Extinction generation

The predicted consequences of greenhouse gas emissions are beginning to manifest themselves. Melting polar ice caps, permafrost and mountain glaciers, uncontrollable wildfires north and south, and drought or flooding everywhere are just a foretaste of things to come. Additional carbon dioxide that is not absorbed by oceans and plants stays in the atmosphere (45%). But its warming effect takes time. It occurs incrementally over two to three decades. This means that present temperatures and meteorological anomalies are the result of carbon dioxide emissions at the end of the last century, when the concentration was between 350ppm (1990) and 370ppm (2000). It has now passed 415ppm. So global warming has still a long way to go, even if emissions were to stop tomorrow. No one knows how hot it will get, as all this is unprecedented and most models so far have underestimated the speed of events. Extreme weather conditions seem to be taking everyone by surprise, though it should be clear by now that they are the beginning of a new normal.

The first widespread alarm was sounded almost fifty years ago. In 1972 a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology directed by Dennis Meadows published their conclusions in a small book titled “Limits to Growth”. Twenty years later they published “Beyond the Limits”, considering they had been passed. Other voices were raised. Even earlier, in the 1950s, Rachel Carson had led a brave campaign against DDT. In England, E.F. Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful” (1973), and in France, René Dumont went as far as being a presidential candidate in 1974 to get some media coverage. Meanwhile countless others were experimenting ways of living in better harmony with nature. But the whole movement was perceived as retrograde in a post-modern urban world. And servile governments and media echoed the capitalist creed of infinite growth. There was also the endless debate and disinformation over global warming. Was it occurring and was it the consequence of man-made greenhouse gas emissions? The result was more pollution, more carbon dioxide and more disappearing species. At present the process has gone so far that there is no going back. Just as the global pandemic is here to stay, so it is with environmental pollution. The ground, rivers and oceans are full of toxic chemical compounds, heavy metals and plastic waste. All will persist for ages. The air is full of micro-particles of soot, nitrogen oxides, methane and the ubiquitous carbon dioxide. The first three are fairly short lived, and would soon disappear if they were not renewed. The carbon dioxide, however, is there for centuries and will keep the planet hot for a long time. Today’s children will grow up in a slowly dying world swept by growing human ferocity. Born into an obese system they will experience its pathological deterioration, and a great slimming down that could bring extinction. They will be the last generation to remember what things were like before it all went wrong.

Extreme inequality in a failing system

As Marx pointed out, the cost of labour is the cost of its renewal, from day to day and generation to generation. This explains why qualified labour costs more than unqualified labour. Its reproduction takes more time and means. But the cost of labour is also subjected to supply and demand. Highly qualified labour may be rare and demand for it strong enough to push up its price. While the least qualified labour may be plethoric compared to demand and drive prices down. There is also a class structure that reserves the priciest education and employment for its most affluent classes. All this combines to create a spectrum of wages and salaries that goes from one to several hundred. While capital incomes that go mostly to the richest 10% widen the gap even more. At the top of the pyramid, all is done to hinder access from below. At the bottom of the pyramid, a constant flow of immigrants fleeing violence and hunger maintains an overabundance of unqualified labour and keeps down its cost.

Wage inequality is probably unavoidable, as certain skills can only be acquired by long and arduous training, and some also depend on random physical or mental predispositions. If the demand is strong, these skills will go to the highest bidder. But all that supposes that some are doing the hiring and firing while everyone else is depending on their decisions, and that capital and labour are separate and opposed. Labour must provide capital with surplus value, so it is always paid less than the value it produces. If that value is small, so is the pay. If it is large, the pay goes up as do profits. Profit is capital’s essential motivation, and it can be an existential necessity to pay interest on debt and dividends to shareholders. Businesses are profitable if they are able to sell goods or services for more than they cost. Reducing those costs increases profits, or it allows a reduction of the selling price and the chance to gain market shares. The cost of production includes the means of production and labour. The cost of the means of production is fairly constant. Inputs in energy and raw materials can see their prices vary at short notice, up and down, but the cost of tools and buildings is determined at the outset for their duration. The cost of labour can be reduced either by a smaller number of employees being more productive, or by the same number having their wages cut. The same number being more productive increases production with the same labour costs, which makes each unit produced a little cheaper.

