Capitalism on the loose

The proletariat can be defined as “the propertyless wage-earners who live by the sale of their labour” (Collins, 1963), or as “the class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live” (Merriam-Webster, 2018). This excludes the property owners who do not earn a wage, as well as wage-earners who do own property, the middle-class. In the decades following WW2 this last category grew considerably in size and influence in all industrial nations. Some even fancied that the trend would in time include everyone. It did not happen, and Galbraith’s call for more public services in an affluent society was ignored. By the 1990s the middle-class was in full regression. By the new millennium, developed nations could be diagnosed by Piketty & Co to be as socially polarised as they had been a century earlier. When the middle-class buffer breaks down, the have and the have-not, capitalists and proletarians, are in direct confrontation. Humanity has been here before and it did not end well.

When capital destroys its intermediary class and comes face to face with labour, it has recourse to two distractive strategies. Using its mass propaganda machine, it criminalises minority groups of citizens and makes enemies of foreigners. And history has shown that this can lead to concentration/death camps and total war. This is what happens when capitalist property severs all social control and follows its natural path of infinite accumulation. More wealth is all that matters, how and why are never asked, nor even considered. Left to its own devices capitalism is a free-for-all that spreads misery and chaos, and is brought down by its own contradictions. The last time led to the centralised control and public funding of global destruction. It was governments that grabbed power and slogged out the war, not the people who were just slaughtered in large numbers. So that when capital made its comeback in the 1980s, it could blame Big Government for all the nation’s woes. As Reagan put it, “government IS the problem”. Capital was able to convince the people that their common enemy was the state, rich and poor together would “drain the swamp”. The result was that governments were indentured to capital and neglected their duties to the people. Capital regained its hold on public spending, and diverted the common wealth into its private pockets. This new found freedom, to do as it wishes with government backing, has allowed capital to bring the world to the brink once again. Will it be climatic disruption, ecological collapse, financial default, or nuclear war? Or will one lead to the other? When the psychopathology of wealth takes over, society is condemned to violence, violence against itself, its immigrants and minorities, and against other nations. So good luck to anyone who thinks this madness can be turned around or stopped.