Quickshot Quotation: Debt and Rebirth
Editor’s note: combining an enlightening left wing quote, with further commentary and analysis, Quickshot Quotations feature semi-regularly on Mastodon, and NIDC.
Capitalism, Contradictions, and the Force of Crisis
Well friends, I was feeling a little spry after a long day in the posting-mines on Mastodon, so I decided to revive an old feature here on NIDC. Today’s highlighted quote comes from the late David Graeber’s excellent tome “Debt: the first 5,000 years” – which a little birdy told me you can read by following the link to the pdf file at the bottom of this article. In terms of the book, I consider it one of the most important historical studies of the rarely-examined, but shockingly pervasive role that debt has played in both justifying, and literally creating, the capitalist global order that is currently threatening to kill us all on a boiling planet.
Originally published in 2009, this passage comes from the conclusion of Debt: the first 5,000 years, and largely references the installation of neoliberal police states, the global treaties and enforcement arms that lock our societies into these capitalist authoritarian structures, and the fact that even when the 2008 financial meltdown exposed this entire system as utterly unsustainable, nothing really changed. This of course remains relevant to us today, because long after the final fallout from that financial tsunami has been counted, we continue to live with the ever-worsening results of those same two conditions; namely authoritarian police states, and a global economic order rigged against any hope of change whatsoever – a situation we lovingly refer to as “fascist hellworld” in common parlance today. Although he couldn’t have known the outcome, Professor Graeber even notes that impending climate catastrophe would likely spell the death of capitalism. This is objectively a certainty at this point, as recent events around the world have demonstrated, and all we’re really fighting about is how many people are going to be sacrificed on the altar of profit and extraction before we either end this, or the planet simply boils the human species into extinction.
Ultimately, what Graeber is really taking about here is the already vast and ever-growing official apparatus of what I call the war on sharing; a machine that includes our armed forces, domestic policing, a surveillance state, corporate media, academic structures, and vast propaganda networks. Using every available means one would also find used in a war, this control structure continuously and violently moves to contain any alternative to the capitalist death cult we’re all immersed in now, and even the very idea that an alternative might possibly exist. The fact that capitalism has chosen to resolve its exposed contradictions by escalating that war to open fascist control, and plans to commit a murder of genocides while the world burns, doesn’t really change much about the nature of that machine, and what it has been built to accomplish. This is because both fascism and neoliberalism are dependent on subverting and subjugating human relations to a legally enforced, inhumanly violent morality encoded in both the social norms and legal structures of our societies. The terminology may have changed, but the job of killing hope to prevent even the possibility of a threat to the larger capitalist structure, and those who control it, remains functionally identical today at the dawn of fascism, as it did when Professor Graeber wrote this, during the death swoons of neoliberalism.
Standing in the shadow of such a vast and long-lived machine, this apparatus to kill ideas, can be quite intimidating. The truth however is that the folks who own, and run the capitalist world we live in, are spending all that money, and exercising all that force, to prevent something they ultimately have no power to actually stop: ideas. Specifically, any ideas about a world, and a future, different than the one capitalist oligarchs have imagined for you and your children. This machine excels at pre-empting the formation of ideas by snuffing out hope for an alternative, and it’s very good at repressing folks who demand alternative ideas be used to run our society, so long as those people remain in the minority. But in the long history of mankind, we have well and truly learned that no amount of propaganda and state repression can prevent folks from having ideas, or from sharing them with each other. Repression only leads more folks to join in the transmission of dissenting ideas, and when things get bad enough, sometimes those ideas are even about revolution.
In this regard then, I think it behooves us to remember that climate catastrophe itself has already acted as the ultimate decider of this ideological debate. Capitalism, which is ultimately dependent on the fossil fuels that are causing a mass extinction event as we speak, is on borrowed time. There are two ways out of this predicament; genocide, or mutual aid and cooperation on a global-scale never before seen in human history. Time does not stand still, even for the whims of incomprehensible wealth and power. One way, or another, our society is going to change.
In fact, there is already a spark of living hope to be found. As the oceans boil, and the forests burn, people are once again starting to talk about ways of living and relating to ourselves and our planet that are not capitalist, and indeed fundamentally threaten the capitalist project currently transforming our world into an open-air mass grave. The machine that is designed to kill compassion is at this very moment running aground on the shores of reality; our job now as folks who don’t want to see the apocalypse, is to make sure that sharing and solidarity, and not fascism, is what emerges from the wreckage.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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