The logic of capitalism presents the production of goods and services as
aiming the satisfaction of Humanity’s needs, extracting from this activity a
surplus for investment in the increase or improvement of its productive capabilities;
that is a lie, presented in the economy schools’ textbooks. That logic is not the
satisfaction of the needs of Humanity; if that were true, the billions of needy
people in essential areas such as food, health, housing, education, and
others – while capitalists, national governments and their regional or global
bodies complain and worry about low GDP growth – would not exist.
From the previous context it follows, then, that the objective of the
capitalists is the production of value, the constant and unlimited accumulation
of profits, of capital, using the satisfaction of people's needs as an
instrument for that purpose; and not as a goal. Basically, for capital,
humanity and the planet's resources are nothing but instruments for the
achievement of the aforementioned accumulation; thus, capitalists, small, big,
multinationals, within the scope of their respective scales, seek to accumulate
money, wealth, capital, using their businesses as their tool and the meeting of
people's needs as a means to achieve that end.
If, for the generality of capital, the production of goods and services
serves to accumulate capital, for Humanity what makes sense is the production
of goods and services that satisfy its needs; and, in that thought, there is
nothing abstract or unlimited.
In this context, capitalism, as an economic model, aims for unlimited,
infinite growth. On the one hand, capitalists need to generate goods, value;
and, on the other hand, they need workers to produce goods and services, all of
which are forms of merchandise, of extraction and accumulation of profits. On
the other hand, these goods and services have to be transformed into money
through sales, thus requiring the existence of consumers (families, people),
purchasing companies and States, that spend the money of the taxes subtracted
from, in their vast majority, labour income.
Ludicrously, while it is sufficient for a person to eat half a chicken per
day, the capitalist, for his part, will use every means so that each person
consumes, not half but one whole chicken, two chickens... From a human logical
viewpoint, food needs fall within limited parameters, in terms of quantity and
variety; the capitalist always wants to produce more and more and that a flow
for this production exists, by inducing artificial needs in consumers, a
consumerist drive, if necessary by compromising future income through credit.
At the same time, the capitalist wants that its workers accept a contention in their
wage baselines at levels that do not lead to an increase in costs which are
proportionally greater than the growth in revenue. Seeking to reach the
infinite through the accumulation of capital is a logic which is intrinsically
demented and predatory on people and on the planet.
It has become commonplace, in the current economish speak, the
daily talk about growth (specifically, the GDP); be them the governments wishing
to show off their skills, banks waiting for new customers, entrepreneurs seeking
to increase sales, armies trying to occupy additional territories or buy new
toys, large companies looking to buy smaller ones. Growth has become an addiction
for the political classes and the business community, with evident contagion of
the commoners. And yet, GDP is an incomplete, diffuse, generic measure, which
covers only about 70% to 75% of the economic activity and does not measure the
“value” of domestic work and care given within families, the social relevance
of which is immense; that in addition to not including corruption, favour, bribes, trafficking (drugs, organs,
migrants, women, wild animals...) On the other hand, it considers to be
included in the GDP an “investment” in… armament!
Synthetically, the lust for infinite growth, inherent to capitalism, is measured
through the nebulous GDP; and since material production requires a consumer
market, which is restricted by the low growth of popular income and the
limitations in access to credit, capitalism has developed, in an unprecedented
way, financial speculation for the creation of value through the mechanism of
the Ponzi pyramids; those have became the dominant element for the increase in
GDP, making it even more diaphanous and of uncertain evolution, as was seen
after 2008, with the flood of money through central banks, without any relation
with the so-called “real economy” and without having to “get your hands dirty”
with the placement of workers around machines, sales structures, logistics,
advertising ...
Country
|
Benchmark
|
Current Value
(in S&P 500 terms)
|
Gain since Nov 26, 1990
|
United States
|
S&P 500
|
3,168
|
901%
|
Hong Kong
|
Hang Seng Comp.
|
2,926
|
824%
|
Germany
|
DAX 30
|
2,913
|
820%
|
Canada
|
S&P/TSX Comp.
|
1,717
|
444%
|
France
|
CAC 40
|
1,16
|
268%
|
United Kingdom
|
FTSE 100
|
1,072
|
238%
|
Japan
|
Nikkei 225
|
315
|
1%
|
Note: Data has been transformed
to match the scale of the S&P 500, and is current as of December 13, 2019
It all works based in supercomputers, very agile in deciding what to buy
or sell, even when it comes to ships loaded with fuel, cereals or oilseeds, for
example, which cargo is bought already on board and resold in the context of
speculative games. A few years ago, the trend to use vegetable oils to replace
those of fossil origin came to cause sharp rises in cereal prices, which led to
popular uprisings in poor areas of the globe, such as Africa[1].
In addition to the new “financial products” that keep being created, the
pressure for higher consumption of goods and services is made through the
induction of fashion and the deification of novelty, which turns buying and
consuming into real addictions. The dynamic of capital is very strong, with
real or formal improvements being launched in consumer goods, with the
incorporation of new features and uses into objects, betting on design and, thus,
requiring a massive investment in advertising. On the other hand, the imbedding
of cheaper components (including wage costs), the increase in productivity, the
segmentation of production and sales across various companies (e.g. through
franchises) and different parts of the planet, involves long and complex
transportation networks[2]. The need to remove or suppress competition may involve an artificial
reduction in the useful life of productive equipment, so that it can be
replaced more quickly by new, or just more appealing, more fashionable, models;
with a subsequent increase in garbage; with, in many cases, expensive and
difficult recycling, itself also inserted in long logistical chains.
This long, frequent, and diversified destruction of goods and equipment,
made obsolete, outdated, physically or commercially, requires a constant
application of new capital in investments and applications where the profit is
higher per unit of time and per unit of invested capital.
All the elements described are the life of capitalism, they frame the
existing competition between production sectors, between countries and
geographic areas, between economic or financial groups, between political
classes; all of them are included in a chain that, despite being an arena for
fierce disputes over primacy, has in common the essential production of goods,
their injection into the market, having as the desired effect the accumulation
of capital.
Within this socioeconomic model, major perpetuation difficulties arise:
·
The first one refers to Humanity's needs
for goods and services, which is, of course, finite, as are the resources
offered by the planet in terms of water, minerals, fossil energies, forests...;
however, these needs, their volume, and their manipulation, are an essential
instrument serving as the foundation of capitalist accumulation.
·
This basic finitude is obviously
confronted with the level at which consumption or, more generally, the
expenditure by human beings, direct or indirect, is. It is convenient that this
level is kept stable, harmonizing the volume of the human herd and the needs of
its existence with the levels of well-being, requiring those to be fed through
increases in productivity, recycling, and new inventions and not through of the
disastrous pressure on the planet's finite resources.
·
The accumulation of capital is a result
of three major factors:
o
Firstly, there is a pressure on peoples
to reduce real wages, for sterilization through unemployment and starvation, while
at the same time fiscal punishment is accentuated; from this compression of
income results a larger share available to capitalists, in their various
strains, without prejudice of the differences between them.
o
Secondly, the maximization of
accumulation, inherent to the logic of mercantile production, with the creation
of value, is not satisfied with just the crushing of income directed at the
human crowd; and it tends to expand this creation of value, including the
predation on the planet's resources, for purposes only laterally directed to
the production of consumer goods and capital.
o
Thirdly, disputes between capitalist
groups and companies force States to maintain armed forces, heavy judicial and
police systems, to promote constant developments in weapons production – a
particularly damaging area to the planet – in addition to mobilizing the peoples
to, through garish electoral journeys or fascist-like nationalist drifts,
defend one group of capitalists against another, including the sacrifice of
human lives, in an outrageously useless way because that sacrifice does not
benefit the peoples and stupidly segments Humanity[3].
·
From the previous three points ensues a
constant pressure for capital accumulation, in multinationals and in the
financial system, in particular; and, at the same time, a penchant for the
predation on the planet and the sacrifice of billions of people, victims of
war, sectarian conflicts, desertification, poverty, disease, hunger ...
resulting, in general, in phenomena of xenophobia, racism, nationalism,
religious and ethnic antagonisms, of defense against threats by the Other; those,
as a rule, reveal fear, ethical minority or strategic harmlessness.
·
The production of goods and services as
defined above is far from satisfying the gluttony of value creation. Even
satisfying the needs of the entire world population – which is far from
happening – would not lead to the sacred objective of creating value, which is
intended to be accumulative, until reaching the infinite. For this reason,
capitalism cannot avoid conflicts, bankruptcies, and the concentration of means
in large emporiums, and cannot be satisfied, to that end, with any level of
production of goods and services, consumption or indebtedness. The search for
the infinite requires struggle and destruction, destruction and struggle,
innovation and abandonment of technologies, the production of new goods and
services and the convincing of consumers to drain that production – often one
source of harmful consumption – thus compromising their income (even
precarious, as is evident) current and future, with a high level of indebtedness
that, in the case of housing, can be transmitted to the next generation,
without the States losing the opportunity to collect taxes within the scope of
ownership and succession.
·
This drive to ride upon
production-destruction-production cycles... typical of capitalism, constantly
rebuilds hierarchies between nation-states, within political classes, between
groups of capitalists, also segmenting workers and articulating them, in a kind
of revolving door, with the mass of unemployed; pushing into a corner, as a
hindrance, as non-productive, weak consumers and others, not very interesting
to become indebted with banks – the unemployed, sick, and retired – whose
income… are a burden to public accounts and contribute to deficits, which
governments complain about; and also entire populations from the peripheries of
capitalism, in Africa, South America, Asia and even Europe.
·
The consumerist logic, the constant
destruction of capital, the productivity drive – for which the production of
goods and services is an end in itself and is not aimed at satisfying needs – has
very visible impacts on the planet, far surpassing the transformations and the
damage caused by Humankind in the last millennia. Although it seems to us that
Humankind’s preference has been in causing harm to itself.
·
When some damage, a problem, is
identified in any sphere – domestic, social, economic or planetary – human
logic immediately questions its cause. In capital’s logic, the system is
perfect; and, being perfect, it must be eternal. Hence, in Reagan or Trump's
intellectually destitute logic, it is only necessary to eliminate Evil, that
is, to eliminate al-Bagdadhi or bin Laden (former friends which fell apart ...),
distribute economic sanctions throughout the planet, make central banks issue credit
without limits, feed military actions, widen conflict and population flee
areas, offering soldiers branded with the UNO/UN stamp as entertainment. They extend
or intensify the sacrifices to be imposed on populations, as has been observed
in Latin America, Europe or the USA, the Middle East, India or Africa, where
governments tend to be increasingly authoritarian and repressive, even when
using electoral processes (usually not democratic) to legitimize their
respective oligarchies.
Being
– the logic of capital – synonymous with perfection, conflicts between
capitalists for access to consumer or raw material markets would be part of the
dynamics of the system itself, of healthy competition, in which the new
replaces the old, with technological evolution as an engine for the
construction of the future, and smartness, as well, as building elements of
progress. Competition, in the context of the solid Protestant morality of Adam
Smith’s times, should remove corruption from market mechanisms; however… this competition,
free and fair, was never widespread. And the intervention of States and their
governments to bias competition through discriminatory laws, by colonial
predation and war, by the possession of lands and markets, with the
nation-states that became enemies at that time, has been more common and
determinant; and also through the internal war over the low price of labor, as
celebrated in the pioneering Peterloo massacre.
·
Today, despite technological advances,
it remains to be demonstrated that the putative perfection of the logic of
capital generalizes well-being, which seems to be increasingly restricted to the
minority social segments (and in a minority of countries) from where the
brilliant brains that cross ideas in Davos or Bilderberg come. In real
conspiratorial acts, from a being resulting from the cloning of Gates, Hitler
and Al Capone, against Humanity.
·
In order to grow the accumulated capital
stock it is necessary to feed, continuously, the creation cycle for new
products and services so that the destruction of capital, resulting from
conflicts, with columns of migrants and refugees on the run, with homes and
infrastructure destroyed by bombings, resulting from the recourse to war and
banditry, can be overcome. This state of constant destruction and creation is
inherent to the logic of capital, constitutes a criminal means of renewing
capital stocks, in interaction with new technologies of production, marketing,
manipulation and control of people, according to the different faces of the
human polyhedron – workers, students, retirees, military, consumers, taxpayers,
capitalists, members of political classes, men/women, voters...; a peaceful and
dignified life for all, taking advantage of existing knowledge, with an
increase in collective well-being without loss in the quality of the
environment, however evident it may be to common sense, however indisputable it
may be to human rationality, cannot be subscribed to by capitalists as a whole[4].
