Tag: David Harvey

In Brief: The West Can’t Stop Its Collapse
Last year, Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan published an article in Al-Jazeera chalking American belligerence toward China up to two factors: an increase in Chinese wages eroding the profitability of foreign investment and the rise of native Chinese industry threatening western monopolies over advanced digital technology, energy generation, automobile manufacturing, biotechnology and robotics. Since western-dominated global capitalism has shown an uncanny ability to offshore capital and relocate investment in low-wage countries, it is undoubtedly China’s threat to monopoly capitalism that has western governments especially concerned.

The ability to export capital and extract profits from the cheap labour and resources in the Global South has been an extremely lucrative racket for the advanced imperial core countries. $152 trillion was transferred from the developing world to advanced capitalist countries between 1960 and 2021.

This racket has worked for centuries, ever since Columbus landed on Caribbean shores. It has evolved from outright theft of land and gold, into more sophisticated neocolonial arrangements which harness sweatshop labour and mine resources for sophisticated products stamped with western corporate logos and sold the world over.

The result has been a river of profits pouring into Europe and the United States, soaking elephantine financial industries and buoying astronomical stock market valuations. But that river only flows so long as the aggregate of advanced technology, patents, licences, designs and money-capital remains steadfast with western corporate headquarters.

China’s entry onto the stage of high value production does not simply add a new player to the game—it threatens to flip over the board. America is staring down hundreds of billions of dollars worth of potentially stranded assets invested in the AI sector alone.

China’s Marxian approach to economics has led them to force-feed their supply chain with an abundance of rare earths and critical minerals, renewable energy, steel, electric vehicles and batteries, artificial intelligence platforms, drones, pharmaceutical products and high speed trains. In a bid to transform quantity into quality, China is converting the lucrative monopoly industries of the past into at-cost utilities for the present. And they are squeezing western corporations out of the global market in the process.

This context is the key to understanding the posture of NATO countries as they pursue rearmament in unison: Trump is demanding a 50% hike to an already-bloated trillion dollar military budget, Canada has signed $100 billion contract for submarines, the UK will dispense an extra £63 billion, Germany has approved a 33% rise in weapons spending, France has committed $500 billion more to its military by 2030—it goes on and on like this. With Russia pinned down by the quagmire of Ukraine, it beggars belief that these trillions of additional dollars are being earmarked to counter threats from Moscow. Western leaders hold their citizenry in contempt when making this claim.

If human society was governed by anything but the ruling class interests that Karl Marx described, the dawning reality of a new global economy would have spurred a movement toward cooperation, integration with the Belt and Road Initiative and major political and economic reforms adjusting to the new landscape. After all, the people of the West could benefit from low-cost advanced technology, public banks, renewable energy and rational economic planning at the highest levels. But the momentum behind centuries of imperial accumulation does not dissipate like the heat of lightning when the clouds break.

So long as warfare and financial speculation lines the pockets of the powers-that-be, ungodly sums will continue to be extracted from the working class and put into the service of a western oligarchy determined to break China’s back. Only then can swarms of cheap labour return to East Asia and US corporate monopolies be assured.

The problems with all of this are legion. What worked yesterday is not always destined to work tomorrow and we are fast approaching a night when tomorrow does not come. Western morality was buried under rubble alongside the bodies of Gaza’s children and the illusion of military supremacy was sunk to bottom of the Persian Gulf. If Iran is the canary in the coal mine, it is clear that all of these billions dumped into offensive weaponry will not yield the surplus required for imperial capitalism to maintain itself.¹ In a dialectical reversal for the ages, the quest for self-preservation puts western capitalism on the express path to terminal crisis.

China has been described as the factory of the world and it would be prudent to now call it the world’s laboratory and power plant as well. Never mind that going to war with such a formidable power would obviously be unwinnable and catastrophic—it well could happen given the incredibly low calibre of people running the Occidental show. When it comes to protecting their property, history demonstrates that the oligarchy is always willing to fight to the last working class man. As David Harvey pointed out in The Limits of Capital:

Capitalism is stabilized through the defence budget, albeit in ways that rob society of more humane and socially worthwhile programmes. But the present theory suggests a rather more sinister and terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use.²

The collapse of the western economy necessarily entails an enormous loss of property on the most rarefied rungs of capital ownership—and this is the good news. If we’re lucky it will happen before an apocalyptic war can commence. Marx wrote that “the violent destruction of capital as a condition of its self-preservation is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.”³ The collapse will not be where the fight for our future ends. It will be where it begins.

