Reading Marx on Halloween

Life under capitalism is the experience of horror — and there is no better guide to it than Karl Marx.

Richard Haidinger / Flickr

BY MARK STEVEN

10.31.2018

 Jacobin

Like the seemingly omnipotent antagonist in any given horror movie, capitalism is not just unstoppably horrific. It horrifies in its apparent unstoppability.

“The runaway world,” argues Chris Harman in a book on zombie capitalism, “is the economic system as Marx described it, the Frankenstein’s monster that has escaped from human control; the vampire that saps the lifeblood of the living bodies it feeds off.”

The diagnosis invites the big question: how do we orient ourselves politically within a social dynamic whose very essence is horror?

This is a question taken up by Karl Marx himself, whose writing overflows with tropes and figures born of the gothic, and it is one worth revisiting for Halloween.

“Capital,” Marx tells us, “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Or, in an altogether more grotesque formulation:

The capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten.

In these two sentences, both taken from the only published book that Marx himself brought to completion, sounds more like Mary Shelley than a work of political economy, summoning predatory vampires, undead monsters, and dismembered bodies.

Both Dracula and Frankenstein have been read as a tales of capitalism. The vampire is, of course, a capitalist hellbent on imperial expansion:


There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster.

Frankenstein’s monster is, by contrast, the zombified embodiment of proletarian retribution:

All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment: I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.

But unlike the novels of Stoker and Shelley, Marx’s account is not only gothic. His descriptions of a blood-drenched and gore-caked mode of production are prescient of horror as we see it in more recent cinema. Whatever these descriptions lack in the sense of morality shared by gothic novelists they make up for in cold rationality.Capitalist accumulation is, as Marx knows, a crime whose most obvious analogue is cannibalism.

Marx’s horrors are irredeemable and absolute. When he insists that capitalism is the mode of production that “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” he really commits himself, as a gifted writer and a master-stylist, to conveying specifically that kind of horror.

Elsewhere in Capital, when the vampire image returns, narrative emphasis shifts from the bourgeois predator to the exploited worker, and specifically to the worker’s obliterated body:


It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.”

The vampire reveals itself only when it is already too late, when the façade of legal niceties turns out to be an evil, Faustian pact, inescapable until the death of either party.

Stylistically important is that quoted material at the end, taken from a description made elsewhere by Friedrich Engels. The quotation from Engels confirms the organic substance of capital, its own expropriated lifeblood, is the insides of the worker.

While Marx frequently draws on the patently gothic imagery of vampires and werewolves, specters and gravediggers, here we can see that his accounts of capital also acquire a taste for human viscera, with sentences chewing their way through bodily gristle:

We may say that surplus value rests on a natural basis, but this is permissible only in the very general sense, that there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from disburdening himself of the labour requisite for his own existence, and burdening another with it, any more, for instance, than unconquerable natural obstacles prevent one man from eating the flesh of another.

Capitalist accumulation is, as Marx knows, a crime whose most obvious analogue is cannibalism. Born into the wage-relation we are not human subjects. We are only our capacity to work, which means serving up our variously muscular, nervous, and cerebral organs — and consuming those of our friends and families, as well as those of complete strangers.

Gothic descriptions like these are not merely decorative. Instead, they get to the very essence of life under capitalism. They remind us how bodies and brains are mutilated into commodities. Literally, we need only think of the deformations, injuries, and fatalities caused by strained working conditions at every level of capitalist industry, from neurological trauma through to heart attacks, right down to broken bones, amputated limbs, and mass deaths.

Figuratively, every minute and every hour spent in wage labor is another minute and another hour in which our bodies are wired to a vast machine that only lives by draining our life substances.

Life under capitalism is the experience of horror, the irreversible liquefying of human substance and its necrophagic consumption. Like the grim fate of the victims in any given horror film, whose bodies are obliterated beyond all recognition and so frequently ingested by other humans, once our labor succumbs to value that transformation is utterly irreparable. So reflects poet Keston Sutherland in a brilliantly nauseating essay on Marx’s jargon: “All that is meat melts into bone, and vice versa; and no effort of scrutiny, will or heated imagination, however powerfully analytic or moral, is capable of reversing the industrial process of that deliquescence.”

The lesson can be put this way: we all inhabit the same horror story and we should all be intensely revolted by this. But, even if we cannot undo what has already been done, that revulsion might still be a catalyst for revolution. Perhaps this is what Marx was trying to teach us all along with his unique brand of gothic horror.

