Pre-cpitalist or post-capitalist?

A considerable part of humanity still lives in tribal societies, where extended family allegiances predominate. The rules that govern these social organisations are very different from those based on the divisions of wealth, class and profession that are the basis of industrial societies. A tribesman knows his extended family will support him, as he would them, and will favour him over an outsider. There is an obligation of all for all, a mutual indebtedness. Going back far enough in time, tribal societies were universal, and probably went back to the primeval stages of humanity. But at some point that ageless tradition was broken in some parts of the world, while it continued elsewhere. Tribal members became serfs or slaves, and social relationships were completely transformed.

Serfdom would have resulted from conquest. In the early Bronze Age, exterior forces with superior weapons could easily take control and impose their rule on neolithic agricultural societies. In the early Iron Age, the invading Dorian Greeks who would become Spartans did this to the Messenian helots. The Aztec society was divided into priests, soldiers, merchants and peasant-artisans, but this hierarchy was open to all on merit - though merchants were a sort of hereditary cast - and the perpetual wars were for trade, tribute and sacrificial victims, not for labour. Serfdom resulted from the foreign conquest and occupation of a territory, and the bondage of its native population. Slavery was the fate of a vanquished army. Originally, vanquished armies were put to the sword (as in Joshua 6, 21), though the Aztec kept prisoners for their gory rituals. The early Romans would humiliate their beaten adversaries by having them crawl under a portal made of three spears and representing an animal yoke. However, they soon found it more profitable to make slaves of them. And as the Roman legions expanded their operations, slave labour became preponderant in the republic and later the empire. Rome's Athenian model had also relied on servile labour, but Roman hubris took it to a much higher level.

The Romans destroyed tribal societies and divided humanity into owners and owned, a condition transmitted from parents to children or acquired in the outcome of battles. This heritage evolved over time, as Roman expansion stopped and contracted. Chattel slavery became serfdom from a lack of fresh supplies, labour was chained to the soil and could no longer be bought and sold, and the Germanic invasions installed feudal vassalage. The Saxons, Francs, Vandals, Goths, etc. soon abandoned their tribal cultures to become owners of land and people, while continuing to fight one another for supremacy. Old and new habits shaped the European Middle Ages and continued the divisions of ownership, passing from the property of land and people to that of money as the source of power, the power of a new ruling class, the merchants, bankers and industrialists.

Slavery and serfdom transformed tribal societies into ones based on class. People were no longer born as members of a clan or tribe, but as members of a social category, separated from the others by unpassable barriers. The social hierarchy was no longer a community. Territorial expansion by a tribe is hindered by its neighbours. They can be allies or enemies, but cannot be incorporated as their parentage is different. Societies structured by class do not have this handicap and can expand indefinitely. Conquered nations are obliged to adapt to the new rules of social stratification based on ownership. There are the owners and those who are owned, and later those who own just their muscles and minds and must sell them as best they can to go on living. Tribal societies are proto-feudal, with the mutual obligations of vassalage, but without the serfs. Their territories are held in common and are unalienable. Only the usage is private. Rosa Luxemburg has described the difficulties confronting the colonial powers in their attempted conversions of tribal to class based societies, Britain in India and France in Algeria (1). Neither was successful and both colonised nations still have large tribal regions long after their independences in 1947 and 1962 respectively.

Tribal common property and capitalist class property produce two very different worlds. They are incompatible, and the second tries to destroy the first, pretexting modernity and “progress”. But there is resistance, and that modernity is increasingly perceived as a source of anarchy and global havoc. Tribalism may have an unexpected tailwind due to capitalism's blatant failure and its path to annihilation of the planet's ecosystem. Capital's accumulation in private hands and its obsessive quest for profit is completely alienated from the common good. That attitude has had fatal consequences for too many in the past, and the number of victims is growing faster than ever. With tradition and religion, the Afghan tribes have resisted and obliged to leave a coalition of at least half the world's arms dealers, and the onslaughts of capitalist corruption were restricted to cities and army bases. Capitalism's seemingly irresistible ethnocidal and sometimes genocidal conquest has lost its momentum and is on a declining path. And a neo-tribalism may well rise up from the ashes of empire.