Thanks for reading!
1. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 40, David Harvey recounts other modes of production that have disappeared by failure to generate surplus. ↩︎
2. David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Verso, 2018): 445. ↩︎
3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 749-50. ↩︎
21 Jul 26
Ask the Editor: Oil Demand and Destruction
To the editor,

Is the energy crisis stemming from the war on Iran a simple matter of supply and demand?

Cheers,

Breezy.

[Sent from Substack]

Dear Breezy,

The world is staring at a billion barrels of oil lost due to military actions undertaken by the belligerent governments of Israel and the United States. This number will only go up with each passing day of disruption to maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf. To put that number into context, it is roughly equivalent to ten full days of total global consumption. This kind of supply squeeze will present itself unevenly; the higher cost of gas and transported goods can be either a nuisance or a calamity depending on the financial capacity of consumers.

Turning to Karl Marx the political economist, he himself did not live to see oil come into dominant use and it was coal that reigned supreme during his Victorian era. But he recognized fossil fuels as a foundational mean to the capitalist mode of production because their dense energy content allowed for the intensification of human labour and factory output.

The utilization of this new mean of production is what ultimately lead to the standardization of wage labour and industrial processes. Whereas water mills depended on the ebbs and flows of natural streams, the coal-fired steam engine could be plunked wherever potential workers were, with trains and ships doing the rest. Oil merely advanced the technological revolution that coal set into motion regarding production and circulation.

Because oil is so foundational to the capitalist mode of production, its presence in the marketplace cannot be reduced to the dollars and cents of each barrel. Countless wars have been fought, governments toppled, acres fracked, blockades raised—all to influence the direction that precious crude flows black. If the price is too high, economic activity will be suppressed. If the price is too low, Big Oil bleeds profits. It’s a fragility that puts Goldilocks to shame.

In Marxian economics, supply and demand “play a vital surface role in generating price movements for a particular commodity” without which “there could be no equilibrium price.”¹ With the economic rise of China and the Global South, oil prices routinely clocked in over $100 per barrel as new demand pressured existing supply. While oil companies blistered with cash, high prices suppressed potential consumption in virtually all other areas of the global economy. After all, only 15 countries export meaningful quantities of oil that another 160 countries must bid on.

As the process of capital accumulation in one sphere became a contradictory force suppressing accumulation in others, the economic system demanded a way to get beyond it.² Fracking technologies were unlocked by American public–private partnerships and they opened up vast supplies of oil in the United States and around the world. Fracking is what brought the supply and demand of oil back into an equilibrium that guaranteed both stable profits and continued future growth.

What the war against Iran has accomplished is to throw disequilibrium back into the oil markets, this time because of disruptions to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. As many Gulf producers go toward zero, oil operations outside the region see their profits soar. The sudden scarcity of oil and its byproducts has led to the cancellation of tens of thousands of planned flights, MRI screening is pressed by helium shortages, semiconductor manufacturing in Asia is throttled and a lack of fertilizer is scarring agriculture in Africa and South Asia.

Disruption to supply inevitably leads to destruction of demand. Free market orthodoxy dictates that price adjustments alone bring about equilibrium in commodity markets. But it will be shown that the value of oil to labour processes and capital accumulation transcends the spot price of each barrel. The oil market is an artifact of economic planning carefully designed to keep the downstream tributaries trickling outward. With those plans now buried under Middle Eastern rubble, capitalism is confronted with yet another “constantly overcome but just as constantly posited” barrier.³

In sols.

Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

Footnotes:
1. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2010): 166. ↩︎
2. The barriers that capital imposes on itself before leaping over them are explored by Karl Marx in his Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 410. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
23 Apr 26
How the Capitalist Stole Christmas
For those of us in northern climes, there really is no better time of the season than Christmas. Egg nog and turkey, the heat of a crackling fire, that royal pine scent. It’s the high point of winter where cold weather and snow brightens the atmosphere; reflecting twinkle lights and hanging drapes of candy cane red.

On the calendar of the secular West, Christmas is the most important holiday, spurring entire industries and price indexes. For all the bluster of church bells and the “war on Christmas,” you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a doctrinal Christian holiday bastardized by secular affectations. But it isn’t.

