Adolf Merckle case: the class politics of suicide
Posted on Wednesday 7 January, 2009
Filed Under Society
ON MONDAY evening, the fifth-richest man in Germany wrote a note for his family, and then took a walk down to the railway track in his home village of Blaubeuren. His body was recovered some time later.
I am at the human level naturally sorry for those close to Adolf Merckle, whose photograph dominates the front page of The Financial Times this morning; they do not of course deserve the degree of pain his action will inflict.
Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding the incident remind me of Marx’s famous description of individual capitalists as ‘capital personified and endowed with a consciousness and a will’.
Merckle controlled companies with a combined turnover of £27bn, and was personally worth about £6bn. He could have chosen never to work again, and to live out his days in luxury unimaginable to most of us. Short of immortality, there is nothing he could conceivably have wanted that he could not easily have had.
But as Marx put it, when we are dealing with a man who becomes capital personified, ‘appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations’.
So last year, Merckle borrowed vast quantities of Volkswagen shares he did not own, and went on to offload them. This is an example of so-called short selling, which is a means of betting that an equity will fall sharply. Then you can buy replacement shares at a lower price, and profit from the difference.
Why would you want to do that when you already have more than you could ever spend sitting in your bank account? ‘Appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract’ sounds to me just about the only imaginable spur.
But Merckle’s wager went spectacularly wrong when VW’s share price quadrupled in just two days. Facing ruin, he decided he would rather die than go broke. Never did the old aphorism ‘it’s only money’ sound more apt.
The thing is, Merckle will not be the only suicide to result from the current economic climate, as recent research by the Samaritans indicates:
Economic recession, especially when it is sudden and severe, can lead to an increase in suicide rates. This is not only because more people become unemployed and, as a result, more psychologically vulnerable, but also because those in employment feel threatened too. The fear of losing one’s job and pressures caused by a downturn in business, demotion or pension plan cutbacks can be bad for mental health and therefore increase suicide risk.
The charity adds that the unemployed are two or three times more likely to kill themselves than those in employment, leading to the obvious conclusion that the suicide rate will rise sharply in 2009.
Recession and the consequent mass unemployment it inevitably brings are in the final analysis another face capital’s drive to accumulate. Working class people rather than billionaires are many times more likely to end up dead by their own hands as a result.
If the recession of the early 1980s is anything to go by, few of their stories will make it into the FT or any other national newspaper. They are just as much victims of capital, nevertheless.
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12 Responses to “Adolf Merckle case: the class politics of suicide”
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Again, a good article,
‘The charity adds that the unemployed are two or three times more likely to kill themselves than those in employment, leading to the obvious conclusion that the suicide rate will rise sharply in 2009.’
It’s estimated over 400 people killed themselves as a direct result of Thatcherite/Monetarist policies, including the guy who tried to ram his car into number 10. i think there is a little monument to him and the others nearby, don’t think it gets visited much though, i wonder why?
When doctors told me I’d not walk again, it was not the shock of not walking which hurt the most but what will I do, what work will I get how will I get a job, even to this day it’s not the loss of use of my legs which bother me or the rest of my problems, but the shame of being sacked, the shame of not being able to work for a living.
Ad yet I’m classed as being what did Purnell say an offender.
Excellent post.
I will never forget a tv production of ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist’ that I saw as a child, in about 1970. In one dreadful scene an unemployed man cuts the throat of his wife and child and himself because he cannot face a life of workless poverty. I don’t have a too much sympathy for the Merkle’s of this world, they have had a chance to shape a better world, it’s ordinary people who are struggling along that I feel sorry for. As the old saying has it, ‘It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure, it’s the poor wot ‘as the pain.’.
Another really good post Dave.
At one level I agree with the sentiment of the post, after all who could not hate the Tories after living through the 80s seeing the damage done and hearing them say “it was a price worth paying” or whatever their phrase du jour was to explain why they didn’t a flying one.
But on the other hand suicide is not a rational response to all of this.
I am reminded of a LPYS meeting many years ago when the audience were told that “capitalism literally made his head fall off” (of a kid who turned to drugs and injected into veins in his neck) and we were then told by second speaker (may even have been the great Mr Sheridan himself – this was in Glasgow) that “the youth of Britain have only two choices, drugs or the LPYS”.
I once saw this film about the Chippendales. The guy who put them together is caught up in all kinds of trouble because of shady business and he’s on the verge of being caught out so he kills himself, ensuring that his wife and children get his money. So perhaps there was a financial motive in that he was about to lose his vast fortune and so killed himself?
If Merckle was about to lose his fortune, we may see more extreme events, such as murder-suicides, as the recession deepens. A few months back there was the case of the failed businessman who killed his wife and children before killing himself. Jon Ronson wrote a very moving article on the case (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/22/christopher-foster-news-crime)
Hard to disagree that things will get worse on this front.
That said, this recession is unusual in the sense that many more high-earners are being hit than previous recessions in which the damage has been much more heavily weighted towards those on low incomes. Just look at the job evaporation in London to see how badly middle and high earners have been hit.
Yeah those poor high earners, I really feel for them. I bet that Merckle was down to his last few hundred million.
I believe he still had 4 billion in the bank.
The Merkle story parallels that of Christopher Foster, who also murdered his wife and daughter:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/shropshire/7589465.stm
Foster was flat broke, but pretended that he was rich. Two innocent people were killed because he was too proud to be poor.
Adolf Merckle wasn’t only a billionaire but also a member of the board of trustees of the “christian conservative” (= far right) think-tank “Studienzentrum Weikersheim”, an institution connecting the right wing of the CDU with the German “nouvelle droite” and reactionary and fascists organizations (from Britain, Michael Walker (editor of “The Scorpion”, ex-NF) gave a paper in Weikersheim in the 1990ies), see http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/Antifaschismus/Themen/szw/seiten/szw.html (in German, sorry)