/lit/ - Literature

>>17401055
The fictions on which the money system rests are highly artificial, and this analysis is not the place to treat them in detail. There is no completely satisfactory theory of money, but the following may be said in this connection. The point of view from which technology looks upon money is a technical one. It looks at money from the viewpoint of circulation, for circulation is the most important technical function of money. Thus, technical progress is identified with an accelerated circulation of money – money is made to work more rapidly. Where treasures and possessions are by nature stable, unchangeable, and out of circulation – features which the technician abhors, because to him they signify sterility – the supporting of the currency by precious metals provides an element of financial stability. From a state of stability where paper money is redeemable in gold, instability begins as the obligation of the state to redeem its currency is suspended. Money is then still backed up by gold reserves, but as the gold reserves melt away, the state is increasingly compelled to try by every means in its power to obtain gold and gold values. The circulation of sheer paper money is rapid, and the more rapidly money circulates, the better does it fulfill its technical function, which is, first of all, to circulate. The deposit of all liquid funds in banks is now recommended and encouraged with the argument that money which is banked best discharges its function of circulation.

The more money is devaluated the faster it circulates. If there is gold, money runs to gold. If there is no gold, it runs to goods. It may be said that bad money runs away from itself. But precisely by doing this it fulfills splendidly its technical purpose. It takes on perpetual motion, circulating with sweeping speed, changing hands and so creating the illusion among the naive that there is a lot of good money, or even that all of us have become richer. The decay of currency is neither local nor transitory. It is a symptom of a certain phase of technical progress. It occurs at the precise moment when the financial needs of the technical organization go beyond those limits within which an orderly financial economy can be conducted."
- FG Jünger

"You look like one,
who has swallowed gold:
they will cut your stomach open!"

This thread is for discussion of wealth and currency in relation to the economic and technological crisis. Post anything related.

The question of currency crisis is that of perfect regulations. This occurs where return to metal stores is seen as the greatest crisis. Behind this lies not only the danger of return, of material availability, but also availability in its metaphysical sense. What comes with the promise of a return to gold? The stamp cannot be enough.
Currency diffusion occurs because of this, it is not only a technique in speculation. Bitcoin is the perfection of abstract barter, the whole of wealth becomes nothing other than the exchange of currency for another currency - but it is also the freedom of the false currency. In it is the promise that all of the impoverishment we have endured up to this point will give birth to a new form of technology. Yet, this is impossible, as within the very production of bitcoin is the elimination of all that makes wealth possible. It is the coin which has been scarred, not only on both of its faces, but within it, in its very character. It is the currency of the Wound Man.

This is where we also see the means of currency devaluation, the speculation on higher value in which input and output are austerity measures. The currency is reduced into fine wire stretched out across the world, buried beside sewage pipes, and travelling beneath the sea. Our real currency is movement, mobilisation. One wants to perfect the being of man, and in this he views the world as the first doctors stared into the void of their cadavers. "These organs hold the secret to all life."

The technician heals the wounds of the Leviathan. As on any battlefield the only currency is continuing the fight.

>>17401100
To understand this it is useful to envision the ideal currency.

"Currency as a mark of wealth and dominion of the state, not a separate power of its own laws. The Owl of Athens on the gold coin; a contract of honour in which only wealth is changed hands, as in skilled work which is a mark of giving and inheritance.
Electrum is perhaps even more valuable than gold, a fasces quality in the metal representative of the state's inseparability from work and property. All work together to combine wealth and sovereignty of all classes. Their division and conflict suggest that the currency has been debased along with wealth.
The black market, particularly in the mafia, exists as something of a death cult of this, preserving some aspect of honourable wealth - an economy upheld by violence in law. The method of exchange is linked to the old families and world, so it is an economy in time and total opposition to the new world. Breaking these societies apart was significant, the leveled criminal rackets of the 'underworld', the racial gangs, and class gangs are much less of a threat. They maintain no opposition to the new society, they are its rightful form of criminality."

In the discussions of the current happening, and economics in general, you may notice that people are mostly concerned with other effects. This has to do with what Schmitt called subjective occasionalism, everything is an occasion of the subjective view, and there is no longer a concern for higher laws - as in what forms the the economic conditions themselves.

Plato's views on wealth make this very simple, and it is not something that should be ignored. Yet, economic thinking reigns, and may be the best proof of our intellectual decline.