A Saturnalian Christmas

The date of Christ’s birth was never established by religious scripture. Without a date, celebrations by early Christians would have been impossible. December 25 was chosen by Pope Julius I sometime around 337 AD and it accomplished two things. First, it projected mystic divinity to the life of Jesus. As he was widely regarded to have been crucified on March 25, it followed that the Annunciation must have occurred on the same day; a perfect nine month pregnancy puts baby Jesus snug in a manger on December 25. Second, this date coincided with the existing pagan holiday of Saturnalia, making for a tidy Christian cooptation of an existing Roman landmark.

Little is known about early Christmas traditions—if there were any at all to speak of. Birthdays were not nearly as significant to ancient and medieval people as they are now. But from the Middle Ages, it is apparent that Christmas had much more in common with the Roman Saturnalia than it did with Catholic ritual: a multi-day public revelry of drunken stupor and feasting, when slaves could be free and peasants could be lords and all rules of the social hierarchy were flattened. In fact, the traditional 12 days of Christmas was so sinful and disorderly that the very first “war on Christmas” was actually waged by American Puritans who attempted to ban the holiday by levying fines against those who observed it.

Whether Saturnalia or medieval Christmas, we see in both instances a holiday that was religious in name only. Rather than piety, what they really provided was a temporary release to the tense social hierarchy and class system. This was the occasion when Roman slave masters and medieval landlords would grant privileges and gifts to their subjects, solidifying the economic order with community cohesion. The multitude of free days dedicated to communal partying is practically unthinkable to modern economies, which generally only grant about ten statutory holidays throughout the entire year—let alone 12 for a single event. But for the largely agrarian economies of pre-capitalist Europe, there was not much work to be conducted during the winter months.

Capitalist Christmas

Although the Puritan Christmas ban during the 1600s failed, the advent of industrial capitalism granted them their wish. The spread of urban factories, industrial mining, shipbuilding yards and textile mills throughout the 1700s scrambled the established agrarian economy and muted the raucous 12 days of Christmas. People were working 16 hours a day, six days per week. Owing to such dreary working conditions in the Anglosphere, by the 1800s people “hardly took notice of the holiday at all.”¹

Describing the capitalist thrust toward exchange value and profit realization, the geographer David Harvey wrote: “The monetization of everything appears to be an unstated evolutionary law of capital.”² The history of Christmas is clearly an example of this capitalist tendency. Whereas the old Christmas posed an obstacle to capitalist accumulation, the new Christmas would facilitate it. The community that made that debaucherous, 12 day Saturnalian binge possible was pulverized by the crushing weight of industrial machines and thirst for survival wages. As Marx said, “where money is not itself the community, it dissolves the community.”³

Shared holidays are a kernel of communal human nature and social labour that have found cultural expressions for all of known history. What we find with Christmas is a tradition that was melted down by the Industrial Revolution and reforged with a capitalist skin. Christmas trees were the first seasonal item to be put up for sale in towns and cities across North America, as the German custom gained widespread popularity after the arrival of migrants. Christmas tree decorations then followed suit, spurning the seasonal sales of street vendors. Printing presses were the next to cash in on the season with the marketing of mass produced Christmas cards that could be sent via public mail delivery. The social nature of Christmas cannot be denied here; Christmas trees for family enjoyment and public display, cards purchased for friends and family across North America. The gift was the next logical expansion of the Christmas commodity ecosystem.

From an economic standpoint, the Christmas gift represents the ruthless commodification of social life under the guise of selfless giving to loved ones. Gift giving within a capitalist framework effectively exploits our cooperative nature for the realization of private profits. The costs do not have to be paid up front. Canadians are expected to carry $6.1 billion in post-holiday debt entering 2026. Last year, 36% of Americans took on about $1,100 in debt to finance Christmas and Brits collectively raised £1.1 billion in holiday debt. For many, it is so much easier to go into debt than it is to say “no” to their children.

Enter Santa

The most recognizable symbol of Christmas isn’t Jesus—it’s Santa Claus. On the surface, it appears absurd that the birthday boy, the King of kings and Lamb of God, would be overshadowed on his special day by a plump, sleigh-riding elf from the North Pole. It makes sense only when considering the history: Christmas was never a particularly religious ritual and modern Christmas is largely a capitalist construction that drives commodity sales.

