Moving backward

The aim of capitalism is accumulation. For this there must be a profit, the possibility of getting more for less. It is happens in two stages. First labour gets less value than it produces, and then this surplus value is exchanged abroad for labour and raw materials. The surplus consumption of capitalist production is transformed into investments by colonial rule or by foreign trade. (The alternative is to grant people credit so they can buy the stuff). Capitalist accumulation needs undeveloped regions for this exchange to take place. The developed world had no reason to share its knowledge and technology, as that was the basis of its power and capacity to plunder the rest of the planet. It has gone to great lengths to protect them with patents, copyrights and secrecy. It has privileged elitist research and neglected the general level of education. This has created a widening space between the front runners and the rest. Knowledge also has its one-per-centers. A large part of humanity has been left in ignorance and poverty, partly on purpose because wealth and information are the sources of power, and partly by disdain and disinterest. Masses of people have gone back in time. In the developed world the time gap is a matter of decades, elsewhere of centuries. In Europe and America the nostalgia goes back to Thatcher and Reagan, which for many are embellished living memories. The Middle East has jumped back to an age of all powerful caliphs and hidden imams. Some parts of Africa have revived sorcery and magic. And most nations are looking at a more or less distant past to model their existence, to times when the ruling forces were nationalistic or religious.

Capitalism has periods of expansion and social progress followed by regression, when mountains of debts have to be resolved and planetary plunder reaches technological, political or environmental limits. That is when the two mechanisms for realising surplus value can no longer grow at a significant rate. At this stage, instead of climbing out of poverty and ignorance, people are pushed down, back to their ancient insecurities, fears and beliefs. Bombing Iraq did not send Iraqis into the Stone Age. Instead they regressed to the 7^th century of Omar and Ali, and to violent religious intolerance. And bombings elsewhere in the region have had similar results. Under severe economic duress the developed nations are also regressing, to the less distant times of nationalism and the question of who belongs and who does not, more a matter of origins than beliefs. On the brink of economic and environmental collapse, humanity is looking to the past for comfort. Ideologically, globalisation was a unifying movement towards a better future together. That model is broken and the reactionary backward movement is divisive because of different opinions on how far to go.