·
This creative destruction of capital,
together with the creation of value, corresponds to the beginning of a new
cycle of growth in the production of goods, the creation of profits, and a
resumption of consumption... until the next crisis. More banally, what matters
is that the GDP grows... grows…
·
The model of infinite growth is
inseparable from capitalism. Value creation is its pulse, its breath. The Golem
broke free in the 17th century, occupied the planet in three centuries and
resistance was crushed or co-opted, while the alternatives collapsed under the
strength of capitalism, also because the losers did not know how to, or could
not, deepen strategies and proceed with the practices to contain it and direct
it to suicide. Today, it is feared that suicide could drag Humanity to a total
war, to a devastating contamination, to the destruction of living conditions on
the planet, to a brutal reduction in the number of human beings since, in the
chapter of animal and plant species’ extinctions, the count was lost long ago.
·
Capitalism has never had as its first
priority the satisfaction of human needs; human beings are just the living
elements essential to the production of value, consumption, and indebtedness,
the latter being a mooring, a capture of the debtor, of its future life, by the
financial system. Humanity is mainly an instrument for the accumulation of
capital.
·
Nowadays, financial speculation is the most dynamic
element for capital accumulation, with the advantages of requiring little human
intervention and only light productive infrastructures, when compared to the
times, a few decades ago, when the industry polarized the substantive part and
politically active population. Apparently, the next bursting of the financial
bubble (like the previous one) will be dampened by governments that will
mediate the transfer of damages to ordinary people through public finances (the
Draghi doctrine), with strong intervention of the States and the political
classes; the latter, that intervene in an increasingly committed manner, see in
that action their continuity as executing agents. This will not be the case
only if peoples refuse this intermediation, contrarily to what happened after
the crisis that started in 2008; if they refuse the deviant and provocative
action of the so-called left parties, which fully fulfilled their function in
Portugal, Spain and Greece in 2011/15.
·
Environmental damages, like many others,
are elements that come from the functioning of capitalism, they are collateral
damages that capitalists try not to internalize in order not to affect their
levels and rhythms of capital accumulation; allowing, as is evident, that this
damage affects populations of various dimensions and leaving to the States (and
to the in-shift political classes) the patching or remedying of that damage...
with the tax money paid by those who have difficulty in exempting themselves
from them.
·
As it is obvious, to cry out against the
damages without having a strongly critical attitude towards the causes and
their causers, is to be benevolent with capitalism; it amounts to an acceptance
of capitalism as a fatality, an internalization colluding with capitalism,
respectfully extending a hand to the political classes for their charity of a lower
environmental aggressiveness. So will it come down to building a world of
happiness by eating transgenic soybeans and not meat? Or to replace the diesel
car with an electric one, incorporating fossil energy produced somewhere? Are unemployment,
precariousness, militarism, nationalism, the gaming with the retirement age,
the suffocating tax burden, the absence of democracy, the commodification of
the satisfaction of all human needs, solved in the follow up of an action
focused on the environment? In that context, this benevolence and acceptance of
the status quo, added together, are called complicity.
·
It is notorious the generalized inability
to construct alternatives to the current dangerous situation, after the failure
of socialisms, which have never been more than state capitalisms, with a single
party divided into several rival tendencies, instead of several rival parties,
as in the dominant market democracies. All of them, however, are very adept at
corrupt practices, lobbying, and securing a never-shrinking fiscal mass.
·
Any sectoral focus of capitalism, which
is always insufficient, is part of that inability. It is methodologically
stupid to think that it is possible to fight the effects without having the
causes as a central objective; as it is childish or reactionary to defend
improvements within the scope of capitalism, admitting the emergence of a
pious, understanding, domesticated, environmentally friendly and committed to
curbing climate drift, capitalism; or, still, maintaining a capitalism that
uses consumerism and debt as ways of capturing people and peoples, which are rendered
increasingly precarious by capitalists and their States, and also carry the
costs of climatic deviations in their health, in supermarket bills or, in an
increased tax burden, included in the pay slips.
·
What makes the crowd accept the
capitalist yoke? The acceptance of the capitalist, of dismissal and
unemployment, of low salaries and the miserable pensions, the increase in
working-life span despite the capabilities derived from new technologies,
constitute a humiliation for all who need to submit in order to survive.