Santa Claus is a composite figure based on 19th century American storytelling and Dutch interpretations of Saint Nicholas, or Sinterklaas. He was not invented by marketeers but his legendary association with gift giving to children made him the perfect marketable Christmas vehicle to drive sales. Attempting to turn Jesus into a piece of marketing would be heretical to the religious and exclusionary to the secular. But Santa; Santa can appear in Coca-Cola advertisements and department store parades. Santa can sprout like mushrooms in December at malls across a continent. The consummate salesman of Christmas, Santa can even get ripped and work the Target store.

Whereas previous modes of production often brought producers and consumers into personal relationships, what happens in the capitalist marketplace is the relation of prices, brands and objects against one another. The production process itself is concealed as “consumers come to form a relationship with products instead of the people who make them.”⁴

Likewise with Santa, whose mythical veneer belies a fetish: by projecting the generosity of Christmas onto an elf, we distance ourselves from the credit cards and labour that perpetuate the myth. Santa is the symbol of overconsumption under a cloak of charity. After all, he is only as generous as we are willing to spend. Yet, when we are acculturated into the Santa myth we recognize that the gifts he procures come from Santa’s workshop rather than a toy store or Amazon delivery. We are alienated from production and bound to superficial mass consumption—and we acknowledge this fact by our refusal to impute these qualities onto Santa, whose elves intimately handcraft gifts from wish lists.

The intimacy is important because this is what grows through the cracks. Despite the commercial creation of Christmas, the communal feast lives on. It is the social quality of Christmas that gives it a heartbeat—and that cannot be purchased at the department store.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. “Christmas in 19th Century America,” History TodayVol. 45, No. 12. ↩︎
2. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse(Verso, 2023): 79. ↩︎
3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 224. ↩︎
4. Jack Lasky, “Commodity Fetishism,” in Ebsco, 2024. ↩︎
16 Dec 25
Free Markets, Unfree People
Most of us dread the deadening of the body and will do anything to avoid it. About the deadening of the soul, however, we don’t care one iota.¹
—Epictetus

As the earliest human societies emerged conscious from nature egalitarianism was a common characteristic. Economic surpluses were minimal and production of material needs relied on a nakedly social effort. The psychologists David Erdal and Andrew Whiten suggest: “Egalitarian behaviour patterns evolved because…individuals became so clever at not losing out to dominant individuals that vigilant sharing became possible, and this was the most effective economic strategy in the circumstances in which Homo sapiens evolved.”

In the prehistoric era of hunter-gathering, or primitive communism, there was no incentive to hoard resources, ideas or technology. In fact, doing so would have carried detrimental consequences to the individual, the group and the wider species. Resources and technology were freely shared between groups and individuals, and this type of cooperation facilitated the dominion of humanity over the globe. The free exchange of ideas and resources during this era fall into the categories of gifts between tribes, reciprocal exchange between kin and petty barter between individuals.

After ecological pressures provoked the Neolithic Revolution, humanity had to grapple with sedentary living and the production of an economic surplus above what was needed to reproduce the population. In the presence of surplus, our tendency toward cooperation and egalitarianism became inverted and economic classes formed which laid claim to different points along the production and distribution ladder. In a dialectical reversal of epic proportions, the prehistoric aversion to domination gave way to the slave economy, the most oppressive economic system known to history.

Ancient Rome was so saturated with unfree labour that little distinction was made between working citizens earning a wage and slave labour owned by a master. Slaves commonly held managerial roles, conducted business and apprenticed in skilled trades. Selling oneself into slavery was an attractive means to escape poverty. In such an economy, it was the narrow band of elite slave owners who absorbed the surpluses of antiquity.

Dawn of the Market

Both enslaved and wage labour transitioned into tenant farming during the late decline of the western Roman empire. Feudalism was a sort of synthesis between the enslaved labour of Rome and the social organization of the Germanic tribes. Meanwhile, Christian idealism began to permeate the superstructure of medieval Europe. Since most of the population was tied down to agricultural production on plots of land, merchants took on an important role in the circulation of goods. Markets were held at regular times and places throughout Europe, giving prospective buyers and sellers of wares notice to prepare. Merchant guilds coordinated the movement of imports and commercial profits became a pathway for non-landholding Europeans to capture a piece of the economic surplus of the feudal era.

Medieval commerce was sublated by the capitalist system as it began to develop after 1492. After peasants were shook loose from ancestral farmland and piled into cities, permanent shops replaced the market squares and merchant banks funded New World pillaging expeditions. We see a point in history where labour, surplus production and capital break free of physical boundaries. This economic transformation created the foundations of science, Enlightenment philosophy, the modern state, monetary system and, of course, the idea of the free market.