"In aristocracies the hire of a farm is paid to the landlord, not only in rent, but in respect, regard, and duty; in democracies the whole is paid in cash. When estates are divided and passed from hand to hand, and the permanent connection which existed between families and the soil is dissolved, the landowner and the tenant are only casually brought into contact. They meet for a moment to settle the conditions of the agreement, and then lose sight of each other; they are two strangers brought together by a common interest, and who keenly talk over a matter of business, the sole object of which is to make money."

>>17401728
From the very beginning democracy divides the classes, chance takes over fortune and inheritance. And where relations are divided currency stores increase. This is the beginning of the reign of lower values which must compound in equal measure to what has been lost.
Private interest begins to increase and weighs against the state. Currency circulates in the private organisations just as it does for the technicians, but in this case indicates a removal from law opposite to the force of centralisation.

>>17401957
We see the middle class increasingly distance itself from the upper and lower classes. The tendency is towards bourgeois opposition to the technological order, yet they rely on it more than any other, becoming the great packaging force and image of economic life.
Technology takes on cryptographic and magical qualities in keeping with the bourgeois image of simple life.

>>17401981
>great packaging force
pacifying

"In proportion as property is subdivided and wealth distributed over the country, the community is filled with people whose former opulence is declining, and with others whose fortunes are of recent growth and whose wants increase more rapidly than their resources. For all such persons the smallest pecuniary profit is a matter of importance, and none of them feel disposed to waive any of their claims, or to lose any portion of their income. As ranks are intermingled, and as very large as well as very scanty fortunes become more rare, every day brings the social condition of the landowner nearer to that of the farmer; the one has not naturally any uncontested superiority over the other; between two men who are equal, and not at ease in their circumstances, the contract of hire is exclusively an affair of money. "

>>17401055
give us a minute to read instead of fucking copy pasting stuff like a machine

>>17402436
There's 4 hours between those posts.

Shut down GME? Who could have seen this coming?

>>17401055

Gotta say I wasn't feeling Junger's explanation but it did make sense when he made it clear that the hoarders are paradoxically dependant on the very techniques which fuel circulation to begin with. Control of flow, as it seems, is hard as fuck to accomplish

>>17403284
>paradoxically dependant on the very techniques which fuel circulation to begin with.
Which part was this? And where did you disagree?

>>17401055
By the way, this is from the 1930s
>>17401728
>>17402390
And these are Tocqueville.

Bb

B

Bump

This thread is terrible and predicated on lies fundamental to our understanding of how debt and economics works. Go read 5000 years of debt. Your entire idea of economics is founded on lies perpetuated by Adam smith and his ilk.

>>17405336
There's a reason OP has to bump his own shit.

>>17405336
Read Plato.

>>17405341
Nice samefag. You're a commie worried that this is some fascist reading of economy. But it's not really about economics. It's not so much against Marx as it is an attempt to see further. Economics is an entirely limited viewpoint, and without reference to higher laws it is simply a form of nihilism.
And imagine how poorly read you have to be to not know Tocqueville.

>>17405336
>founded on lies
Name one tranny.

>>17405431
For anyone who doesn't know, Friedrich Georg Junger wrote the best book there is on technology. It influenced his brother's work, Heidegger studied it for years, and much of Ellul's work follows what he set out.

His thinking resolves much of the conflict between economics and technology, and to a great extent answers what eluded Marx. Even the question of economics must be tied to that of being, and the laws of the era, and this, primarily, is where Marx fell short. The number of Marxists since who have even attempted the question of being can be counted on one hand.

The modern economic question is primarily a technological question. This is clear in Marx's enslavement to technical thinking. He lost sight of being, and got caught up in a perfected weaving of legal and technical effects.

>>17401100
Where there is absolute currency circulation one can be certain that economic nihilism has reached its limits. Economic opposition begins to pile into currency speculation, whether through abandonment of principles or gambling on total metamorphosis of the currency - a Great Jubilee begins to take hold before debts are even considered.

The shift away from traditional leftist politics precedes this by several decades, and suggests the extent of the greater interest which will be called back. The ancient laws remain, even as the few remaining communists rewrite history as economic determinism for liberalism. The stamp of the coin retains its greater meaning, where this is lost one can only assume permanent war conditions.

