Capitalism was inevitable

so is its collapse

I am not a Marxist.

—Karl Marx

Doomer alert.

Socialism isn’t going to replace capitalism. There, you can’t accuse me of burying the lede.

Big claim, that something is historically inevitable. Marx said it about socialism. What we got instead is Chinese capitalism.

Inevitability conjures time; and time is a tricky thing. Try and define in, and watch the ground disappear beneath your feet. What’s past is inevitable. The facts, such as they are, have already happened. There was a Han Dynasty, a Pompeian volcano, a Charlemagne, a now locked-in twentieth century. History is a different kind of facticity than this coffee cup sitting next to me, which won’t be there (or maybe it will) by the time you read this. It’s as lost as it is unchangeable. The present, in all its ontological obstinacy, has dug in, and the rest enters it through wrecked imagination, then pours off of it like smoke in the wind. Nonetheless, history—the process, not the academic discipline—forms and reforms according to cause—material, formal, efficient, and formal—with some black swans thrown in. Faulkner said the past is never past. Still, history follows rules, from the Second Law to human nature to geography. These rules, embedded in complexity, form tendencies—granular to global. Every morning, we rise and prepare for a day based on known tendencies. Then there are miscalculations, accidents, conspiracies, stupidities . . . things that queer the pitch.

In what sense, then, can I say that capitalism was inevitable and so is its collapse? I could tell you there’s a griffin ringing our doorbell, but that doesn’t make it true. On what am I basing this dual speculation, one foot in the past and the other in the future?

Two things: money and war. But before I make the argument, I need to define the highly contested term capitalism. Any time you stick an ism on the end of a word, you’re courting trouble.

The American Heritage dictionary tries it three ways:

• An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.

• An economic system based on predominantly private (individual or corporate) investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods and wealth; contrasted with socialism or especially communism, in which the state has the predominant role in the economy.

• A socio-economic system based on private property rights, including the private ownership of resources or capital, with economic decisions made largely through the operation of a market unregulated by the state.

Okay, whatever we have now is none of these. Whatever we have now, the state has always had a strong hand, from the issuance of currency to setting the rules of commerce to settling the knotty questions of “property.” (← Another rabbit hole like “time.”) We all know that those with power make the state their servant, that money equals power, and that all the world is now dependent upon money. So, the dictionary is engaged in some propaganda here, or a cover-up. Marx got this part right. Capitalism is political power wielded by the business class, whose power is increased by the accumulation of wealth in the form of money in an economy of money-dependent scarcity. You and I have to have the money to survive. They have the money to dole out; and so they can demand that you and I do what they want to get some of this scarcified lifeblood.

The thing is, money has its own tendencies, its own rules, and those rules and tendencies are different at different scales and in different forms. By rules, I don’t mean laws of commerce or whatever, but something built into the nature of money as a phenomenon. The laws of commerce are often as not retrograde attempts to deal with the unforeseen consequences of money’s nature.

The fundamental power of money is speed of exchange. Since exchange is a universal constant in human affairs, the speed of exchange translates into the speed of life. so to speak. Not a lot of people nowadays, especially on this side of the Atlantic, know the work of Paul Virilio. He invented the term dromology. The study of speed as a source of power. We’ll put a pin in Paul right now, and just acknowledge that speed, in itself, is not a thing that factored into a lot of social or even psychological criticism. His compound term the dromological society is a useful exegetical for an examination of money as phenomenon.

As a more or less universal exchange equivalent, money is like a million times faster than barter. Obvious, right? If everything has a money price, the key to getting all the various things I need or want is to have some money. Industrialization lit under fire under the dromological society.

As Marx noted, at first the imperial technological revolutions relied on a certain degree of plunder, or “primitive accumulation.” British shipbuilding deforested Northern Europe once. American capitalism was built on plundered land using plundered bodies (slaves). The goal, however, of growing cotton, grain, tobacco, sugar, and rice—especially cotton—was to sell these products to make money. Slave labor was an input cost, and soil degradation led to expanded land acquisition.

Plunder in the peripheries, money-exchange in the metropoles.

Eventually, something called “development” infiltrated peripheries (to make them into new markets), and everyone was rendered dependent on money. The thing about money and speed, you see, is the dromological nature of money lends itself to, in fact, makes inevitable, a competition between moneyed centers. Each is impelled by the other to corner markets, and to do so, they have to make things faster, commodify more fields of life (faster), and develop new innovations.

The state inevitably has a hand in this, and a stake, because competition for peripheries and markets are often resolved in that age-old human enterprise—war. The state is capital’s policeman and war machine. And here we’re back to Virilio whose main interest was war.

War is itself—especially since its industrialization—predicated on speed, and with the industrialization of war, industry (money) and the military became merged. They were always merged, but now to a degree never before imagined. The speed of exchange determines the speed of industry and innovation, and the speed of industry and innovation is constantly incorporated into production for war.