“Free market” is defined by Britannica as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal.” It’s interesting that free market fundamentalism—or laissez-faire economics—arrive on the political scene around the same time as socialism does, during western industrialization.

As noted in the first paragraph, human beings evolved with an aversion to domination and preference for some modicum of economic and political egalitarianism. The adoption of sedentary living and the creation of economic surpluses within a class hierarchy threw back much of the formal cooperation of hunter-gatherers but it did not eliminate the collective want of freedom. Cooperation and freedom from domination is hardwired into our evolutionary history. This is visible in slave rebellions and peasant uprisings, as well as religions preaching liberation of the spirit. What capitalist modernity offers is a chance to concretely understand society and create the necessary political and economic conditions for liberation.

Socialism v. Markets?

For socialists, liberation involves a positive action: the organization of workers to overthrow the state and create a new government that lays hold of the economic levers of power. This would allow society to democratically create the material conditions needed for individual flourishing. Free marketeers are the inverse of this, socialism’s negative correlate: cut the government to a minimum and remove political authority from economic levers. The great promise of the free market is to provide “social order without institutions, claiming not to be one itself.”² The premise here is that a market of self-interested individuals is the best allocator of goods and services for the whole of society. The market represents true capitalism, and true capitalism only exists where state authority ends.

Voluntary exchange between individuals would certainly be a feature of any pro-social economy. For this reason free market fundamentalism can sound attractive. But it brings forward serious problems owing to the rock-ribbed power imbalances embedded within the capitalist economy. Every class society has featured an elite class which posits a state to protect property and safeguard economic interests and capitalism is no different. In his history of capitalism, Jürgen Kocka writes:

State formation and the origins of financial capitalism were closely connected, and the nexus provided a way for prosperous urban citizens in high finance, a small elite, to establish their influence on politics while simultaneously making their entrepreneurial success dependent on powerful rulers and their shifting political fortunes.³

This is a situation that continues to the present day, with the powerful corporate lobby and central banks that fuse financial capital to the state apparatus.⁴

Assuming that the Siamese twins of state and corporate power could be surgically separated, the benefits are not clear. The capitalist market is not like the reciprocal exchange and gift economies of our prehistoric ancestors. It descended to us from authoritarian ramparts, by way of colonial subjugation, race-based slavery and violent ethnic cleansing. No wonder that the capitalist market is a bare-knuckled fight in which each participant must attempt to end the day with more money than they began it with.

Even for a bourgeois economist like John Maynard Keynes it was apparent that the accumulation of money had bound society to “pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”⁵ Under such conditions, scams are incentivized, price gouging is profitable, environmental stewardship is burdensome, stock swindles are rife and labour appears only as a costly appendage to production.

Stamping the capitalist market with the title of “free” does not dress the window much either. Engels pointed out the logical fallacy of the “free” aphorism when critiquing a proposal to repackage Germany as a free state: “Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where the state is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with a despotic government.”

Once the great mass of people is subordinated to market forces by way of survival, the market is free to act on them in despotic ways. The workplace is a totalitarian encampment where using the bathroom and eating lunch are objects of scrutiny, the threat of termination hanging like the sword of Damocles over the necks of employees.⁶ Meanwhile, bills accrue. Small businesses collapse under the weight of competition. Houses are seized by debt obligations and families go hungry by price shocks. In the absence of income, the free market pushes desperate participants into drug peddling and sex trafficking. Art and corporate advertising become salacious performances demanding attention from a tired population on the go. Sterile escapism is rampant. Information deteriorates to the standards of minds made lazy and politics is a bloodsport. Every stripper pole, inside trade and contract killing can be rationalized so long as it pries away a profit. When Adam Smith likened the market to an “invisible hand” he failed to mention how often it would punch us in the face.

Past the Paradigm

The multitude of social ills kicked up by a despotic market which commands labour and demands consumption is the reason why the free market utopia is a mirage, at best. Even a conservative thinker like John Gray adroitly pointed out that cultural conservatism is not compatible with free market, laissez-faire policies.⁷ The conservative rebellion against corporate diversity policies and global trade are examples of misalignment between the capitalist market and traditional values.

If the political theatre is the stage of class conflict, the current tug-of-war between interventionist modern liberals and the protectionist populist right wing demonstrates that there is no room in the troupe for free market fundamentalists. The market has already blazed a trail for mass migration, menacing technologies, medical bankruptcy, sky-high utility prices, the outsourcing of decent jobs and hollowing out of public infrastructure. All that’s left to do is fight amongst the wreckage left in its wake.