>>17402390
The money supply increases along with the equalisation of the classes. This is paradoxical to economic theory because it cannot see value, only the numbers where they represent technical speculation.

Class, however, is not determined by availability of money, as in every way this increase of money against value acts in the same way as holding debt. What separates the classes is character, values, spirit, and a tendency towards legal strength.

Here we see that devaluation and deflation is written into the very form of the modern character, its law of being. The economy receives its orders for compounding austerity from higher, if invisible, laws.

>>17406180
This inflation of the money supply is due to the minimization of the social condition. Where the distance between landlord and farmer, factory owner and worker, is decreased the character of class difference is constrained within a smaller territory. One can only then demonstrate hierarchy, or minimal superiority, through holding of money.

This is the condition of equality in which all sovereignty must take on the elements of chance. So long as the victor is human and all are given equal opportunity in the distribution of fortune by chance, class remains one.

Money supply also increases along with this elevation of chance over fortune, meaning that there is a threefold formation in which money may increase, or siphon off the stores of the other pots. However, where chance is a neutralising factor it gains in strength over the equalisation currency. This explains the perfection of currency in total speculation.

>>17405336
Answer this Graeber

>The process of continuous neutralization of various domains of cultural life has reached its end because technology is at hand. Technology is no longer neutral ground in the sense of the process of neutralization; every strong politics will make use of it. For this reason, the present century can only be understood provisionally as the century of technology. How ultimately it should be understood will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground.
>Great masses of industrialized peoples today still cling to a torpid religion of technicity because they, like all masses, seek radical results and believe subconsciously that the absolute depoliticization sought after four centuries can be found here and that universal peace begins here. Yet technology can do nothing more than intensify peace or war; it is equally available to both. In this respect, nothing changes by speaking in the name of and employing the magic formula of peace. Today we see through the fog of names and words with which the psycho-technical machinery of mass suggestion works.
>Today we even recognize the secret law of this vocabulary and know that the most terrible war is pursued only in the name of peace, the most terrible oppression only in the name of freedom, the most terrible inhumanity only in the name of humanity. Finally, we also see through the mood of that generation which saw only spiritual death or a soulless mechanism in the age of technicity. We recognize the pluralism of spiritual life and know that the central domain of spiritual existence cannot be a neutral domain and that it is wrong to solve a political problem with the antithesis of organic and mechanistic, life and death. A life which has only death as its antithesis is no longer life but powerlessness and helplessness. Whoever knows no other enemy than death and recognizes in his enemy nothing more than an empty mechanism isnearer to death than life. The comfortable antithesis of the organic and the mechanistic is itself something crudely mechanistic. A grouping which sees on the one side only spirit and life and on the other only death and mechanism signifies nothing more than a renunciation of the struggle and amounts to nothing more than a romantic lament. For life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the order of human things. Ab integro nascitur ordo.

>>17401055
>"When we study the financial and currency system of today, we enter an area where there reigns profound confusion
They print meme money and give it to themselves, and let banks loan even more imaginary meme money they don't have.

gigantic tracts of autism about what money is are unnecessary when the fraud is that obvious, it is literally just letting people print money for themselves.

(Edited)
remove
For every $11.00 the price of GameStop shares goes up, the banks lose about a billion dollars.

2008’s housing market collapse only cost the banks around 50 billion.
$1000 GME/Funcoland is WORSE FOR THE BANKS THAN THE 2008 HOUSING MARKET CRASH.

This is going to crash the entire financial system.

And it’s not limited to Gamestop, or AMC, or BBRY.

This has exposed a serious vulnerability in a system that is already propped up by MASSIVE amounts of debt.
These funds make up a significant amount of trading volume on the NYSE, and the average hedge fund has $30-40 in debt for every $1 of actual money on their books.
It has now become apparent that the sustenance of the entire system is dependent upon fund managers and bankers trading on inside info at the expense of retail investors who hold positions opposite theirs.

Retail and “outsiders” have now figured out a way to break their game, rendering them unable to service that debt.

If the government intercedes, they can only do so unconstitutionally and screw tens of thousands of regular people out of money they made fairly.

If they don’t, I don’t know if you realize this, but we are looking at a system-wide collapse that can’t be stopped.

Hedge funds have a total of $3.25 trillion under management, and nearly every dollar of that is intertwined and levered up to the extent above.

