The New Reading of Capital after the end of the workersʼ states
...Heinrich by contrast finds it “decisive how exploitation and class rule function in a society” without considering this fact worth proving. He does not want to highlight exploitation as the decisive scandal, but what he considers the amazing functioning of this system. His attention is not so much the absurdity of the economic system and its harmfulness for the great majority, but capitalism as a functioning system. He wants to explain how this system, despite its “destructive potential,” integrates its (human) elements and secures its existence in the world. Criticism of capitalism is for him not the clarification of arguments as to why this system of exploitation deserves to be abolished, but remarks that take the stability of capitalist society as the topic: He is concerned with uncovering mechanisms of unconscious preformation of thought and action by the “system” that ensure that its inhabitants function reliably and don’t arrive at any critical thoughts. “The system” is for him the all-ruling subject of the capitalist world.
Criticism of the system, but no hostility against capitalists
Heinrich speaks of a ruling and a ruled, exploited class; but he barely looks any closer at both classes, they appear quite the same in the regard that primarily interests him: Exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled are equally ruled, namely as subjects of a “systemic relation of rule”:
“In the next chapters it will become even clearer that capitalism is based on a systemic relation of rule that produces compulsions to which the workers as well as the capitalists are subjected. Hence, a criticism is too limited which aims at the ‘excessive profit striving’ of individual capitalists, but not at the capitalist system as a whole.” (15)
Certainly, a criticism that only demands that individuals moderate their striving for profit when it is carried to excess is inadequate; it is essential to indicate the necessity for the bad experiences of workers in capitalism and to pinpoint the reasons for this necessity in order to properly criticize the eternally disappointed and still never given up false hopes for improvement and the corresponding constructive proposals. However, Heinrich understands this need falsely, as the “hence” in the above quotation suggests: According to him, “the criticism of unbridled profit-striving is too limited,” not because there are no individuals who strive so excessively, but because the capitalists are forced to strive by the system, whether they want to or not. Heinrich polemically poses the logic of the ruling system of exploitation and capital accumulation against the fact that this is the systematic domination of an interest; an interest that the agents of capital in fact have, as they pursue their economic purpose with all determination, and to which they make the wage-laborers subservient. When Heinrich mentions “system” and “necessity” it is always in a tone of warning that one should just not reproach the capitalists: for him they are not what Marx called “character masks,” representatives of the capitalistic money increase in that they strive as private owners of money to increase their property. For Heinrich, they are, like their victims, victims of the system – and in this respect can’t help it. This is a strange critique of capitalism whose first task is not to clarify the socially valid interests in and methods of exploitation, but to warn against hostility towards the exploiters. In a way that can be called very monotonous, when Heinrich covers the fundamental facts of capitalism, he always ends the presentation of the relevant passages from Capital with exculpating negations: what the capitalists do is not individual madness, not malice, nothing reprehensible – everything is forced by the system and correct according to its principles.
