A transnational common weal

Marx had pointed out that the concentration of capital would facilitate its appropriation by a proletarian dictatorship. And Rosa Luxemburg criticised Lenin’s injunction to “Go and take the land for yourselves”, arguing that it “simply led to the sudden, chaotic conversion of large landownership into peasant landownership. What was created is not social property but a new form of private property, namely, the breaking up of large estates into medium and small estates, or relatively advanced large units of production into primitive small units which operate with technical means from the time of the Pharaohs.” (1)

The idea that capitalism is just a prelude to socialism comes from historic materialism. Humanity is on the path from slavery to freedom, and salaried bondage is the intermediary stage. In fact, the only certainty about the future of a species is its final extinction. Imagining that humans can achieve liberty, equality, fraternity and happiness before that fatal outcome is just a hypothesis. Having lost the common freedom of their wild origins, can humans regain it? If the power of master over servant is to be abolished, then its foundation on the private property of the means of production must also disappear. Both Marx and Luxemburg considered that big concentrations of private capital were the most suitable for a passage to communal/social property. Today’s leviathans are transnational corporations, so their social property would have to be global.

The industrial revolution greatly accentuated the division of labour, but capital brought together multitudes for a common production. Labour was divided and ruled, while capital acquired the planet’s continents and oceans. Capital accumulates over generations, and its property concentrates as big fish make alliances and swallow small ones. The actual concentration of wealth – it is still going on – has not been seen for a century, but the quantities of wealth have multiplied faster than the population and the disparity between the top and the bottom of the property pyramid has increased accordingly. Many of the poorest people in America (South of Rio Bravo), Africa and Asia have seen their living conditions worsen over the past fifty years, and not a few have been killed or forced into exile by drug, agro and oil capitalism (2). Last time it all led to total war, widespread destruction and death, forced redistribution and a more level wealth hierarchy. This time total war would mean total nuclear destruction, so that civil war offers the only alternative. Events in Syria (Iraq, Ukraine, etc.) may be just a foretaste of global events to come. The capitalist phoenix must burn to ashes before it can be born again.

Things could be resolved by expropriating and socialising the ownership of the means of production, and by writing off debts. But that is contrary to the interests of the actual owners, and they have the power to decide what is said and what is done. And why go to so much trouble, when it can be settled with barrel bombs, multiple-rocket launchers and armed drones? Pasolini’s film “Salo”, inspired by Sade’s “120 Days”, shows how totalitarianism takes over incrementally, how tormentors and victims come to accept their roles and, as the level of horror rises, how the tormentors in turn become victims. The atrocities perpetrated abroad are distant and seem contextually excusable or of no concern. They may turn out to be the hors-d’oeuvres for a homeland feast. Already academic and theological spokespersons are bewailing the ingrained propensity of the species for violence, while ignoring its psychotic obsession with possessions and the social organisation that encourages this “disgusting morbidity” (3). The illness is not a resurgence of primeval inhumanity. It is the result of crushing the many to enrich the few, of putting everything up for sale, of using death to dissuade dissent. And wiping out a city, or bombing a nation back into the Stone Age, is the ultimate barbarity of extermination. The inhuman beast is not a scruffy bearded gunman in a blood washed town somewhere to the South, it is the tailor-made executive in a high-rise office somewhere to the North.

1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch02.htm 
2. Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley, AK Press, 2014

3. In 1930 Keynes had this to say on the subject: “The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Essays in persuasion, V, 2, Economic possibilities for our grandchildren, Classic House Books, 2009, p. 199