The value of the US dollar will be at risk. There’s no amount of stimulus the government can pour in to help service that debt without triggering hyperinflation.

Exciting times.

>>17406461
So replace one nihilist system with another? How do you think that will work out?

>>17401063
>Where treasures and possessions are by nature stable, unchangeable, and out of circulation – features which the technician abhors, because to him they signify sterility – the supporting of the currency by precious metals provides an element of financial stability.

Bump

"A man whose estate extends over a whole district, and who owns a hundred farms, is well aware of the importance of gaining at the same time the affections of some thousands of men; this object appears to call for his exertions, and to attain it he will readily make considerable sacrifices. But he who owns a hundred acres is insensible to similar considerations, and he cares but little to win the private regard of his tenant. "

>>17401055>>17401063

>intellectual praised by a heists talks out of his ass about money

phew, the french revolution really was a mistake

>>17408183
A lot of trannies seething. Great sign that it's true.

>>17405336
>>17405341
>>17406461
>>17408183
"The secret which conceals itself here is of a simple nature: It consists, on the one hand, in the fact that the economy is not a power which can bestow freedom, and, on the other, that an economic sense is not able to access the elements of freedom – and yet it requires the eyes of a new breed to work out this secret."

>>17408183
>>intellectual praised by a heists
What?

"What then comes, as the next big step, is forging of metals, which is spreading in ever more extent, with ever better procedures and with which ever higher temperatures are produced. Gold has been used from the beginning, not as cast gold but as hammered gold. The oldest art of blacksmithing is goldsmithing. It is possible that the fusibility of the metals was first discovered in gold and not in copper, all the more so as the melting points of the two naturally occurring metals are adjacent. Since the methods of determining time are becoming more and more refined, exact dating is to be expected."

Wealth must be seen in the whole of the minting process, from the stamp, to the hammering, and the refinement of materials, even the choice of the symbols and their aesthetic placement is significant. All of this is one with what it is exchanged with. Rather than abstract batter, money must be seen as raising the inheritance of the whole of a city, a people, and the relation to time and nature. It cannot be an efficiency process alone. Even where this is attempted one sees the return against value only increase, an inefficiency in yields.

>>17409221
In the hammering of the coin the form of wealth is given its shape. One sees in the ancient coin the contours of something to be held onto, a gift of a stamp which has also been pressed into the thumb - it was much as our handshake, only with greater gravity and presence.

Garbage. Read these and learn

Amusing ourselves to death
Manufacturing consent
5000 years of debt
Bullshit jobs: a theory

>>17409512
Subgraduate.

"But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that your fasting will not be obvious to men, but only to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal."

>>17405341
This board needs gadflies.

"Wise is he who knows by nature much."

In the excess of currency there is also becoming. Man must order himself, become many things, live many lives. As Schmitt suggested, man must be his own priest, caretaker, master, doctor, technician, accountant, etc.. The industrialisation of the self necessitates many currency for each life.

Thread comparison
>>17410184

Bh

The Robinhood/Reddit mob are not investors. They’re gamblers. It’s a game. Under the guise of ‘sticking it to the man’ these folks are actually trying to make fast money without working for it. There’s nothing noble about being a pig. Taking a rabble of four or six million traders, hopped up on Internet chat, and throwing it against one security or asset to purposefully inflate its value is dangerous and irresponsible. It’s certainly not an ethical strike against boomers, market participants, brokers, investment funds or capitalism. But it is exploiting vulnerabilities in a system designed by people who never thought folks could be this stupid. Now we know.
What can go wrong?
Lots. Tons. The implications are large. Securities regulators are all over Reddit, Robinhood and the capital markets because what’s taking place sure smells like deliberate crowdfunding manipulation. The issue is simple: values purposefully detached from reality. This undermines market integrity where pricing is constantly scrutinized and adjusted (earnings reports, fundamental analysis, forward guidance, prospectuses, p/e ratios, macroeconomics, sector analysis – you know, the adult stuff). Yes, valuations get out of whack when investors make bets on the future, but this is new ground. This is inflation merely for the sake of creating notional wealth. Greed, personified. Turned into a video game.
The crowning achievement in this moronic, self-serving, narcissistic behavior is to cloak it in moral outrage. A whole bunch of people clearly think they’re victims, so it’s perfectly cool to slag their elders, victimize each other and screw up capital markets where most people’s family nesteggs, education funds and retirement bucks are housed. So they can be porcine.

