Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/80/en

The prospect of the invention's success prompts a bank to provide credit for the establishment of a production facility. That is to say, the spirit of the human being (idea) creates capital, and this congeals in the course of labour into buildings, means of production, raw materials, energy, and so on. Max Weber — German political economist and sociologist (1864–1920) — observed: «Eine leblose Maschine ist geronnener Geist.» ("A lifeless machine is congealed spirit.") The spirit now presses further toward the realization of the invention; it impels toward work. It is only through work that the production plant comes into being, and within it, through various stages of labour, the manufacture of the product. What characterizes the industrial production process is that values arise purely through the inventive spirit determining the course of human labour and modifying it in manifold ways — while the outward expression of this spirit must be sought in the manifold configuration of capital. Nature in the form of raw materials and energy recedes into the background the more human intelligence flows into the production process, the more that process articulates itself through division of labour. Division of labour moreover drives down the cost of commodity production and thereby promotes all the more strongly the expansive drive of industry and trade, extending to the commercialization of all services. Capital arises on the one hand through the inventive spirit of the human being and through division of labour; on the other hand it ensures that division of labour spills over into the boundless. As a consequence, the industrial production process threatens to emancipate itself entirely from nature and — by way of digitalization — from the working human being. It becomes the overpowering counterpole to agriculture and threatens to burst the two constraints that are meant to hold it within measure: namely, nature and the legal order.