Mark Steven is a lecturer in literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism and Splatter Capital.

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“They Want War”: An Open Letter to Visual Artists and Critics

BY STEPHEN F. EISENMAN
COUNTERPUNCH
MARCH 11, 2022

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Sue Coe, “What a Golden Beak (They Want War)”, Tragedy of War, 1999-2000. Photo: The artist.

Dear Comrades,

Before I say anything else, let me to extend to Ukrainians my fervent hope for your safety. If you are sheltering with family, friends, or neighbors, please find comfort in companionship, and solace in dreams of better times. If you are a refugee, I hope you have been welcomed with generosity – no one should have to experience what you have. If you are fighting, I wish you success! But please remember that retreat in the face of overwhelming odds is not timidity; it’s tactics.

To Russian artists and writers: I salute your courage in protesting this war. If police repression has made that impossible, please know that others around the world are speaking out on your behalf in opposition to invasion and violence. We understand that many ordinary Russians, perhaps a majority, oppose the war, and want to remove Putin from power. We know just how they feel. How often have we said out loud, under successive U.S. presidents, “Not my war!” or “Not in my name!”

To progressive artists and critics in the U.S., I admire your engagement in issues of war and peace at a time when most creative people and institutions prefer to cultivate their gardens and harvest what rewards they can. I especially applaud you for pondering how best to support Ukraine under siege, while at the same time denying comfort to the cold warriors and arms manufacturers at home that created the conditions for the current conflict and expect to profit from them.

During wartime, aesthetics is often set aside in favor of sheer survival. That’s understandable. But wars are waged with ideas and images almost as much as bombs and bullets, which is why Putin has shut down all independent media, banned public protest, and propagated the naked lie that Russia is not fighting a war at all! And it’s why the Ukrainian president has used every possible image and anecdote – and American public relations firms — to paint a picture of heroic resistance against a much larger and more powerful invading force.

Since the invasion on Feb. 24, many of you – my friends and colleagues in Ukraine, Russia, the U.S. and elsewhere — have been meeting to talk about how to use art to help stop the Russian onslaught and secure peace. Discussions have been spirited. Because I live in rural Florida, safely distant from the combat zone, (not withstanding Governor DeSantis), I have mostly abstained from these conversations. But the truth is, I’m deeply implicated in this war; so is every American. Putin would not have invaded Ukraine but for the specter of U.S. and NATO expansionism. We are the enemy; Ukraine is the proxy. The U.S. is far away and armed to the teeth; Ukraine is close and comparatively weak. That’s why Russia attacked. This fact is obvious but rarely said. We are responsible for Ukraine’s suffering, almost as much as Russia.

So, my friends, here are the two questions I most want us to address in our next meeting:

1) How can we best deploy art to challenge Russian violence and irredentism, while at the same time attacking U.S. and NATO imperialism?

2) How can artists and critics challenge the madness of exterminism: the grotesque illogic of nuclear war and the equally mad rush toward climate catastrophe?

We can begin to consider these questions by examining some specific works of art from the past.

Art Against War

I have long admired the work of the British-born, American artist, Sue Coe, so let’s look at her anti-war etching “What a Golden Beak (They Want War), part of a series of 23 prints titled The Tragedy of War (1999-2000). As you well know, serious artists don’t invent ex-nihlio; they build upon what has come before. Coe fits that model to a t. She is very conversant in the long history of art against war. Her suite recalls Jacques Callot’s similarly titled set of 18 etchings called The Great Miseries of War (1633), and Francisco Goya’s collection of 80 etchings and aquatints titled The Disasters of War (c. 1810-15).

In these prints, Coe represents violence abroad and at home. She alluded in the series to the U.S. and NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in Spring 1999, the scourge of American gun crime, the targeting of innocent children, and many other tragedies of war. She also indicted American and European war mongers in a pair of prints titled “War Street” which shows a Wall Street bear and bull watching Death on a pale, carousel horse; and “What a Golden Beak (They Want War), which depicts a dead bird-fetus hoisted like a puppet above a teeming mass of leering faces. Behind the carcass are two more marionettes: a bat with mouth wide open, and the effigy of a man. The bird’s beak is gilt, as if to suggest that for a war profiteer, death is pure gold.