Productivity is largely dependent on technology, though the organisation of labour and the just-in-time delivery of inputs have their share. Gains in productivity are determined by the technicality of the time and place. It used to be the monopoly of Europe and North America, and along with colonial plunder it allowed higher profits and wages. Now that Asia has caught up its technological delay, the price competition must fall on wages. Capital has managed to get labour to compete with itself, across borders and around the world. Instead of depreciating wages with cheap immigrant labour, capital has moved production to countries with low labour costs, as well as environmental and tax advantages. An executive of the French car-maker Renault explained that an hour’s labour cost 30 euros in France, 10 in Romania and 5 in Morocco. The two countries his company had moved its production to. No one asked him which of the jobless French and the underpaid Romanian and Moroccan workers would be buying his cars.

Capital has always worked at dividing labour and fuelling antagonisms in its ranks. And capital has now reached the stage where those antagonisms are between national labour forces. This change has two consequences. On the one hand, there is a growing aggressiveness towards foreigners, who are perceived as threatening. On the other, the sense of national unity is revived. This combination is dangerous. The rejection of otherness, the split between “them” and “us” must have an exclusive definition of who are the “us”, of who is legitimate and who is not. Humanity has been to the extremities of that path before, and may hesitate in following it again. Especially the growing numbers of people who are beginning to realise that the real existential menace is climate disruption and species extinction, and that the only chance of survival is coordinated action on a global scale.

Capital is privately owned, and that ownership is so concentrated that a bus-load of proprietors has as much wealth as the poorer half of humanity. It has also been estimated that one per cent of Americans possess over four fifths of US company shares. This concentration of riches is a concentration of power. And, though everyone is subjected to the law, the power of money weighs heavily on legislation. The rich pass laws that bolster their position, while their servants in media and government exert themselves to present those laws as being for the common good. And the continuous battering in print, audio and video has proved quite effective so far. People are convinced that those laws keep them safe, healthy and happy, fed clothed and housed. Though, in fact, most laws are about making a profit and protecting the rich from the poor. However, contrary information and alternative stories are beginning to circulate, forcing people to rethink their beliefs.

The upheavals of the 1960s generated a counterculture. But all it had at its disposal was offset and Roneo printing, live theatre and short-lived attempts at pirate radio and TV. Its effect was marginal compared to the mass coverage of national networks. Today’s ideological battles are fought on the internet, which is a slightly more level playing field. Though one may have zero followers and the other millions, an obscure blogger is as accessible as POTUS just about everywhere on the planet. Ideas can be propagated as never before. This proliferation has brought some confusion. What is and what is not, fake or real, fact or fiction, true or false. But the essential consequence is a growing questioning of the structure’s foundations, with the generous contributions of the Orange Wrecking-ball. The consensual class-driven discourse is no longer unique. Wealth concentration has reached the point of obscenity and technology is pushing the world off a cliff. This has been there for all to see for quite a while, but it was hidden in a fog of propaganda. That mistiness is being dissipated by the hot winds of reality and by growing critical choruses. What is lacking, and this can only evolve through trial and error, is and alternative vision. The goals are simple, a different distribution of wealth and incomes, and a technology serving the people instead of capital’s profits, but the paths that lead there are still unclear. Meanwhile, financial and environmental collapse seems increasingly imminent. And it could be that chaos is the only medium out of which something new can emerge.

The road to tyranny

Goods and services are consumed or go back into the production process as investments. Some products cannot be consumed and are obviously destined for production, where they will either transmit their value or acquire more value. But just about everything may be an investment and be counted as a production cost, even the most ephemeral and immaterial. This means the contours of two separate departments are difficult to define. Though it is clear that some goods and services transmit or acquire value, and others do not. Some of the value produced is invested and the rest is consumed. At least on the market there are two categories of exchanges, and supply and demand must more or less balance out.

Capital’s priority is accumulation by investing profits. Ideally, there would be no consumption, and investments would produce investments that produce investments that produce investments, and so on indefinitely. But consumption could just as well be the priority with investments reduced to the essential, which is how things were before the Industrial Revolution multiplied investment opportunities and their profit making. This obsession for investments brought colonial expansion and the confrontation of colonial powers. But investments cannot produce investments indefinitely. At some stage, after successive transformations, the accumulated value must be consumed. It cannot be transformed any further. Profits destined to be invested restrain consumption, as they are a part of the value added by labour, which adds up to the value of consumption. However, some consumption can be used to increase the labour force, thereby increasing the production of investments and ultimately of consumption. In the first stage, more workers must share the same quantity of consumption. In the second stage, consumption goes back to its previous levels for everyone. This would mean reducing wages to spread demand more widely to include more workers. Then wages would rise to create a demand for the growing supply of consumption. But private capital’s priorities are the accumulation of investments and the profits that fuel it. So wages are kept low and, as production grows, supply outstrips demand, unsold stocks pile up and businesses fail. Surplus consumption can be sent abroad to supply colonial occupation or to be traded for raw materials. But the great consumer of surplus consumption, the one that is regularly resorted to, is war.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, when countless millions had nothing to spend, was finally resolved by military production on a vast scale, and by massive increases in government debts. The process started in Japan and Germany. Then European nations followed suite with more or less conviction, except Spain already subjected to the ravages of civil war (1936-1939). Meanwhile in the US, Roosevelt’s timid attempts at getting things going again, by building dams and granting small social benefits, were not having much effect. But the Lend-Lease deal to sell arms to the UK slowly started things rolling. And after the declaration of war the whole industrial complex was harnessed to mass produce means of destruction, bringing conscription and employment to everyone, even those with darker skins obtained a few crumbs of the wartime cake.

