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.