Coe’s “What a Golden Beak” recalls Callot’s etching from the Miseries titled “L’Estrapade” (“Strappado”), which shows in the middle ground a man hoisted in the air by his wrists, and in the right foreground, another man trussed up, preparing to suffer the same fate. Three centuries later, strappado was deployed by the Nazis for purposes of torture and interrogation, and still later, by the CIA at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In that instance, the prisoner, Iraqi national Manadel al-Jamadi, was killed.

Jacques Callot, “L’Estrapade,” Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, 1633. Photo: The author.

A more obvious source for Coe was three prints by Goya: “¡Que pico de oro!” (What a Golden Beak!”) from Los Caprichos (1799), “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos,” (“The sleep of reason produces monsters”) also from Los Caprichos, and “Que se rompe la cuerda!” (“The rope

is breaking”) from The Disasters of War (c. 1810-15). From each print, Sue selected a single motif – a parrot, a bat, and a tightrope walker – to convey a complex, new idea: that a

multitude of war profiteers have constructed a political zombie that can ventriloquize their greed.

Francisco Goya, “Que se rompe la cuerda!” (“The rope is breaking”), The Disasters of War, c. 1810-15. Photo: The author

Of course, the meaning of Coe’s work is not so literal. It’s also about the divide between performance and spectatorship; the relationship between individuals and mobs; and

the conflict of innocence and experience. No artwork of value can be reduced to a single, articulable “message;” if it could, its very existence would be unnecessary. You know this well. But Coe’s print series is concerned to warn us about the risks posed by weapons manufacturers, the aerospace industry, fossil fuel companies, security consultants, investment bankers, pipeline developers and the rest of the vampires who “want war” and live off death. And her cautionary remains salient today. The war in Ukraine is a tragedy for the many, but a bonanza for a few.

War Profiteers

The war against Ukraine and the economic sanctions against Russia have disrupted the global market for oil and natural gas, raising the price for both to record levels. The war has also greatly increased demand for advanced weapons and aircraft. Fossil fuel companies and arms manufacturers are practically chortling. Any losses BP and Shell may incur from their withdrawal of stakes in Russian oil and gas giants Rosneft and Gazprom, will be more than made up for by increased profits from rising fuel and share prices. Even before the war, the oil and gas companies were doing very, very well. Shell earned $6.4 billion in profits in the last quarter of 2021. Shell’s CEO, Ben van Beurden had a total compensation last year of about $10 million. In February 2022, he collected a cool $5 million from the sale of Shell stock. ExxonMobil made almost $9 billion in the fourth quarter, and its CEO, Darren Woods made about $15 million, $8 million or so from stock options.

Not content with record profits and executive profiteering, the oil industry trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, which represents Exxon, Shell and Chevron, wants more. In the wake of the war and possible shortages, they are asking the Biden administration to relax extraction regulations and open up drilling on federal lands and off-shore to “ensure energy security at home and abroad.” They have not proposed rapidly expanding the use of renewable energy, though this would accomplish the same thing cheaper and faster and at much less cost to the environment and climate.

Here’s another example of an energy company profiting from war: Cheniere Energy, the largest U.S. exporter of Liquified Natural Gas, which reported record profits in 2021, saw its share price last week rise almost 8%. Eager to allay any anxiety about gas supplies, Cheniere’s vice president, Anatol Feygin, said his company’s tankers would be “a key part of the solution going forward.” He added: “The human toll and tragedy [of war], obviously has our thoughts and prayers.” Coincidentally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last week that global temperatures are rising faster than expected and that record droughts and rising seas will cause catastrophe – hunger and malnutrition, displacement and early death – for millions in the next few decades unless immediate action is taken to reduce the emission of global greenhouse gasses. Feygin and Cheniere did not publicly address the IPCC report. War, fossil fuels and climate catastrophe are evil triplets.

As the world’s leading producer or fossil fuels, the U.S. is the chief culprit in the climate crisis. It is also the world leading producer (37% share) of armaments, followed by Russia (20%), France (8%), Germany (5%) and China (5%). It’s home to the planet’s five biggest arms manufacturers, led by Lockheed-Martin, which logged $67 billion in sales in 2021. Lockheed makes Stinger and Javelin missiles, currently in great demand by Ukraine and all other nations in the region. The looping trajectory of Javelins allows them to hit tanks from above, making them very effective at penetrating the commander’s hatch and incinerating the crew. U.S. defense contractors donated almost $50 million to both Democratic and Republican campaigns in 2020, led by Lockheed-Martin with about $6 million, followed closely by Raytheon and Northrop Grumman with more than $5 million each.