The capitalist paradigm has only cemented over a scant 300 years of human history. Capitalism has visited humanity with a progression out of feudalism but its market is neither efficient or rational, as the swelling expanse of global slum dwellers, overflowing landfills and microplastics in our bloodstream attest.

What is needed is not the expansion of the capitalist marketplace but its sublation: a pulling forward of our latent cooperative instincts into a universal exchange that rewards economic actors according to the satisfaction of human need rather than profit. In such a post-capitalist market, the gift economy and reciprocal exchange reappear. Rewards accrue to the doctors curing cancer; the innovators shortening the workday; the oceanographers detoxifying our waterways; the engineers constructing comfortable housing and transport for all. For humanity to have a future we must not oppose the current paradigm but go beyond it.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin, 2008): 15. ↩︎
2. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 293. ↩︎
3. Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2016): 43. ↩︎
4. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Verso, 2018): 321. ↩︎
5. Keynes as quoted in David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023): 83. ↩︎
6. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2010): 176. ↩︎
7. John Gray discussed in Jameson, Valences, 463-4. ↩︎
05 Nov 25
Capitalism
This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

There is a claim that capitalism is defined by free trade and markets but this is an obscurity. Capitalism utilizes both markets and economic planning where beneficial, just like every other economic system has done—including hunter-gatherers, ancient Rome and feudal Japan. The definition of capitalism is actually very simple and specific: private ownership of production and wage labour. These characteristics may seem unimpressive from today’s vantage point but their fruition conceals a long and shady history.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher points out the prevailing sentiment of 21st century disempowerment: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”¹ As recent movies and television series indicate, there is a fascination with the apocalypse and barren moral landscapes that burn on our consciousness. Now that capitalism is concretized as the social reality in most of the world, the mind’s eye has tunnel vision regarding it. However, this anguish is not a distinct capitalist phenomena. Eschatology is an ancient subject. Generations of medieval peasants saw little change, despite the shifting boundaries of feudal fiefdoms and principalities. The Roman Empire and Ancient Egypt were supposed to last forever. And the Paleolithic era nearly did. For so many who lived and died in the past, it must have also been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of their own way of life.

That would not be true of every single generation—after all, there are active periods of revolution where artifacts and norms are torn down within the lifetime of individuals. And if anything distinguishes capitalism from what has preceded it, it must be the fixed quality of hectic upheavals. Karl Marx observed: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all soil conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones.”² And again: “Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a productive process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative.”³ The nature of capitalism is therefore paradoxical—its end is unimaginable but so too is any status quo within it. Revolutionary change—in consumer goods, living costs, warfare, culture, nature and demographics—are always descending upon us under capitalism.

Primitive communism, ancient slave societies and feudalism all arose gradually. The phase transitions triggered by natural human evolution, a warming Neolithic climate and the supplanting of Rome’s slave economy with feudalism all took place over centuries. Not so with capitalism. If capitalism is a spinning-hot mess of instability, conflict, technological invention and brutal exploitation, it’s because it was born in a frenzy of looting, genocidal violence, biological contagion and piracy. Feudal Europe was a pressure cooker of mounting debts, stifled trade routes, Catholic Inquisitions, bubonic plague and a bridled merchant class. Capitalism did not really emerge in the world—it exploded onto it the moment Columbus made landfall on Caribbean shores. Observing the golden adornments and timid nature of the Arawak people he encountered, Columbus salivated: “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

In a short matter of decades the indigenous societies, mired in less-advanced modes of production like primitive communism and slave economies, were broken to the thunder of Old World disease, technology and thirst for lucre. Gold and silver deposits in the Americas were drained by indigenous labour toiling under the swords of conquistadors, oceans were mercilessly exploited, vast tracts of land were cleared for plantations of sugar, tobacco and cotton, the African slave trade was engaged.⁴ From the European perspective, wealth seemed to amass from thin air, as all debts were paid far from home in the form of blood and environmental ruination. In a preview of what would later become the stock market, expeditions dedicated to pillaging native kingdoms were funded by investors risking capital for shares on future spoils. It was the ransacking of the Americas, the mass-utilization of African slaves and gunboat diplomacy in Asia that marked capitalism’s primitive accumulation stage. To follow still was the Industrial Revolution and formal colonization of South Asia, the Middle East and continental Africa.