Signed,

>t. Boomer
P.S. why don’t you get the fuck off of reddit and go mow the lawn

>>17413615
ok boomer

>>17406248
Every effort of financial centralisation was formed through regulation of chance, techniques already known to the gambler. When winning the table a stranger is pushed into the game - chance itself is shuffled. Where this does not work then the game must be taken to another level. The criminal origins of America becomes the whole of exchange, backed by securities.

War efforts are the perfection and end of finance. This is the civil war phase. Or more accurately when the slave hordes take the fortified territory, they will have to do very little fighting. Only women and children remain.

No consoom. No response.

It's worth what people in the market say it's worth.

>>17413615
Ok boomer

>>17413615
You’re on 4 Chinz right now not leddit you absolute retard. Too dumb to look at your own url?

>>17406426
Not OP, but Marxist doctrine is the philosophical version of filibustering, I.e. rather than having anything good to say, you obscurate your argument and condense what could be a paragraph into four pages.

>>17413615
Ok boomer

>>17416043
Don't care still selling GME.

>>17401055
I like your posts op

>>17416061
>the boomer cries out in pain as he shorts you

>>17415789
Market was fine until millennials came in. Too lazy to work and put after hours the way your suppsed to.

Now your all screwed lol. Stick to your games next time.

>>17413615
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=167IhlXnN2Y

What would he buy?

Arise, arise, Raiders of Théoden
Fell deeds awake: fire and overleverage!
C-suites shall be shaken, shares shall be tendered,
A sword-day, a red day, ere the market closes!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

>>17416294
>China's elite blocks your path

>>17413615
>Come on Mr. Frodo. I can't carry it for you... but I can claim you as a dependent!

Bump

>>17405632
>Friedrich Georg Junger wrote the best book there is on technology

Really? I find it hard to believe that anything could be as comprehensive as Ellul's TTS. Are there english translations?

>>17409512
>t. 112IQ chompskyite

>>17418946
I don't know about comprehensive, but it is as close to the truth as anyone has come. He sees the essence of technology and what is behind it. You can see where Ellul followed Junger but still fell short, he didn't quite get what was said and strays off into relatively weak positions.
Unfortunately it is very hard to find in English. My copy was expensive but I only saw it the one time. There was a digital version a few years ago but last time I checked the site was down.

>>17416294
People aren't enjoying watching hedge fund managers squirm because they're socialists, but because they're going to lose money on irresponsible shorts (or they would if the government wasn't going to step in to protect them). Realistically a Socialist government would have similar issues - access to wealth and power would be based far more on who you knew than on ability to create value or on merit. They don't want a Party-State that controls all major industries, but for the people on the losing end of irresponsible shorts to pay up.

LEAVE ISRAEL ENGLANDER ALONE! HE'S TRYING TO MAKE A LIVING.

>>17418946
Friedrich Georg on wealth. Whole chapter at link:
https://derarbeiternotes.blogspot.com/2021/01/fg-junger-on-forms-of-wealth-and.html

B

Bump

Buu

>>17416064
Thanks for your comment. Nice to know someone's reading.

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B

Bump

>>17405336
Graber is a butthurt commie

>>17425900
Wrong. He disproves this fascist nonsense.

>>17425913
>>17405336
Still haven't answered.

B

>>17401055
>le gold should back currencies
>implying our subjective value of a gold rock is any better than our subjective value of a green rectangle
:/

>>17401055

>>17402820

>>17428594
>subjective value

>>17406509
I'll believe it when I see it

>>17428594
gold is a natural resource you dumb retard it has a limited value
on the other hand shillbucks can be printed to oblivion until you run out of trees

>>17431553
I'm not him but you should realize how uneconomic your argument is because it does not claim to optimize anything.

Modern monetary policy optimizes GDP growth and through very complex macroeconomic theory leaves everyone better off. I know I'm about to get a bunch of retards who have never taken calc or even an introductory economics course tell me I'm wrong. They love to think that the buzzfeed tier political economy book they read with no math or graphs makes them an expert.

So let's pose the question as an econ question. explain to me how gold is more optimal than paper money.

>>17431842
>explain to me how gold is more optimal than paper money.
Yikes.