The war had been such a success for private capital that it became a habit. Though the level of destruction deployed in Europe and the Far East could not be maintained. In fact Western Europe and Japan were to be reconstructed under American tutelage. And in a sudden turnaround that obviously inspired parts of Orwell’s novel 1948… sorry 1984, the US and UK allies, USSR and China, became their enemies, and their previous enemies, Japan, Germany, Italy and fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey, became their closest vassals. This old and new alignment – the Soviets had been the enemy since 1917, which is why Hitler received encouragement before he made a pact with Stalin and invaded Poland, a sort of Saddam Hussein of his time – coincided with the dismemberment of European colonial empires. Independence frequently involved low intensity warfare, and following the Cuban, Algerian and Vietnamese examples, uprisings had to be countered by constant mobilisation. As Europeans retreated, America advanced to fill the gaps and oppose the thinly veiled support from Moscow and Peking.

War consumption paid with public debt and reductions in social services and infrastructure upkeep, is the perfect solution to capital’s surpluses. Vast value is created for pure waste and profits are insured, but poverty spreads its dark shadow over tent cities and caravan towns, and millions of children go hungry. And all that is in the richest nations of the world (1). Elsewhere is often beyond description. Such a situation can only be maintained by violence. The external force of the military is reflected by the internal force of the police, and rising levels of brutality are transmitted from one to the other with equipment and personnel. As wealth concentrates poverty expands and those in between see their numbers shrink. Then the wealthy must protect themselves with armed guards and mass surveillance, funded by mostly public money. A police state slowly takes shape, by almost imperceptible touches as has always been its method. The coup, the Night of the Long Knives, the Moscow Trials are the crowning moments of a methodical process. They give the control of brutal force to one person, who governs by violence and terror. Even wealth is drawn into the spiral, and the wealthy become mere accomplices. Might is Right.

Theoretically, this chain of events can be interrupted or avoided altogether. If large numbers rise up to oppose the violence, and if legislation constrains it, the escalation can be halted. It happened in the US over half a century ago, with the movements for black civil rights and for an end to the war in Indochina. So far the present actions against state violence have only mobilised half the troops. Black Lives Matter needs the support of a wide rejection of forever wars around the planet. Unfortunately the circumstances have changed. Today’s military are no longer conscripts. They are all under Draconian contracts. However, those who have enjoyed killing and bullying in foreign lands can then join the police and continue those practices at home. This time under very advantageous contracts that place them above the law, a perfect opportunity for the more violent elements. In America, veteran organisations have criticised the perpetual occupations of foreign nations and the brutality they propagate. But their voices are muted and their numbers are few, as it is probable that most disappointed soldiers go back to civilian life and try to forget the things they have done under orders in uniform. This has nothing in common with the conscription and pending conscription that concerned all young adult men and their families in the 1960s and early 1970s. Back then it was not about youngsters signing up in the hope of citizenship, or just to escape poverty. It was every eighteen year old that could not be exempted in some way or other, or was unable to dodge the draft by escaping to Canada, Mexico, or wherever. The whole nation was involved directly. And once they realised that the endeavour was pointless and was costing lives, severe handicaps and vast amounts of public funds, not to mention the immeasurable harm done to the local populations and environments, they rose up in sufficient numbers to say enough is enough. The Johnson administration was obliged to concede black civil rights, affirmative action and some social advances. And the Nixon administration, under continuing popular disapproval, reduced and then ended in 1973 the presence of conscript troops in Vietnam. While some professional ones stayed on for another two years, trying to prop up the puppet South-Vietnamese government.