Coe’s etching, “They Want War,” we have seen, is a highly mediated work of art that is part of a long tradition of anti-war images stretching back at least 400 years. But it effectively evokes the current drive for profit of some of the nation’s largest and most powerful corporations. Radical art today isn’t primarily about reporting the facts – that’s the essential work of journalists. It’s about making militarism and capitalism emotionally and intellectually vivid, the better to be resisted. “The weapon of criticism,” Marx wrote in 1843, “cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon; material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” Replace the word “theory” in Marx’s famous quote, with “art” and you have a pretty good idea of the potential power of art in the context of a mass movement against war and empire.

Art of the Meme

By now you are probably asking yourselves who are the Sue Coes (apart from Coe herself) of the current anti-war, anti-imperialist struggle? The answer for the moment is unclear. Serious art takes time, and it is only in the next few weeks and months that we’ll begin to see what the world’s best artists have to say about the current crisis, and how they will forge links with emerging protest movements. So far however, the most arresting art consists of memes supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia. For example, the unsigned, unattributed, widely distributed internet montage of Putin using a dart to burst a Ukraine-flag balloon but exploding himself. The image is a clever inversion of the scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great  Dictator (1940) in which Adenoid Hynkel (the Hitler character played by Charlie) toys with a balloon-earth, only to have it blow up in his face.

Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, written, directed, and produced by Charlie Chaplin, 1940.

Other memes, especially by Ukrainian artists, are still more tendentious. The ones posted online by Katerina Korolevtseva and the Projector Creative & Tech Online Institute were made to be freely downloaded and distributed. Their most frequent demand is for NATO to

Artem Gusev, Close the Skies, 2022 Elina Tslk, The Ghost of Kyiv, 2022

“close the sky,” meaning establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine. That request was rejected last week by U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg for the very sensible reason that do so could trigger a U.S. war against Russia and possible nuclear holocaust.

Other designs show Putin as Hitler, Russia as Nazi Germany, and the “Ghost of Kyiv” who single-handedly shot down between six and 21 Russian fighters – the numbers vary according to the teller. Like the widely reported deaths of the 13 border guards on Snake Island who rather than surrender to the Russian navy shouted “Go fuck yourself”, the Ghost figure is fictional. (The guards were not killed; they were captured alive.) Truth, as the expression goes, is the first casualty of war.

Another effective, but less partisan meme is one by Brett Stiles simply titled Peace, which recalls Picasso’s iconic lithograph from 1949. Stiles updated the image by turning the curves of Picasso’s bird into an angular origami made from a New York Times front page reporting the Russian invasion. Picasso’s bird is notable because it was intended to be an anti-nationalist symbol, condemning all war and violence, but particularly that perpetrated by the U.S.

Bret Stiles, Peace, 2022, courtesy brettstilesdesign.com. Pablo Picasso, Peace, 1949.

Stiles’s meme too rejects nationalism in favor of global peace. (Another dove by Picasso was used on the poster for the second World Congress of Partisans for Peace in Paris in 1949.)

Precisely such images, however, have been criticized by Ukrainian designer Korolevsteva. She writes:

“I think the most useful messages from the international community and from our designers in English are not with doves and calls for peace, but calls to make donations, for example. Or calls to cut Russia off from the international payment network Swift, or to close the sky. When these messages are shared, they lead to action and designers can make a difference in the name of truth and our freedom.”

Whether such memes can in fact “lead to action”, or as Marx wrote, become a “material force,” depends upon conditions of their reception. But the massages of some of them – especially “close the sky” — are historically and politically irresponsible. They invite war between the U.S. and Russia.

The shape of things to come

The memes illustrated here, and many others, fail to effectively characterize the individuals, institutions, and practices responsible for the current conflagration. The fires of war were not lit in a flash by a single, evil genius; they have been long smoldering. NATO expansionism and U.S. impunity infuriated and emboldened Putin and his military. As horrific and inexcusable as is the Russian attack upon Ukraine, the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, bombings of Serbia and Libya, and support for the Saudis in their war against the Houthi in Yemen led to vastly more casualties than are likely be suffered in Ukraine. And yet there were no sanctions against the U.S., no war crimes tribunals in The Hague, and no confiscation of the wealth of American oligarchs. To say that is not to excuse Putin’s malignity; only to say that it was a disease that spread from west to east.

