
18 Gérard Granel, “Les années trente sont devant nous”
Les Temps Modernes, February 1993, pp. 60–85. I would like to point out
how much I owe to the thinking of Gérard Granel regarding his exposition
of the work of infinity in modernity. Cf. pp. 65–66.
19 I use the concept of labor in the sense used by Marx, in other words,
meaning social labor, which allows the idea of non-labor, i.e., unemployment,
to be included in the notion of labor. Cf. Capital, Volume I, Part I, Chapter
1, section 4.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta