THE A.B.C OF CAPITALISM

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A . . .

. . . is for accumulation, the art of taking everything for yourself and leaving nothing for anyone else. Accumulation is advertised to be the most desirable way of living and having lots of goodies is advertised as the only way to be happy.

B. . .

. . . is for boredom, which the vast majority of those who work suffer each and every day in their subservient, dead-end jobs, unseen from the lofty heights of the board-rooms. The height of boredom is achieved in bureaucracies, which are factories for the mass-production of boredom both for their employees and the population at large, who have to fill in their forms and jump through their hoops.

C . . .

. . . is for corporations, which are taking control of every centimetre of the planet in order to ratchet up their astronomical profits. Transnational corporations are super-corporations, which owe no allegiance to any particular country or anyone else, apart from their stock-holders, to whom they give enough of their profit to discourage them from selling their stock to other corporations, which might want to take them over in a corporate take-over or leveraged merger.

D . . .

. . . is for debt, which makes the rich-world go around and the poor-world grind to a halt as children die and resources are shipped away to pay off the interest on their debts to the knighted loan-sharks of the West.

E . . .

. . . is for energy, which is taken out of the earth by the oil companies and is converted into heat and green-houses gases, which are turning North Africa into a dust-bowl and the coastal regions of the planet into swimming pools. Result: environmental destruction and ecological ruin.

F . . .

. . . is for Foreign Exchange Markets, where trillions of dollars are traded daily by speculators, who aim to make a profit by exploiting rises and falls in the value of currencies with respect to each other, without any regard for what a fall in a currency’s value might do to the lives of the people who actually have to spend it to satisfy their needs. Black Wednesday, The Far East crisis, the Mexican devaluation of the peso and the current crisis in Turkey are examples of the speculator’s perfidious actions.

G . . .

. . . is for globalisation, which means the opening up of the poor-world and all its citizens, to the unfettered purchasing power of capital. The rich-world continues to protect itself with all sorts of tariffs on commodities and restrictions on the free movement of labour. Globalisation is the rapid and rampant increase of global inequality.

H . . .

. . . is for hunger, the standard state of life for the poor of Africa, Asia, much of the Americas, Russia and the inner-cities of the U.K and Europe.

I . . .

. . . is for investment, which is the way capitalists with loads of money make loads more money. Transferring factories from regions with high wage costs to regions with very low wage-costs is a classic case of investment. Investment depends upon inequalities between regions and the International Monetary Fund ensures that there will never be any shortage of them.

J . . .

. . . is for the jitters, a condition which afflicts investors, speculators and other Capitalists, when they can no longer make an easy profit and begin to sell off their shares, stocks, bonds, derivatives, currency holdings and other abstract property in a mass panic that leads to stock-market crashes and mass unemployment for everyone except the investors, speculators and other Capitalists who get jobs advising governments on repairing the system they have helped to break.

K . . .

. . . is for Das Kapital by Karl Marx, which is at one and the same time the greatest critique of Capitalism and the most profound love-letter ever addressed to an economic system.

L . . .

. . . is for losses, which come in two forms: financial losses which are viewed as very serious by the Capitalists and lead to tax revenues being transferred to banks so that they do not go bust; and job losses, which are viewed by the capitalists as nothing very serious but rather as an important way to avoid financial losses.

M . . .

. . . is, of course, for money, the mystic substance that whole system feeds off. Money is a medium of exchange that allows commodities to be exchanged in the market, without having to physically swap them. However, money also takes on an independent role and itself becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold. If you have lots of money, you can therefore invest it and make lots more money. If you only have what you earn, then the money in your pocket is worth less than the rich people’s money, since you cannot invest yours, but instead see its power to buy commodities fall, as prices get higher and the value of your pay-packet falls, which is an indirect result of the rich people investing their money to make more money. This is called inflation and the monetary policy of governments tries to keep it under control, but at the cost of making money very expensive to borrow, which of course is much worse news for the wage-earner than the capitalist. Monetarism is the doctrine championed by Milton Freedman and employed as the basis of government policy by Maggie Thatcher. It states that governments should not intervene in the economy except to control the supply of money. This ideology therefore favours a Minimal State, a government with no other functions than to be a glorified Mint. State investment in health care, education, transport infrastructure, agriculture, public utilities and other services is to be abolished. The project continues throughout the world under the auspices of The International Monetary Fund and “economically prudent governments” everywhere.

N . . .

. . . is for neo-liberalism, which is the monetarist ideology as it is enshrined in the New World Order of transnational financial and trading institutions ( The World Trade Organisation, The World Bank, The World Economic Forum, G8, The European Central Bank, The Secretariat of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, The International Monetary Fund to name some of the most conspicuous of the bastions of neo-liberal ideology ). They police the economy of the world to ensure that there is no challenge to the American imperialist credo that American businesses ( and a few favoured others ) have a perfect right to buy up the world, lock, stock and barrel, irrespective of what the world’s inhabitants think about it.