1. A must read on the subject.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch27.htm

Apocalypse now

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published its 6^th Assessment Report, with gloomy predictions and recommending a stop to carbon dioxide emissions. It is much the same as their five previous reports, but with a rising level of urgency. Just a few days earlier, a study of North Atlantic ocean currents signalled that they are slowing down and may change their patterns completely. This complex system (AMOC) carries hot surface sea water north from the Tropics, while cold sea water flows down to replace it. This circulation is being slowed down by the masses of fresh water from melting ice and permafrost rushing into the Arctic Ocean, whose principal outlet is into the North Atlantic. As this melt-off does not contain salt, it is lighter than sea water and stays on the surface, and pushes back the hot surface current coming from the south. And that pile-up is slowing down the whole process. If the hot currents no longer circulate, heat will accumulate in the Tropics and colder conditions will affect Western Europe. Both weather patterns will be seriously modified towards more extreme events.

The IPPC has declared unequivocally that global warming is the consequence of greenhouse gas emissions, largely due to the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. The affect of rising temperatures on sea levels and atmospheric phenomena is computer-enhanced speculation, and actual meteorological disasters are more precocious than predicted, as is the rate of melting ice in both polar regions. It is happening now, instead of in a few decades. However, there is one aspect of the subject that is seldom mentioned. There is a lapse of time between the increased presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and their complete warming effect. This delay is estimated to last at least ten years, and possibly as much as thirty years, depending on the sources of information. So that the droughts and floods, the hot and cold that the planet is experiencing today are caused by emissions that occurred one, two or three decades ago. And those decades are just when emissions accelerated, from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, from forest fires and Arctic methane leaks, and the oceanic absorption of carbon dioxide is slowing because of saturation, and could be reversing from carbon sink to carbon emitter, like the Amazon forest. There has been a 10% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide just this century, whose effects have yet to be felt. Meanwhile, emissions continue to rise, governments are showing their incapacity to organise a turnaround, and most of humanity would not survive very long without cooking, heating, cooling and transportation, all of which depend directly or indirectly on carbon combustion.

Fifty years of negation, corruption and disinformation have brought life on planet Earth to a cliff edge, a dead-end with no way out except a desperate and futile scramble back against the flow. The climate refugees from the South are a prelude to mass movements everywhere, as ecosystems collapse from the stress of persistent droughts, repeated floods, extreme temperatures and rising sea levels. The urgency expressed by the IPPC report seems to have surprised, but it is quite insufficient and, as some have noted, there is no mention of the overriding rule that only profit determines human endeavours. There is criticism of government ineptitude in reducing fossil fuel combustion, but the system that functions exclusively for profit is ignored, as though its influence on governmental actions was not preponderant. By taking governments to task instead of the system, the report absolves it and guarantees its perpetuation, until its own mechanisms ultimately fall apart.

The planet is subjected to fires and floods, and a growing number of people are the victims of governmental and/or criminal ultra-violence. Survivors are seeking refuge elsewhere, but safe havens are becoming rare and far less welcoming, and ever more millions are camping on the margins of society. In all this darkness, stock markets - the NYSE in particular - are cavorting enthusiastically from record highs to record highs. The signal should be, all is well, the future is bright, but the causes are not at all reassuring. Central banks have been transforming debt into cash on an astronomical scale, and that fresh money has gravitated to the stock markets. And it has inflated other prices as well, from housing to goods and services. The central bank alchemy of transmuting future incomes into past ones can only be a short term strategy, but once started it is difficult to stop. The debt cycle showed its limits in 2008, and monetary creations took up the relay to keep spending above income and insure profits. A decade later and no end in sight, colossal reserves of cash are piling up with nowhere safe to go, as everyone knows the financial bubble is close to bursting point.

Capitalism based on interest and profit must have perpetual growth to accumulate those benefits. Its nature is imperialistic and it strives to be hegemonic. Monopoly is its guiding star. In the past countless empires have built themselves on plunder, overreached and fallen. But their expanse was limited by slow transport and communications. Relays of runners or horsemen might average ten miles an hour, while troops and wagons might average twenty odd miles a day. Things accelerated with large sailing ships and again with steam power, and soon after with the telegraph, internal combustion engines, radio, etc. The reach of empire became global, and the empire of capitalism holds the world in its grip. There is no escape and no other model to turn to, just small pockets of resistance on the verge of extinction. Past empires have fall and humanity has moved on to new ideas and different imperial dreams. Today's capitalist empire is so overwhelming that its breakdown, like climate disruption, will spare no one. The IPPC's wakeup call may be better than nothing, but it carefully avoids the real cause behind the destruction of the planet's complex ecosystem. Private profit is always detrimental to the wider well-being.