What’s needed now, my dear friends, is a global, mass mobilization against this war, U.S. imperialism, NATO expansionism and the fossil fuel and arms industries. Protesters on every continent must condemn the current drive toward self-destruction whether in the form of nuclear war or global warming. Their mantra must be, as it was for the historian E.P. Thompson in 1980, “protest and survive.” A leader of the global Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Thompson understood the nuclear standoff of his day not simply as the head-to-head battle of a few, international leaders, but as the product, as C. Wright Mills first argued, of the “oligarchic and military ruling classes.” That remains true today, as does the illogic of exterminism:

“Exterminism designates those characteristics of a society — expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity and its ideology — which thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes. The outcome will be extermination, but this will not happen accidentally (even if the final trigger is “accidental”) but as the direct consequence of prior acts of policy, of the accumulation and perfection of the means of extermination, and of the structuring of whole societies so that these are directed towards that end.”

That “accumulation and perfection of the means of extermination” is the reason why anti-war art that today must be similarly broad, international, and inclusive in its messaging and scope. Patriotic memes simply won’t do, no matter how much they may bolster the morale of heroic partisans in Ukraine. It’s necessary to recall, once again, that the citizens of that country aren’t the prime targets of the current war, even if they are so far, its only victims. The U.S. and NATO are Russia’s main targets, which also makes them – along with Putin and his oligarchs — the war’s instigators.

The new, anti-war art I’m calling for must demand peace negotiations now, based upon concessions from all sides. The terms of a resolution are obvious: a phased Russian withdrawal in exchange for the slow lifting of sanctions; political neutrality for Ukraine, including an agreement not to join NATO for the foreseeable future; a deal between the U.S. and Russia to pull back missiles from each side of the Russia/NATO borderland; nuclear arms reduction talks; and immediate, joint action to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. (There is no use stopping one catastrophe while continuing to accelerate another.) Ukrainians may not like some of these terms. But to forestall further suffering and death, a negotiated settlement is required — what Noam Chomsky calls “an escape hatch with a grimace.”

As we begin to come together in protests, we also need to gather our creative energies in support of a few basic ideas that will inform a veritable flood of memes, signs, posters, banners, screen prints, etchings, woodcuts, paintings, sculptures, performances, aesthetic practices, essays and works of criticism.

No to the Russian invasion of Ukraine!

No to Russia’s attack on dissidents!

No to war!

No to U.S. militarism!

No to U.S. imperialism!

No to global fascism!

No to NATO!

No to exterminism!

Yes, to peace, yes to negotiation, yes to compromise!

Protest and survive!

Many great artists have preceded us in protesting war, imperialism and fascism in the 20^th Century, including Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Norman Lewis, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Martha Rosler, Rudolf Baranik, Pablo Picasso, David Alfaro Siqueros, and Kathe Kollwitz. Now is our time to make art that will help stop the gathering momentum of violence, catastrophic climate change, and exterminism.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015) and many other books. He is also co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit,  Anthropocene Alliance. He and the artist Sue Coe and now preparing for publication part two of their series for Rotland Press, American Fascism Now.

 

Only the World's Workers Can Save Us from a Capitalist Cataclysm

Editorial for Revolutionary Perspectives 18 (Series 4).

Capitalism has brought the world to the edge of an abyss. Hundreds of millions, if not billions had already fallen into it, even before Covid-19 appeared. Despite the “boosterism” of the British bourgeoisie, the vaccines have not brought the pandemic under control even in the richest countries in the world (and less than one in six of the global population has currently had two jabs). As we go to press, all legal safety measures are being lifted in England despite a rising infection rate. Their gamble is that the profit-making machine can get back to “normal” soon.

For most of us the previous “normal” was hardly paradise. Before the pandemic much of humanity was already subject to various forms of imperialist violence, with wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Central African Republic, Congo, Sudan (where the war in Darfur goes on), Somalia, Mozambique, and all across the Sahel, not to mention the insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines. Add to that the continuing police violence in places too numerous to list, but includes Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Philippines etc. Throw in too the perilous fate of refugees forced to flee this violence and the hunger it engenders, who end up in North Africa (especially Libya), Mexico and Europe.