>>17431842
>through very complex macroeconomic theory leaves everyone better off
ASS

>>17431842
Oh sweatie ...

>>17431842
Who's talking about economics?

>>17401055
B

>>17405336
>>17426612

>>17431553
>natural resource endows gold with the quality of value (allegedly)
>dollar is made by natural resources AND is backed by the threat of force
seems like the better option is clear

>>17431842
>So let's pose the question as an econ question. explain to me how gold is more optimal than paper money.
I'm the first guy and you're o the money. These /lit/eral retards can't even apply their reading to other fields, they'll never be true polymaths. Gold is not more optimal than fiat currency, and the complaints directed toward fiat is similarly true of gold (and the ones that cannot, such as inflation, are beneficial for modern economies.). Not to mention that the countries that dropped the gold standard recovered faster in the Great Depression, or we can consider the political ramifications of basing a currency on gold when other nations have greater access to gold than the USA.

>>17435953
We're not discussing optimal shekeling speed retard. go back to redbit.

>>17401055

>>17435953
Tbh keep gold standard would make USA a third world country

>>17438137
In GDP not reality

Bump

>>17435953
>anime postrr

Dogecoin?

>>17401055
Dd

"I have seen money singing and celebrating mass.
Money was singing, Money was preparing the responses.
I have seen it weeping while it was giving a sermon
and smiling because it was deceiving the people.
No one without Money is honored or loved.
If a man's lineage confers infamy, Money shouts, "He's an upright man!"
See! It is clear to everyone that Money is king everywhere,
but because Money's glory can quickly be used up,
Wisdom alone refuses to be a member of that school."

>>17440391
>anime posting invalidates an argument
>a drunkard claiming that gravity exists renders gravity false

>>17438137
>>17435979
>choosing to be stupid when the option to be smart was available
I shiggy diggy

>>17444851
>>17444881

>>17444965
>>17444965

>>17445095
who this basedman?

God, let this shit die already.

>>17445225
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivadar_Csontv%C3%A1ry_Kosztka
here is the artist

>>17445234
Filtered

>>17445234

Bas

>>17419841
Interesting. What's the book called?

>>17447636
The Perfection of Technology. Or I think The Failure of Technology is the standard translation.
Would be interesting to read them side by side.

A comparison.
Ellul:
"All this being so, we touch upon a new characteristic of economic technique: it is inevitably antidemocratic. At first glance, this comment sounds surprising, even shocking. After all, technique does bring the masses of men into the economic circuit, allowing them to participate in it as they never did before. In the technical affirmation of the present, we can point to the fact that we are witnessing the forward movement of socialism: management committees, autonomous administration of social security, profit sharing, workers’ councils (which exist not only in the Soviet Union), and the achievement of recognized status by the labor unions, which thus can play a positive (not merely a revolutionary) role.

How, under these circumstances, is it possible to speak of the technical economy as antidemocratic? In reply, it would be easy to show that all these different kinds of “progress” become feasible only to the degree that men are subjected in advance to the action of technique. The opposition men manifest to this slavery (and it is a kind of slavery) is merely superficial, a matter of self-interest, and is not due to any basic revolutionary orientation. Men are unable to exert genuine influence on the direction of the economy. They can change certain modalities of wages. They can alter the direction of enterprise and intervene in certain economic forms to compensate for certain mechanical drawbacks; and they can give opinions on fabrication, procedures, and financial methods. None of these is negligible and I have no desire to minimize their importance. But they do not add up to economic democracy."

>>17449353
Junger
"So far, hardly any attention has been paid to the fact that technical and economic rationalism do not coincide, that they differ in purpose and in aim. The aim and purpose of all intelligent economy – whether of an individual or of a community – is that it yield a profit. But the aim of the technician is technical perfection. What concerns the economic man is whether a work process is profitable. But to the technician, economics, like any other activity, is something which must be subject to rationalized, technical thinking. Such difference in their desires for power creates the current rivalry between technical and economic thinking. Economic thinking, which demands autonomy, cannot be a matter of indifference to the technician. He will not accept the fact that technical progress is made subservient to, and remains dependent on, the purposes of business .