Even in the Roman Empire, circa the fourth century, the state required vast sums of money to pay soldiers and foot the bill for weapons. They had around 645,000 men under arms—wages, gladia (swords), pugios (daggers), pila (javelins), shields, horses, wagons, and chariots . . . you can imagine the scale. State factories (fabricae) were established, augmented by private shops. Then there were raw materials, wood, iron . . . food. By the time the United States went to war with itself, factories, railroads, telegraph lines, guns and cannon, uniforms, equipment, hot air reconnaissance balloons, ironclad ships . . . even food, were all produced by capitalist (private) enterprises. These enterprises had to run as fast as possible to keep up the operational tempo of the war, and likewise the extractive industries who provided the feedstocks.

The bourgeois revolutions in France and the US became possible because the business class had amassed sufficient money to overthrow the decadent monarchies.

When I say that money itself has a nature, that nature is simultaneously material and immaterial, that is, using Alf Hornborg’s neologism, money is eco-semiotic. It stands for something; it is an immaterial sign (semio) of disconnected, or transferable, value, which, when used, accelerates (speed) material exchange. But more than accelerates, because acceleration, as a quantity, ramifies into qualitative changes in the environment. It takes a tree X number of years to grow. If you harvest wood from a forest, as one or a few persons, for immediate use, e.g., to build shelters, the forest as a whole has time for general replacement.

Excerpt from my book, Mammon’s Ecology:

What fundamentally connects velocity-of-exchange to social inequality and environmental degradation is the velocity of exchange out running the velocity of non-economic natural processes. The depletion of an aquifer contributes to enforced scarcity and strengthens the claims of those with plenty of money on those who have little. Aquifers recharge at their own rate. Trees grow at their own pace. Oil and coal are created over millions of years.

Seventeenth-century Britain suffered what was called an “iron famine,” which was accompanied by massive deforestation. The production of cannon and ships exhausted not only Britain’s iron mines, but its forests were used for ship building and as fuel for the smelters, iron mongers, and blacksmiths.

“[T]he shortage of shipbuilding timber was first noticed during the wars against the French in the 1620s and the shortage became acute in the 1650s, particularly for specialized requirements such as masts. A first-rate, 120-gun ship needed a main mast forty meters long and over a meter in diameter. Until the mid-seventeenth century the navy could rely on the oak forests of England, especially those of Sussex. In the late seventeenth century, the admiralty belatedly introduced officially sponsored replanting schemes even though it would take a century before the trees could be used. In the meantime timber would be imported.” (Jason C. Moore, “Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World”)

Deforestation migrated into Northern Europe, all the way to Poland, which was denuded.

Money can do this because it stands for abstract value (attached to no particular thing) and not concrete value (“use value,” in Marxian terms). The sellers of the timber who profited from the deforestation could use the money they received to buy silk or beer or brothel parties. The buck—so to speak—never stops here. And as we’ve seen, it can facilitate the detachment of a hundred thousand square kilometers of wood from a forest. In the same way money acts as a solvent—think about it—its dissolving of biomes, as a major example, knocks on as the dissolution of the societies/cultures that were situated within those biomes.

At one level, this is a thermodynamic process, with photosynthesis as the baseline negentropic process upon which Priogogean “order” is built, and money as an entropic accelerant destroying that order. This is literally true, for example, in fossil energy extraction. But for that rabbit hole, see my book, Mammon’s Ecology, or Alf Hornborg’s The Power of the Machine, to which my book is exceptionally indebted.

Which is why capitalism—which was inevitable because money has this viral parasitic nature and because it proved most adept at war and development, which is driven by competition (even political survival)—inevitably will collapse. Capital is a ravenous introduced species on an island. It can’t stop eating and reproducing, even in light of the clear evidence that it will destroy its own food supply.

We are seeing, in real time, how closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted an entire global financial system that was based—blindly, until the crisis hit—on one thermodynamic input, released from its ecologic niche through moneyed industry to travel the world. Strangely enough—or not, one of the most energy-intensive practices is warfare, and so we’ve had wars over energy that the wars themselves deplete. It’s like an auto-immune disorder.

As we use that fifty-million year-old solar energy at an increasing rate, the combustion that qualifies as “use” dissolves the combustible material, releasing atmospheric carbon . . . we know the rest. We know the rest, and yet . . . we can’t stop capitalism, nor can it or will it stop itself . . . at least, by anyone’s intent.

It would appear that capital has the capacity to create “systems” at scales over which neither capital nor anyone else has the capacity to control.

I’m reminded of the late Mike Davis’s excellent book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (highly recommended). In it, he traces the history of Southern California’s “development,” wherein the capitalists were banking on what-you-see-is-what-you-get with regard to SoCal weather and terrain. But, as Davis explained, So-Cal is a Mediterranean climate, which cycles at a rate of around a century at a time . . . sitting on a seismic fault. Now the region is plagued by “environmental” disasters.

I’ll leave you with this video on Davis’s thesis.

Peace.