Despite the selective Panglossian propaganda of the Stephen Pinkers of this wonderful world, the reality for over 2 billion of the planet’s people is literally not knowing where the next meal is coming from. Scientific advance contrasts dramatically with social atavism. We have recently seen dramatic protests against attempts to make the population pay for economic failings in Colombia and Cuba, but as the fallout from the pandemic continues, we can be certain that these will not be the last.

Debt and its Consequences

Even in the relatively comfortable “democracies”, increasing numbers were seeking help from food banks before the pandemic. The numbers have increased manifold over the last 15 months. Whilst the lowest paid workers struggle to survive, governments have created billions in payments to businesses to keep the economy afloat. As a result the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) tells us:

The pandemic has pushed global government debt to the highest level since World War II, surpassing the world’s annual economic output. Governments, especially in rich countries, are borrowing still more, partly to erase the damage of Covid-19.⁽¹⁾

And, as the same article points out, the global capitalist system seems a lot more relaxed about ever-increasing debt since the quantitative easing programme saved the system after 2008. But these debts still exist. The WSJ goes on to tell us that:

The U.S. government is on course for a budget deficit of $3 trillion for the second year in a row. Despite that and fears of inflation, 10-year Treasury bonds are yielding only around 1.33%, partly because of the Federal Reserve’s caution about raising its interest rates.

Though the ruling class are playing it cool (perhaps due to having no idea what to do?), the system is in a bind. If the fears of inflation which are already apparent (especially in global “commodity”, i.e. raw material, markets) come to pass then the system will have to raise interest rates (in the US, and in other rich states, they remain historically low, between 0 and 0.25% in the US). If that happens debt repayment will suddenly become unsustainable, especially for the now substantial numbers of “zombie companies”, who survive only by paying interest without making a profit. They would not be the only ones in danger. Given the global hegemony of the US dollar, the consequences of higher interest rates would spell disaster for so-called “emerging markets”. They cannot simply issue currency without it having drastic inflationary consequences at home. Here, some countries which are already experiencing high inflation (like Argentina), will be faced with hyperinflation, and unsustainable debt repayments.

Even before the pandemic, UNICEF were telling us that in 2019, 25 countries — most of them in Africa and South Asia — were spending more on debt payments to financial institutions in wealthy nations than on education, health care and support programmes for the poorest. Zambia’s external debt payments took 2% of government revenue in 2011 but 34% this year. Pakistan’s external debt payments have soared to 35% from less than 10% over the same period.⁽²⁾ Paying more for vaccines will only drive these debt levels even higher but, as we show in this issue, the pharmaceutical companies are only interested in the health of humanity (or lack of it), as far as it registers profits for themselves. This can only mean mass misery and more social explosions of the type mentioned above. Even in some of the wealthy capitalist countries, the ruling class are already refining the tools of oppression, with France, the UK and Australia leading the way in either giving enhanced powers (and indemnity) to the police, or militarising still further the forces of law and order.

Imperialist Rivalry

Some things do carry on as “normal”. Imperialist rivalry does not abate just because millions are sick and dying. The USA is now re-mending the fences torn down by Trump to revitalise a Western alliance against Chinese ambitions to dominate the whole of Eurasia, via its Belt and Road project. As our Italian comrades show in this issue, the response is for China to draw closer to Iran, and any other state that has fallen foul of the US. But the rivalry does not stop there. China increasingly threatens Taiwan with a whole series of military manoeuvres as it builds up its navy in preparation for an eventual confrontation in the Pacific with the US.⁽³⁾ The Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping make no secret of the fact that they want to be the world’s dominant power by 2049, exactly 100 years after the “Chinese Revolution” brought the Chinese Communist Party to power. And part of that nationalist resurgence demands the full integration of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China.

The new “normal” also now includes imperialist rivalry in the Arctic where global warming has reduced the ice to its second-lowest levels ever in October 2020. This has opened up a new contest. Russia, Canada, the US and the UK are vying to control the area. China sent its second icebreaker, Snow Dragon 2, there whilst

Beijing-based Cosco is the only one of the five major container shipping companies sending vessels through the Northern Sea Route each year as part of the “Ice Silk Road” initiative with Russia.⁽⁴⁾

All this in addition to the impetus for imperialist confrontation over increasingly scarce water resources (in the Sahel, the Blue Nile between Ethiopia and Egypt or the Jordan, Euphrates and Tigris in the Middle East) which climate change has created. Indeed capitalist-created climate change is what links pandemics, imperialist competition and the overall environmental threat to humanity’s future.