The 21^st century wars have been extravagantly publicised at their outbreaks, and then waged ever more secretly. Media coverage is almost all in-bedded, and whistle-blowers are systematically prosecuted. War has become a money machine that brings in huge corporate profits and burns the nation’s wealth. It realises capitalist surpluses and reduces societies to debt slavery. It kills and mutilates women and men, children and elders indiscriminately. It ruins cities and leaves deadly ordnance all over the place that lasts for generations. It cannot be justified, and yet it is all the time. It becomes a necessity for the preservation of a system, its economy and its ideology. A system based on plunder must develop the idea of supremacy. Taking from others by force or cunning builds a sense of superiority that needs to be confirmed by superior power. It can then become systemic and crush all opposition. The masters of capital and their government flunkeys have the same contempt for society as mobsters. Humanity and the planet are their preys.

That power corrupts is not news, nor is the corruption of power. But the level of corruption and the absoluteness of power vary in time and place. And the travesty of power as an electoral process is more or less convincing, from effective representation to binary choices between two look-alikes. These days, electoral conviction is in free fall, while corruption and autocratic power are rising steeply. Those trends are linked. Corruption discourages popular support, and the lack of consent is countered by tyranny, more corruption and force. That condition is well established in numerous countries, some have never experienced anything else. But now it is once again taking hold of the rich white developed nations. Europe and North America are at a critical moment when the rise of gangland culture may still be resisted. Or it could turn out to be irresistible (2). When the power of money pervades everything and gross inequalities are accepted as normal, when corporations dictate their laws to government and capitalism’s financial house-of-cards collapses, only brute force can keep the power structures standing. And brute force is difficult to counter. So far it has only been successfully opposed by superior brute force coming from elsewhere. The people cannot out-gun their government as long as it controls the intelligence and security services and the military, and writes the laws that bind them. In very particular circumstances the military have sided with the people, the Carnation Revolution in 1974 Portugal, or stayed in their barracks as they did during the regime changes in 1990s Eastern Europe. However, military support has also been divided and led to civil wars. Russia (1918-1920), Spain (1936-1939), and Syria (2012-?) are telling examples. In general, the military stay with government, and sometimes become the government in a more or less open manner, most obviously in North Korea, China and Egypt on a long list. As for the ancient practice of resistance by heading for the hills (3), drone surveillance and armaments would reduce it to very remote places where only small groups might survive (4). Armed uprisings are an illusion, because the balance of power is too unequal. The people do not have the fire-power but they do have the numbers, and if they are determined they can bring everything to a standstill. 

Capitalist profits have piled up debts and wrecked the planet. Now that finance and climate are collapsing, capitalism has its back to wall and will become increasingly dangerous. The pandemic is just a foretaste of the job losses, business failures and debtor defaults that will result from financial and climatic chaos. It has also highlighted the nefarious privileged incompetence of the ruling classes, and the brave solidarity of workers who have kept all essential things going, risking health and life. Governance has been dismal, incoherent and panicked. Some world leaders spend their days watching TV, some wander around looking unkempt, some strut about making promises they know they will never keep, and all still manage to pretend they have the people’s interests and wellbeing in mind. But the ranks of their supporters are thinning by the day. Their credibility is evaporating in the heat of events, and the emperor’s clothes are seen by increasing numbers to be non-existent. As America stumbles towards the third of November and age-old divisions come to the fore, few expectations can resist the test of reality. The growing tensions show no signs of abating, and many are wilfully stoking the fires. Joe Biden may save America from Donald Trump, but it is less likely that he will manage or wish to save America from itself. And there are no signs of change elsewhere. Other regimes are more intent on tightening the screws that keep them in power, than on opening up to a post-destruction world. Today’s youth are faced with the growing intensity of climatic events and the rising violence of police states. They cannot count on much support from their elders who are already chained down by work and debt, though that may be about to change with vast job losses and financial breakdowns. As for the Boomers, COVID is taking care of them. Though there are exceptions, notably those enrolled in religious creeds, today’s youth are the brightest best informed there has ever been. They may yet save humanity from the savagery of ultimate capitalism.

1. Fidel Castro observed that Cuban children could be seen begging on the streets of Miami, not on those of Havana.

2. A play written by Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, covers the 1930s. And Solzhenitsyn commented somewhere that he was hearing in the streets of Moscow some of the vocabulary used by the crooks and gangsters who more or less ruled the Gulag Archipelago. He considered this to be a sign of their ideology and methods spreading through society. A few decades later Putin and his Barons could well be classified as Robbers and Racketeers.

3. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott. Unfortunately it is long and very repetitive. That part of the world has been named “Zomia”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_Massif#Zomia

4. The Pashtun occupy a vast mountainous area astride the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which gives them a relatively safe haven. The NATO (US) forces in Afghanistan have violated Pakistan’s airspace quite frequently, but have not tried crossing the border with troops, except for the attack on the Laden compound. That insurgent advantage occurred in Vietnam and Korea, but it remains exceptional.