The concept of phase transition is also described as “the transformation of quantity into quality.” The pillaging of the Americas illustrates this, as a massive rupture to the feudal mode of production burst open once the natural and social wealth of two continents was exposed to those with armaments and the backing of mercantile investors. European land—the primary source of life and wealth through the feudal age—diminished in its preciousness, and the fortunes of the landed aristocracy diminished along with it. The massive surplus of inputs—precious metals, sugar, cotton, forced labour, etc.—was absorbed by the relatively small population of western Europe and forced a phase transition from a relatively closed and stable feudal system into a rabidly expansionary global capitalism.

As land in Europe lost its importance in a rapidly evolving mode of production, pressure was applied to agriculture to squeeze more out of the lands. New rotation methods were implemented, new American crops like potatoes and corn were planted, new ploughs were deployed, peasants that had worked lands for generations were evicted by force. The separation of peasants from their livelihood on the land is how wage labour emerged. The collision between the masses of peasants dispossessed of their ancestral lands and a new class of capital owners is what gave birth to the modern system:

The historical conditions of [capitalism] are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring to life only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capitalism, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.⁵

Feudalism was being negated fast, especially in Britain where the Industrial Revolution began. The overwhelming amounts of resources flooding Europe spurred productive innovation in order to process it all. New forms of capital were merged into a fledgling factory system, such as steam power, milling machines, blast furnaces and power looms. But now the capital owner was faced with a unique problem posed by this new web of economic relations: overproduction. Too many goods could be produced for the domestic market to possibly absorb at a profit.

Typical in the history of capitalism, the solution was found at the end of a gun. Leveraging their technological advantages, European states in the service of financial capital laid siege to India and China, the great powers of Asia. China became a dumping ground for opium and the Indian domestic economy collapsed as their market was flooded with cheap European textiles and manufactures. Much of South Asia and Africa were formally colonized, transformed into outlets for excess European production and becoming sites of resource extraction under systems of forced labour.

It was these three broad motions that resulted in a world under capitalist domination. First, the pillaging of North and South America and genocidal exploitation of enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples. Second, the creation of a mass of wage labourers drawn from the European peasantry through enclosures that separated them from their land. Finally, the establishment of extractive colonies across almost the entirety of Asia and Africa. While these processes have continued to evolve rapidly over the 20th century to the present, the mechanism whereby one class extracts profit at the expense of another has not changed—it is baked into the logic of capitalism. The geographer, David Harvey, sums up capitalist history thus:

The transformation of labour, land and money into commodities rested on violence, cheating robbery, swindling and the like. The common lands were enclosed, divided and put up for sale as private property. The gold and silver that formed the initial money commodities were stolen from the Americas. The labour was forced off the land into the status of a “free” wage labourer who could be freely exploited by capital when not outright enslaved or indentured. Such forms of dispossession were foundational to the creation of capital. But even more importantly, they never disappeared.⁶

It is difficult not to recognize capitalism as a zero-sum game when considering its history and present-day unfolding. Over a billion people in less-developed capitalist countries live in slums—a number projected to double by 2050. Over 700 “dead zones” without oxygen have formed in the ocean as a byproduct of heavy shipping traffic, plastic waste, overfishing and the acidification of waters by carbon emissions. Over 187 million people have died from wars involving capitalist competition over resources since the last century—and that number is climbing. Even in the core capitalist countries of the West, an increasing number of crises and epidemics are building—the mental health crisis, climate crisis, housing crisis, inflation crisis, drug epidemic, refugee crisis—with more to come. While its productive capacity is unquestionable, an enormous surplus is amassed by a small number of elite capital owners—close to 0.1% of the population—and arrives by a process of destabilizing exploitation, including international military coercion, imbalanced trade treaties and unmitigated pollution of the biosphere.

It is the contention of classical Marxist philosophy that a positive-sum economy working for all is only possible along the lines of a democratic, classless economy that puts wealth creation and scientific discovery at the disposal of the working class. On progress under capitalism, Marx states:

When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the markets of the world and the modern powers of production and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.⁷

Further Reading:

Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India.”

———–
1. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 17. ↩︎
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
3. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019), 318. ↩︎
4. Ian Angus, “The Fishing Revolution and the Origins of Capitalism,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 10. ↩︎
5. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019), 120. ↩︎
6. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 57. ↩︎
7. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎
08 Apr 25