Capitalist Climate Change

As we go to press 500 people are feared dead from an unprecedented heatwave in Canada whilst, by contrast, 200 are dead and hundreds more missing in Belgium and Germany, due to floods brought about by massive concentrated rainfall not seen before. Both are consequences of human-made global warming which has already cost the lives of 150,000 people a year for 3 decades. This is expected to double in the decade ahead (according to WHO and other scientific estimates).⁽⁵⁾ And all that has been agreed are pious promises to reduce emissions but as the WSJ advised in 2017 this should not cost more than 0.1% of world GDP growth! We are actually living through a mass extinction which is developing faster than any in global (and not just human) history with species vanishing at a rate far in excess of that of the Permian extinction of just over 250 million years ago.⁽⁶⁾ The root cause of all of these issues (or the failure to deal with them) is a system based on nothing but the pursuit of profit, which creates excessive wealth at one pole, and unbelievable poverty at another. It is comforting, for some, to think that there is nothing much wrong with the world that a few reforms cannot solve, but we have already gone too far for that. Unless the system of production is changed so that it is dedicated to producing goods that people need, and not commodities aimed solely at financial profit and whose production entails massive waste and destruction, humanity faces a planet which will only support about an eighth of the world’s current population by the end of the century.⁽⁷⁾ It would be good if the capitalists agreed that their game is up, but we know that is about as likely as the Second Coming.

From the point of view of the controllers of capital there is no serious crisis just a series of “problems”. They are still getting richer, the working class globally is hardly responding, and lacks a coherent project of its own, so our masters and mistresses are not being pushed into a corner by the class war (which they are currently winning). As the article on the collapse of Bretton Woods in this issue shows, world capitalism has been facing a crisis of profitability for half a century now. It is unprecedented and the longest such crisis in capitalist history. The system really needs a massive devaluation of capital before it can start a new cycle of profitable accumulation like the post-war boom after 1945. Indeed, only some devastating event like a world war can bring this about. Naturally they will do everything in their power to avoid it as the consequences are too dire to be contemplated. As long as no other pressures come to bear (from a rising working class movement or an intensification of the imperialist rivalries already analysed), inertia and muddling through will be the primary policy drive. Great hopes will be raised about a “green industrial revolution” (on the capitalist right) or a Green New Deal (on the capitalist left). A chimera in both cases. The one thing that is certain is that the working class, and the populations of the poorest countries in general, will pay yet again for the follies of the system. How the working masses respond will be key.

… there is One Hope

In the social turmoil that will accompany the inevitable dash to extinction, the extent to which the revolutionary programme is taken up will be crucial. A movement that sets its sights on a new global way of living, not based on fighting for this or that local or immediate issue (e.g. abolition of the police without abolition of the capitalist state is meaningless), which will not be based on “identity” (an ideological game to divide humanity), but the common class position we hold in the system of production. We have a clear political alternative furnished by the history of past generations of workers’ struggles (a world human community based on the direct democracy of workers’ councils). We have an alternative to the profit-driven road to disaster in the shape of a community of freely associated producers who exchange to meet each other’s needs. Of course, a programme propagated only by revolutionaries is not enough. What is also needed is a mass movement of the working class which is already the majority of the world population. Our task is to get across the ideas we have gleaned from the history of class struggle so far so that this time capitalism everywhere is overthrown. Capitalism cannot be overthrown by decree but only by the actions of the mass of the class taking up its own programme of emancipation. Humanity has never needed that initiative so much as it does today.

CWO

Notes

(1) wsj.com

(2) Peter S. Goodman and Alan Rappeport “This Is the Plan to Rescue Poor Countries From the Pandemic” New York Times, June 24, 2021

(3) news.usni.org China may now have more ships that the US Navy but it also has not fought a war since 1979 when it tried to invade Vietnam – and lost.

(4) theguardian.com

(5) scientificamerican.com

(6) un.org

(7) nymag.com

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Revolutionary Perspectives

Journal of the Communist Workers’ Organisation -- Why not subscribe to get the articles whilst they are still current and help the struggle for a society free from exploitation, war and misery? Joint subscriptions to Revolutionary Perspectives (3 issues) and Aurora (our agitational bulletin - 4 issues) are £15 in the UK, €24 in Europe and $30 in the rest of the World.