O . . .

. . . is for the oil and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a cartel which attempts to keep the price high by setting quotas for the amount of oil that gets pumped from the world’s oil-fields. The price of oil is set in dollars, which has important consequences for the global economy. For instance, when the dollar went into free-fall during the Vietnam War, President Nixon’s Republican administration responded by devaluing the dollar and abolishing the gold-standard that had underpinned the exchange-rate of the dollar and the other major global currencies, since the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944. The OPEC countries now found that America was buying up the oil at rock bottom prices with their devalued dollars and so, like good rational, economic actors should, they began to hike up the price of oil, which led to increasing import costs for the oil-importing nations, whose balance of trade fell into the red and whose economies plunged into recession, leading to massive job-losses in manufacturing industry and other related sectors. The crisis of the mid-70s and the Capitalist governments’ inability to do anything about it, therefore paved the way for the triumph of monetarism and neo-liberalism. But it also created today’s world debt crisis since all the dollars, garnered from the sale of hyper-inflated oil, were invested in banks, who hit on the bright idea of lending them to Third World governments so they could afford to buy the oil to keep their incipient economies going. Good news for Saudi Arabia, very bad news for the people of Africa, whose economies have never recovered from the oil-shock.

P . . .

. . . is for prostitution, which millions of the world’s women are forced into by the pressing need to feed families on derisory wages. Prostitution thrives particularly in those regions of the Third World where Western Capitalists take their Rest And Recreation. Screwing prostitutes is said by many Capitalists to convey a great feeling of power over the submissive bodies of the poor. The poor are, of course, screwed by the rich in many more ways that through sex alone.

Q . . .

. . . is for quantity over quality, which is the basic maxim of the capitalist economy. Its not how good your product is that matters, but how much you can sell. Nor is quality of life important. What alone counts for rational, capitalist actors is the quantity of profit you make.

R . . .

. . . is for robots, which have led to the extinction of the mass-factory proletariat of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Robots are efficiency incarnate, do not unionise, work 24 hours a day, seven days a week at no cost beyond the energy required to run them and fund their maintainance. Robots, however, do become obsolete and must be regularly replaced, which is a way for manufacturing companies to reinvest their surplus-capital in a way that keeps the big, institutional investors happy, because it means more profits for the robotics companies and more profits all round. Hal, the automated robotic control system of the Jupiter probe, in 2001: a Space Odyssey, goes mad and tries to wipe out the entire human crew. This is not thought to be a likely scenario by most roboticists and cyberneticists, except for the greatest cyberneticist of them all, Norbert Weiner, who considered it to be an eminently plausible scenario. The roboticisation of war and the roboticisation of nuclear defence tends to favours Weiner’s reservations about our increasing dependence on robots.

S . . .

. . . is for slavery, which is the barely concealed state of most people who work for a wage. Work-places under capitalism are sites of domination and servitude, where behaviour is strictly controlled through surveillance, set routines and the threat of the sack.

T . . .

. . . is for trade, which is always rough, since its terms are always set by the rich and powerful corporations, through their global institutions ( see neo-liberalism ) to maximise their exploitation of the “emerging economies” ( i.e. the poor and defenceless people of the earth ).

U . . .

. . . is for under-development, which is the Capitalists’ code-word for the misery inflicted by neo-liberalism on the poorest 90% of the earth’s inhabitants, who are viewed by the Capitalists, with colonial disdain, as mere human resources which must be put to use to turn a healthy profit for the masters.

V . . .

. . . is for value, which Capitalism collapses into the single value of monetary exchange. Any other source of value, such as morality, feelings, aesthetic power or justice are to be systematically abolished, so that money alone shall be the determinant of value for society, which as Maggie Thatcher once admitted, is also to be abolished. Indeed she implied that society already had been done away with. But in that, as in many other things, she was jumping the gun. If invited to a Capitalst dinner-party, do not mention the vengeance of society. It puts them off their vol-au-vents..

W . . .

. . . is for waste, which is Capitalism’s number one and most enduring product.

X . . .

. . . is for X-Files, which is the sort of mindless television programme that the Capitalist culture industry foists on the exhausted workers in their evenings instead of making widely available the stimulating, creative and critical cultural productions, which continue to make sub-cultures so exciting.

Y . . .

. . . is for Ya Basta ! which is the growing cry of all those whom Capitalism has stripped of land, freedom, wealth and dignity.

Z . . .

. . . is for Zero, which is the level to which the Capitalist rate of profit incessantly tends, spelling the eventual collapse of the system, once there are no more markets to conquer or territories to exploit. Watch out Mars! The Capitalists are coming!

We shall overcome,

Oisin