Alfred Amonn, Arbeit und Wirtschaft (1958)

Alfred Amonn’s German essay examines Alexander Kokkalis’s attempt to reconstruct economic theory around labour. Its central question concerns not simply labour’s contribution to production but the conceptual grounds for distinguishing labour, nature, and capital. Amonn locates the inquiry within a longstanding theoretical problem:

Die Stellung der Arbeit in der Wirtschaft und ihre Bedeutung für die Wirtschaft war immer eines der fundamentalen Probleme der Lehre von der Wirtschaft, sowohl der reinen wie der angewandten Theorie.

English translation: The position of labour in the economy and its significance for the economy has always been one of the fundamental problems of the science of the economy, of pure as well as of applied theory.

Against classical political economy and the conventional classification of productive factors, Kokkalis treats labour as the original economic means. Amonn approaches this proposal with explicit appreciation:

In neuerer Zeit hat der Grieche Alexander Kokkalis das Problem wieder aufgegriffen und die Frage in einer neuen, und wie man sagen muß, originellen und scharfsinnigen Weise zu beantworten gesucht.

English translation: In more recent times the Greek Alexander Kokkalis has taken up the problem anew and has sought to answer the question in a new and, as one must say, original and acute manner.

Amonn reconstructs the argument through Kokkalis’s principal writings, moving from economic means to production, accumulation, value, and distribution. The foundational distinction separates indispensable conditions of human activity from means humans can command. Nature may be necessary for life and production without thereby qualifying as an economic means. The criterion is control:

Die menschlichen Zwecke werden deshalb nur durch Mittel erreicht, weil der Mensch eben nur über sie Verfügungsgewalt besitzt.

English translation: Human ends are attained only through means for the very reason that man possesses power of disposal over means alone.

Labour power is therefore the original resource available to human agency. External resources become usable through its exercise, and capital represents labour power embodied outside the worker. Cultivated land belongs to capital insofar as labour has rendered it available for production. This classification rests on a claim about human command, not merely on the observation that production requires work.

Kokkalis distinguishes categories of productive means from productive factors. Labour and capital differ as internal and external productive energy, but capital is neither original nor functionally independent. The decisive factors operate within labour: directive intellectual activity establishes purposes and methods, while executive bodily activity carries them out with capital’s assistance. Both are necessary, but improvements in direction explain productivity growth. Their relationship is understood as multiplicative rather than additive: better direction raises the effectiveness of executive capacity.

This distinction supports a challenge to saving-based explanations of capital formation. Kokkalis separates the emergence of new productive capacities from the multiplication of existing capital goods. Invention and organization explain how resources acquire greater productive effectiveness; abstention from consumption cannot itself explain that transformation. Saving can consequently follow capital formation rather than constitute its original cause.

The framework also brings workers’ maintenance and education within production. Goods that restore or develop labour power sustain the productive process instead of simply terminating it in consumption. Consumption in the narrower economic sense is reserved for enjoyment that does not reproduce productive capacity. Production becomes a circulation between powers embodied in human beings and powers embodied in external goods; rising productivity makes this an expanding process. Technical, organizational, and intellectual rationalization identify different improvements in the direction of productive energy.

In value theory, Kokkalis distinguishes relative exchange values from the formation of aggregate economic value. He seeks to explain how productive capacity generates the value of social income, rather than deriving value from labour expenditure alone. Marginal utility retains a role in exchange valuation, but price relationships do not adequately explain the creation of total value. Expanding needs and the complementary operation of directive and executive labour connect productivity growth with increasing value and welfare.

Distribution likewise turns on productive improvement. Better direction generates capital and entrepreneurial profit, while wages must increase with output to prevent insufficient demand and crisis. As improvements become generalized, their benefits appear in wages. Amonn presents these propositions as interconnected parts of a theoretical system.

His assessment combines appreciation of Kokkalis’s originality and consistency with scrutiny of its foundations. The exclusion of nature from economic means, the separation of directive and executive labour, and their asserted multiplicative relationship remain decisive points for criticism. The essay shows how a labour-centred theory can connect innovation, human development, accumulation, and distribution while identifying the conceptual assumptions on which that connection depends.