The destructive power of wealth accumulation

The amount of money in circulation – cash as opposed to credit – must be sufficient to allow all transactions that demand that form of payment to take place. As the volume and value of exchanges grows, so must the amount of circulating money. However, the speed at which money circulates is also a factor. The same money can change hands in quick succession, but it may also be hoarded for months or years. If there is more money than is needed, prices tend to rise. And if there is less than needed, prices will tend to fall. The persistence of price inflation, whether high or low, seems to signify that circulating money always increases faster than exchanges, that there is always a bit more cash around than the goods and services on offer. But, of course, cash is not the only form of payment that fuels demand. An ever growing amount of credit exists alongside it.

Credit is granted by the seller or, more usually, by an intermediary such as a bank. It must pay interest, hence costing more than a cash payment, and is returned either by instalments or as a lump sum. There are also revolving credits that are constantly renewed at term and only interest is paid. Credit can be used to buy just about anything, and in that aspect resembles a cash payment. But cash symbolises a past income, whereas credit is the promise of a future income. One represents something that has happened, the other represents something that should happen at a later date. Granting credit has a risk factor that is proportionally or excessively compensated by interest. It is profitable for the lender and useful for the borrower, but its consequence is that future incomes have been spent and cannot be spent again. More spending today means less spending tomorrow, unless that spending is on an investment that generates an income and pays itself back. Though the interest on the credit means the investment must return more than has been spent. Consumer credit reduces future consumption, unless incomes are rising, in which case it merely reduces that growth. Invested credit must get more out of the market than has been put in.

Money mediates transactions, selling the produce of labour to buy the produce of some other, different labour. But, very early on, people realised that if selling to buy was possible, then buying to sell was also a possibility. Selling to buy is an exchange of use values, and the intermediary money gives them a similar exchange value. Money is a token of value that changes hands and facilitates the exchange of use values. Buying to sell is a very different process. Here use value is the intermediary, and the exchange is money for more money. Between the two transactions the use value has acquired extra exchange value. Either it has been bought for less than its exchange value, or it is sold for more than its exchange value. The original seller, the final buyer, or both are being cheated (1). This getting more for less accumulated wealth and allowed the rise and fall of many splendid merchant cities along maritime and caravan routes. It would lay the foundations of profit capitalism.

Credit preceded coins and bullion by a few thousand years (2). But it still needed a standard measure of value. This was often a certain measure of locally grown cereals that could be stored and kept, and represented wealth. And, being food, it was also a measure of labour time, which in turn compared the relative values of exchanges. Before the minting of money and its general usage, payments were promises. Going farther back in time, early societies practised a system of gifts and returned gifts. The returned gift being equal or exceeding the one received. This may have been the case with the early forms of credit. It certainly was later on, when merchants became bankers and demanded interest on credit and loans of money. The gift system tended to accumulate wealth at the top of the social hierarchy, but a periodic potlatch would redistribute or destroy it. The early credit system tended to accumulate debts, but they would be remitted periodically. Coins and bullion, however, cannot be written off, and their metals are all but indestructible. When precious metals became the standard measure of value and coins the means of exchange, wealth accumulation acquired new, much vaster dimensions.

Money and its debt companion rule the world. Wealth buys the support it deems necessary and reduces the rest to debt serfdom. Voluntary servitude or forced labour seem to be humanity's only destiny. The volunteers have the illusion of free choice, the rest knows only compulsion. The incentive for compliance is moving up the ranks and getting more of the crumbs. And it is instilled in childhood by the bells and rules of education, where submission brings praise and prizes, and rebels are no-future outcasts. Cash and credit have all the planet under their yoke, and their need of always more is their undoing. Getting more out of the market than is put in means looting the environment and spending future incomes. Both sources of profit are on the verge of collapsing and are already in intensive care, with money transfusions and frequent organic emergencies. The system is moribund, but it is still capable of killing the planet before it dies.

1. The environment almost systematically gets less than the value it produces.

2. See David Graeber's masterful book, Debt: The first 5,000 years