Capitalism is a Death Machine; a Better Future is Up to Us

Chased by its own constant degradation, capital needs constant feeding. It press-gangs human labor to dig up and transform water and soil and fossilized sunlight and plants and minerals and animals and any other entity within the natural world that can be converted into a sellable product, a commodity. Constantly driven to catch up with its perpetually falling rate of profit, it metastasizes over the globe, seizing everything, eating everyone.

Heedless of all who cry and beg for moderation, for mercy, it lays waste to every continent, exhausts every possible resource, tears into every small hidden place, digs down into our very thoughts and emotions, into our very DNA.

But nothing is ever enough. Ruining the land with its foul discharges, bleeding out value in sagging returns on played-out investments, more famished than ever, it desperately attempts to leap into space.

There is no reasoning with it. Capital — assets used to generate profit — moves and destroys, but it is not alive. Stringing us along with fables of prosperity and happiness, its purpose is not to meet needs but to manufacture ever more demand. It’s an economic machine with one imperative: to expand itself.

It calls forth stewards unencumbered by empathy; even some of them find themselves appalled. But any capitalists who might catch a conscience and attempt to soften it are quickly out-competed, taken over, and replaced. And any of their political representatives who might attempt to slow it down will face ejection from office, whether through manipulated election or assassination or coup. Capital has no brakes. It respects no limits.

Capital generates capitalism. More than a system, it’s an all-encompassing way of life born of class divisions, propelled by competition and private accumulation. It shapes our ideas, our cultures, our politics, what we eat, how we structure our relationships, and all the ways we serve it.

It manifests in multiple and sometimes overlapping forms based on varying dominant class fractions and methods of accumulation — colonialism, neo-colonialism, settler-colonialism, slavery, imperialism, racial capitalism, disaster capitalism, monopoly capitalism, finance capitalism, crony capitalism, bureaucratic capitalism, state capitalism.

Reinforced by an elaborate social latticework of relative privileges and oppressions, it bribes/threatens some of us to look the other way when it gorges on the suffering of others. When bribes and threats don’t work, it deploys raw violence.

Inevitably, capitalism generates its own internal crisis. After slurping up all the low-hanging fruit, overproduction leads to glut, gridlocking demand. Profit margins go limp as spending seizes up. Interest rate manipulation can’t break the squeeze between deflationary price undercutting and inflationary loss of currency values. Assets are financialized in a struggle to overcome capital’s ever-increasing rate of decomposition. Fictitious capital builds rickety towers on implausible promises of future prosperity; bubbly speculation destabilizes the global economy. Loose cash searches in vain for healthy investment returns, and can’t even find safe haven.

As bubbles pop and the economy cycles downward, even more ruthless measures of innovation and adaptation are required to boost economic growth, and capital is compelled to start eating its most loyal subjects. Bribes dwindle, state violence is deployed as fascism to enforce austerity, unwilling markets are forced open for products no one wants, the pillage of Earth intensifies beyond its ability to support life. Those in power demolish vast swathes of what has been built in order to build back bigger. They inflict “natural” disasters, gentrification, apartheid, wars, illnesses, carceral states, genocides — using it all to dispossess populations, crush resistance, and to clear out territory for fresh economic opportunity.

Competition between individual capitalists leads to monopolies, concentrating obscene amounts of wealth in fewer and fewer hands through mergers and acquisitions, as the rest of us are squeezed to the breaking point. There’s no more pretending that this arrangement provides any benefit to humanity, aside from a few flashy rewards for capital’s top facilitators. Their assurances of a glorious tech-enhanced future sound hollow and obscene.

We ride this monster-machine as hostages, enchained by extortion: “work for us or starve.” As it thrashes in the polycrisis it has made for itself, hurtling toward the abyss of omnicide, our hearts burn with the need to get free of it.

And though an extremely sophisticated and all-encompassing propaganda apparatus insists otherwise, emancipation is possible.

Capitalism has a structural antagonist at its very core — one that it’s always depended upon and hated (and feared!), and lately is rapidly attempting to transcend through automation: the working class.

Workers are in a relationship of contradiction with capital that can never be resolved within the framework of capitalism, because it is structurally embedded as the source of capital. If and when workers emancipate themselves from this relationship, capitalism would no longer exist.

This relationship is based on the exploitation of commodified labor power, which is the basic mechanism of generating capital. The essence is this: during each workday, workers produce value greater than the wages they are paid. This additional value, stolen by the capitalist, is a form of profit called surplus value.

Surplus value is held in commodities, and released for reinvestment as new capital when the commodities are sold. It is the reason capitalists even bother to deal with the hassle of arranging for commodity production in the first place. It is the bedrock of the economy, the ulltimate wellspring of all forms of profit, even ultimately the frothy toxic fake gambling kind.

It is also the locus of capitalism’s fundamental vulnerability: because workers have their hands on the means of production, they can fold those hands and stop production. They can also take possession of those means of production and turn their use toward the common good. This potential terrifies capitalists, who have spent every furious second since the beginning of capitalism beating it back. They are trying very hard to get beyond the need for human workers altogether by building robots who won’t complain or revolt.

But you can’t steal wages from a robot, so where’s the surplus value going to come from?

