Sooo, you wanna know what I learned this week?
Well, it wasn’t anything to do about renewable energy – kind of lost sight of that.
But I did dig deeper into the hole of economics and its mysteries. And it really is a hole.
On the other hand, I also dug deep into the machinery of politics – political parties. How they establish themselves, how they interact and how they represent themselves to us. So let’s break it down again.
The choice of no choices
So I think what I learned this week can be summarized into “What the fuck is wrong with politics?”
I learned about the guiding groups of politics – how there are different theories of how parties came to be. Some say they started as the manifestation of social conflicts – for example working people vs capital owners – that mobilized their opinions into active groups on the political field to voice their needs. How our structuring of politics into a left-to-right dimension isn’t much of a structure at all. What would you say places a party on the left side? And what would the antipole be?
And now think about it – is it the whole of the party or just one topic? Is it just their standpoint on migration? Or also their standpoint on affordable living? It’s hard to combine all of that on one line of left to right, because politics used to be much simpler. The left-right categories started from the French Revolution – where people on the left were for a reformation, abolishing the monarchy, and people on the right wanted to keep the monarch in state. The questions politics face today have multiplied significantly, yet they are supposed to have a guiding ideology, overarching standpoints that people can relate to and therefore vote for them. So what’s the point of political parties?
To build cohesive sets of ideas, so people can decide which party they find represents them the most – Representation.
Have enough competent people and structures to put these ideas into reality – Competent working power.
And I think a third point that is left too much out of the picture:
Show us the solutions for problems we don’t even know we need. Show us what the underlined problems are and how you will change it – Shaping the future.
Why has that third point been ignored for so long? Why has this responsibility been pushed from one side to the other? Some theories state that democracy demands educated citizens who can name their problems so that parties can represent them. Well, I think that’s not possible anymore. Our world has gotten so complex that not even the institutions put into place to regulate them know what the fuck is going on in all aspects, even less so how to regulate them – but we citizens are supposed to do it?
Yeah sure.
But not only that third purpose is not being fulfilled. Political parties also lack cohesive sets of ideas we can choose from. They rather choose to diffuse their positions on certain topics, mix different opinions, or not even voice any opinion on certain topics, in order not to separate voters with different opinions from them. Like right-wing parties being very opinionated on migration but very silent on most economic issues (at least in Austria – but different examples can be applied). How that often leads them to, if they gain power, lean on experts that were not part of the election. So the second purpose also gets ignored.
So if these parties end up not having any real opinions on more than one topic, what are we voting for? So the whole talk about citizens not being interested in politics takes a whole other side if you take into consideration that there are not many clear positions to dive into. And being into politics turns more into a reality show of what the current Kardashians are up to.
Take the current New York election. Is it great that finally a normal person, someone you can relate to, got into a high position? Absolutely! Is it a problem that it’s more about the person and less about the topics (besides cost of living, free buses and childcare) and plans? I think yes. Of course, elections are a tool to show the direction they want to take, not the finished plans. But we seem to lack more and more plans and seem to just have reactions of people. Take it to a higher level: we have the EU that agreed years ago on a plan to try and save the planet – Green Deal – not made by personalities but by positions. And what do we have now? A breakdown of that very promise because the EU is back in defence mode against other individuals’ reactions (wink wink Putin, wink wink Trump). And what is on the front agenda once more – you guessed it: ECONOMY.
Written down value ¹ Actual value
Economy. The term you can’t escape on any level. And the more I think about it, the more it feels like this one central problem:
We have more written-down money than actual value in the real world.
By actual or physical value, I mean things you can touch — land, buildings, machines, resources, labour.
By written value, I mean everything that exists only on paper or in digital numbers — loans, debt, financial products, expectations about the future, or the made-up numbers in the stock market.
It sounds absolutely dumb, I know. But isn’t that at the core of what’s wrong?
Let’s take China as an example, because their real estate system makes this crystal clear — and at the same time terrifying.
The China example: turning land into endless numbers
China’s land system works differently than in most places.
All land belongs to the state. That means the government starts with a real, physical asset — actual land. You can touch it. You can grow grass on it. It has value even without adding any financial layer to it.
Local governments lease this land to companies. Not sell — lease. This lease itself becomes a kind of financial asset. Suddenly the land is not just land anymore; it’s capital. They turned something physical into something written down and tradable.
Then developers come in. They borrow money, they combine the land with other physical inputs — workers, materials — and build houses on it. And this is where value starts multiplying, but often only on paper.
Because the price they want to sell the houses for has very little to do with:
the physical cost of materials
the actual work done by humans
or the real usefulness of the building
Instead, the price reflects a promise — the expectation of future demand, future growth, future profit.
So now we have a situation where the state earns money from the lease, the company earns money from selling the homes, and the value of both land and buildings increases far beyond their physical value.
Here’s a simple symbolic version of what basically happens:
Beginning:
State: physical value (land), written value: 0
Company: physical value (materials, workers), written value: 0
Building phase:
State: written value +1 (from lease)
Company: written value -1 (because they borrowed and invested)
Selling phase:
State: written value +1
Company: written value +4
Citizens: written value -5 (because they buy at inflated prices)
These numbers aren’t literal; they’re symbolic. But the point is this:
the surplus that the company and state get ultimately comes from the citizens.
And those citizens are often the workers whose labour created the houses in the first place.
When real workers can’t afford real houses
Here comes the real issue:
If workers don’t earn enough during the building phase — and in China many don’t — then they can’t buy the very houses they built.
So where does the money come from?
Banks.
Banks give out loans.
And here is the uncomfortable truth:
Banks do not lend out physical value. They create written value out of nothing.
They type a number into a computer, call it a loan, and suddenly there is more “money” in circulation. But this money isn’t backed by physical stuff — no land, no metals, no goods. It is backed by trust and expectation.
So now the whole system grows as long as people:
keep taking loans
keep believing prices will rise
keep buying houses they can’t afford
But if anything disturbs that — a war, a drop in population, bad economic news, investors getting scared — people suddenly want to turn their written value into something real. Something they can hold.
Cash. Gold. Land. Anything physical.
And that’s when the system shakes. Because there simply isn’t enough actual value to match all the imagined value.
The financialization twist: Marx but on steroids
This is basically the next stage after Marx.
He said that in feudalism, landowners had physical assets (land), and farmers worked it. Later, capitalism turned landless workers into wage labourers who created surplus in factories. Capitalists reinvested that surplus into machines — more physical value.
But then another layer was added:
financialization.
Bigger capitalists stopped investing mainly in physical things. Instead, they invested in financial products — stocks, bonds, derivatives, companies investing in companies investing in other companies.
It’s money moving money.
Surpluses turning into bigger surpluses without touching anything physical.
Imagined value piled on top of imagined value.
And when it collapses?
States jump in — not to save citizens, but to save the financial system.
Because the system has become too big, too interconnected, too digital, too dependent on future promises.
We once hoped for a “trickle-down effect”:
If the top gets richer, maybe something trickles down.
In some countries, yes. But often it was used to justify pay cuts and more pressure on workers, so surpluses grow at the top while the bottom waits for rain that never comes.
And globally?
Can it even rain for everyone?
So what’s left?
Written value is growing faster than actual value.
And the gap is getting bigger.
And I am I am no step closer to understanding any of this.
See you next week.