Debt war

Capitalist accumulation is a story of expansion and blockage. This is because surplus value can only be monetised by plunder and debt. Europe’s plundering of the other continents was the first stage of accumulation. Then, with the Industrial Revolution, debt took on an increasingly prominent part. By 1900 the development of coal and steel was waning. Rail tracks had been laid everywhere, to the point that many lines could not be run at a profit, so rail companies were defaulting on their debts, and demand for steel was in free fall. So making guns and battleships was the only alternative to keep the steel mills burning. And it took the destructive power of two world wars, an economic depression and high inflation to get accumulation going again. Old debts were made worthless, so new ones could be contracted.

The period that began after Hiroshima was powered by oil and internal combustion. And a new debt cycle was inaugurated. Now, seven decades later, both the technology and the debt are at the end of their course. The first is poisoning cities and the second is paralysing demand, which is similar to the situation the world was in a hundred years ago. And, if a similar solution is necessary, the “creative” mass destruction will be proportionate to today’s vastly increased wealth (x 50). But, considering how long it has taken to destroy small cities like Kabul, Grozny or Aleppo with conventional weapons, this far greater undertaking will probably need the force of nuclear explosives. Instead of succumbing to toxic wastes, greenhouse heat and crushing debt, humanity may decide to vaporise itself in mushroom clouds.

Capitalist accumulation is once again facing the void it has built with debt and frenetic expansion. And it is prepared to drag the rest of the world with it, as it falls into nothingness. That endangered world, however, can exist without the private property of the means of production (land, money, machines, infrastructure, media etc.). It has done so successfully in many places in the past, and a few residual societies still have communal property of land and resources. With adjustments at local levels, some of humanity could step back as spectators, and watch capitalism’s financial house of cards and its futile productions crumble away. Unfortunately, capitalism holds the developed nations in a web of partial and total dependencies, and that is sufficient to engulf everyone.

Déja vu

It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.

(Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, part III, chapter 10.1)

http://www.cscd.osaka-u.ac.jp/user/rosaldo/101010OTHA.htm

The method has shown its effectiveness, but if today’s practitioners seem more farcical that could be because the outcome is still unknown. Back in the 1920s and 30s, the rising demagogues were also perceived as buffoons. They turned out to be lethally dangerous. But then they were the produce of their times, of war and economic disruptions. Somewhat like the present circumstances, in black and white instead of colour. So Trump could have copied Obama’s 2008 victory speech: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible.”