However, it is not difficult to see that productivity gains only marginally
lead to increased incomes for wage earners and, even more rarely, to reduced
working time; on the other hand, it is easy to see the expansion of useless,
bureaucratic, control, and tedious tasks, the purpose of which is precisely to
occupy the life span of human beings, transvestite as workers or collaborators[5]. The latter, if they are busy for many hours,
subjected to metrics to measure their performance – which, to a large extent,
are integrated with the measure of the performance of their counterparts – are
commonly said to be… working. If each employee, before and after his/her work journey,
has to squeeze into crowded transport, traffic queues and eventual drop-off/pick-up
of children from schools or nurseries, in addition to household chores, if that
employee may still have a few hours to, exhausted, indulge in television or
social media vacuity, then it is an automaton integrated in a controlling
society.
·
In order to render slim any possibility
of revolt, capitalism has been developing the State’s apparatuses to a level of
complexity and resources unparalleled with the pre-capitalist proto-state,
which confused itself with the private property of a king or emperor[6]. The capitalist state, in the early stages of its development, had an
administrative apparatus and another, a repressive one, both of which were
fragile enough so that a popular revolt or a coup d'état could effect changes
in power. Today, taking into account the extension of the administrative
apparatus and the information circuits, there is a very strong connection
between the political class and the economic circles, which, in the European
case, work in an integrated and tendentiously uniform manner. This European
cooperation (and in the area of NATO) can also be seen in the realm of the
armed forces, disconnected from interventions in domestic politics, especially
through pronouncements as in the past; even at their base, they are made up of
contracted elements rather than part of a mandatory military service, obsolete
in the face of modern weaponry. As for the various police forces, they are
highly armed and trained to juggle popular demonstrations with adequate
brutality, as was recently seen in the case of the yellow jackets. And one
should not forget the role of private security guards, their connections with
the police or as contractors in supporting actions for the armed forces to
carry out “dirty war” actions.
·
In the market democracy’s political
models, the economic oligarchies, the patronage that “counts”, that is, the
powerful interests of multinationals or of the financial system, do not
organize coups d'état… just because it is not necessary; the putsches are
reserved for neo-colonial scenarios where tribal or racial antagonisms coexist
with an army that provides a precarious way of earning a salary and from which
emanate, frequently, "heads of state" corrupted by mining companies
or emporiums of extensive and predatory.
·
In market democracies there is a suit of
parties among which some, very few, are the main recipients and beneficiaries
of legislative orders, subsidies, or ready-to-sign contracts, emanating from
large local or global economic groups. As there are no free lunches, these
great economic interests discreetly finance the parties and place in their
staff people from those parties, well paid and acting as links to the traffic
of influences. The people, lulled by elections, fraudulent in their own
configuration and, ignoring the above mentioned collusion, will remain meek,
accepting and paying the bill of a decrepit capitalism linked to the state
machine.
·
Regularly, those who work will pay taxes
on the consumption of goods or services, on income or property, so that the
State can function as the guarantor of the controlling company, maintain the
competitiveness of the economy or, more precisely, maintaining the political
class and the capitalists connected to it, united in the suction of the “pork barrel"
·
The acceptance by the crowd, with a high
degree of passivity, with resignation, of the state and corporate oligarchies’ power
has a very old origin in the creation of hierarchies anchored in the power of weapons
and/or in connections with the divine. For one or both of these reasons,
obedience to hierarchies became commonplace, as well as considering as being of
the proper nature of things the existence of small groups of people who give
orders to the rest of the community. The acceptance by the working classes of
the population of this permanent and renewed structural coercion is extended
and deepened, in an overwhelming way, with capitalism, within which the coercive
apparatus of the State can reach almost half of the wealth created, measured by
the famous GDP.
“The population, in general, does not
know what is going on, and does not even know that it does not know.” (Noam
Chomsky)
This and other texts at:
[1] Some years ago, in 1973, following the war between
Arabs and Zionists, a Portuguese company operating in the area of transportation
of fuels and oil crude saw the price of the cargo of one of its large ships
rise in an astronomical manner which, in that year, caused it to have a
fabulous profit.
[2] We know that the electric scooters which have become
fashionable in European cities are made in China, and then shipped to the USA
and from there to Europe by ... by air! Its production, exploitation and
duration is far from having substantial environmental benefits, but… it makes
the mayors proud and the environmental groups to jump up and down, while hiding
the energy costs of operating, collecting and repairing vehicles that do not
last more than two months . Dogs may bark but the caravan still goes on by, unperturbed
...
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