This battle breaks out everywhere, and the superior power of the technician is evident in his fighting, not by means of ideologies, but by inventions. The economic man who buys up a technical patent to keep it locked in his safe is already on the retreat. His use of delaying tactics shows his inferiority. He is even forced to furnish the technician with new weapons for his attack. The fact that an installation is profitable is no reason for the technician to give up his striving for technical perfection. He will ruin even a profitable enterprise if it refuses to give in to his demands for technical rationalization. He ruins the manufacturer by unpredictable inventions. It is he who overnight creates new industries and new technical equipment. He cares no more for the welfare of the capitalist than for that of the proletarian. He is not concerned with incomes, or interest rates, or the standards of living they afford. This indifference to prosperity, to economic profit, may well be called "ideal" inasmuch as it is an expression of his superiority over the economic man, whose doctrines he overthrows without qualms. It was he who, by his invention of the power loom, drove the craftsman from his hand loom and forced him to become an operator in a mill, a proletarian. In this act his intent was not to enrich the capitalist at the expense of the factory worker, but he accepted this consequence without compunction. He was interested above all in developing the technical mechanism, and not at all in who profited by it. An idealist of science for science's sake like Roentgen, for example, refused categorically to draw any kind of economic profit from his invention of the X-ray machine. This refusal was not without an understanding of power relationships, for the scientist or engineer who thinks of profits first becomes a captive of economic thinking. "

>>17449477
"However, the dependence of technical thinking upon economic thinking dissolves to the degree to which economy becomes subservient to technical rationalization and has to give in to the compulsion exercised by the technician. Economic man can no longer escape the technician's drive for perfection. Wherever he tries to, he is choked by technology's firm leash. The technician determines the form of the working process and thereby gains influence upon the actual work itself. The superiority he maintains is well founded. He is superior because he thinks in terms of absolute rationality, whereas the economic man thinks only on the inferior level of functional rationality. Religious, political, social, and economic considerations are excluded from technological thought processes to which they have no necessary relationship. We see here a striving for power that is successful and terrifying precisely because it keeps aloof from monetary rewards."

>>17449485
There is a clarity in this section which gets to the essence almost immediately (the chapter itself is only a few more paragraphs). Rather than a comparative history which makes the events central, Junger is following the laws themselves to reveal what lies behind the process.
Technique is a law of being in the modern era, and the type of being is set out from the very beginning, he is not a product of economic domination, nor even technical. A great image is that of Tocqueville's worker, who reveals that technological obsolescence, of shedding technology like a husk, is present from the beginning and is a means of man in creation of himself and his dominion. He is one with democratic being, and is himself a technician. What Ellul misses in these minor political oppositions is that the technician is himself a type of worker.

The soviet worker is not more or less efficient, he is only conditioned by specific cultural, natural, and ideological differences. Within modern time the sense of being and technology remains king. Authoritarian measures may be seen as a response within constrained time, or a necessity of crisis, i.e. where economic austerity must be increased to form the being of the worker. This is why sovietism may appear more efficient on the surface.

The soviet who abandons economic thinking does not prove the superiority of authoritarian measures over the democratic, rather his installation only proves a willingness to submit to technological thinking. Another possibility is the extent of the transition, as the Russian peasants had to be trained in such a short period of time. Technical administration of economic theories was a greater necessity, and given the bureaucratic character it was also used to salvage their own organisations. Hence the greater impoverishment loss of sight of the end form of the worker.

I have no idea what's going on here, how does crypto fit into this?

>>17450927
Crypto is the perfection of a currency which is never used, acting as a means of technical management of crisis and currency austerity.

>>17451067
Or perhaps it is better to say that its use is abstract. Finance is a type of second-order economy and crypto rules where the economy has 'escaped'.

>>17401055
B

>>17401084
Any recommendations for this?

>>17450927
Yes

>>17448842
>>17449353
>>17449477
>>17449485
>>17449699
Sorry I'm late, but thank you so much for your thorough response. I have only read Ellul and will look into Junger. Surprised Ellul didn't expound on the Technician as a worker much. Again, much appreciated. Attempts to crack the economic conundrum without giving technology/technique its proper dues seems superficial

>>17453895
No problem. I'ok probably try to look at This closer. Evola, for example, seems to take the route of economic determinism, whereas someone like Heidegger is almost scared of even mentioning economy. It's an interesting conflict.

>>17401055
G

you wrote so much text; didn't read any of it
gold is a commodity, money is not.

>>17457263
>didn't read any of it
Pure lit

>>17401055
H

B

H

>>17401055
H