Early adopter enterprises will be able to undercut the laggards as long as the prices of goods overall still reflect the generally necessary cost of labor, but as robot workers become the norm, the advantage these companies enjoy will quickly evaporate. Profits will flatten to zero.

The big-moneyed set, frantically prepping for this endgame and with no viable plan to fix the situation, are making their last big wealth grabs before retreating to bunkers and private islands, already having fever dreams about uploading themselves into AI-generated backlit synthetic playgrounds, released from the headaches of managing all of us annoying humans.

When those who control killer robot armies no longer require our service as laborers, and come to view the billions of frightened, hungry, angry, willful, desperate, rebellious people as a liability, then what?

What sort of post-commodity-based economy might develop when they no longer need human producers or consumers? There is a looming sense of pessimism about where this could be heading, unless we take our fate into our own hands. Responding constructively, many people are initiating grassroots projects — like mutual aid networks, tenants unions, and community gardens — as the scaffolding of more just and survivable alternatives.

Meanwhile, today, capitalism still rules. Tech bro fever dreams aside, it might still need human workers for a while to maintain mining robots on Mars. In whatever ways it blunders forward, its continued existence threatens us all as it chews through our remaining living habitat.

Or! Or — and this is historically the approach we keep turning to for good reason, learning hard yet valuable lessons with each attempt — or the global working class could organize collectively to self-emancipate from the exploitation of waged labor, and end the private control and theft of what is socially produced, thereby freeing humanity as a whole from capitalist dictatorship, so we can move on to democratically reorganize society in such a way that allows us to meet everyone’s needs, repair the damage, and evolve into new ways of life for a thriving world.

Looking at the social landscape today in the imperialist cores, this may seem farfetched, a relic fantasy of a bygone era when industrial production was newly on the rise and revolutionary workers distributed leaflets at giant factory gates. We are lectured to (inevitably by non-workers) that industrial production doesn’t determine the economy any more, therefore the working class is irrelevant.

But is that true? The capitalist legal apparatus keeps unions on a tight leash, and their education system erases the history of labor struggles, while their paramilitaries in many countries outright murder union organizers — would they try so hard if the working class didn’t have immense latent power?

Chasing the arbitrage of geographical wage differentials, capitalists in the US have pushed the bulk of this hostile class away from their own doorsteps by outsourcing both labor and its direct management. But with every reactive move, they dig themselves deeper into their own structural contradictions: an increasingly internationalized super-exploited workforce connecting class struggle with anti-imperialism (in the context of tightly interconnected supply chains) gains even more potential strength for overturning the global order.

This dilemma for the ruling class generates infighting, mixed messaging, and conflicting policies within the capitalist bloc.

On the one hand they attempt to reshore production, along with pushing corresponding nationalist/xenophobic/misogynist/genderist/traditionalist ideologies to shoehorn the domestic workforce into lower payscales and confine women to the role of reproductive labor.

On the other hand they attempt to transcend the physical limitations of living on a ruined planet, asserting worldviews of a high-tech post-humanist future in space — which ironically requires massive resources, driving them to further accelerate their rate of conquest and plunder. Despite all the theories about service and information and cloud economies transitioning us into post-capitalism, and despite the financialization of the economy disproportionately inflating immaterial founts of profit, we are still in the era determined by industrial production. Surplus value remains the base underlying every speculative investment.

Capitalists can’t escape their need for material inputs. Services require tools and tools require mined metals; clouds require servers and servers require fuel; and even wealthy capitalists require food. Glitches in the distribution of industrially produced goods quickly drag intangible assets into a tailspin, making it obvious how much the whole global economy depends upon their constant flow. And the waged labor of the working class, deployed to convert the living world into commodities, is still the origin of this flow.

Because the point of production persists at the core of capital accumulation, it remains the fulcrum of a viable approach to overcoming our situation and re-orienting toward something more positive. The struggle over surplus value is material, it is concrete; any approach that doesn’t take it into account is punching vapor, leaving capitalism free to continue on its destructive path.

Capitalism doesn’t just dominate the working class; it dominates everyone, populations diverse and highly stratified, with a broad variety of grievances. There are many ways to resist and weaken capitalism and its nightmare medley of effects and forms of domination. There are many ways to strengthen community and build networks of solidarity and care. Depending on our position within the social structure, our capabilities, inclinations, and circumstances, we each contribute how we can with what we have.

Workers, however, are in a strategically unique place: the fight against exploitation on the job is an immediate, face-to-face, direct conflict against capital. Also, workers are already hands-on running social production and distribution — if capitalists were no longer in control of it, it could be transformed and redirected. Social labor, guided by Indigenous land stewardship, could be equitably and democratically shared, along with its fruits, for the good of humanity and the Earth.

To get to a better world beyond capitalism, the myriad efforts of those who are not workers can be most effective when they align with, center, support, and/or are led by autonomous movements of the international working class struggling for emancipation from capitalism.

This does not mean that struggles outside the central capital-worker relationship are to be postponed, ignored, or sidelined. It means that intertwining them with the fight against capital can expand the class struggle beyond immediate economic concessions, while accelerating and strengthening our collective ability to overcome the social structure that harms us all.

When lies and bribes fail to pacify us, late-stage declining capitalism tries to immobilize us through fear, hate, isolation, and helplessness, and when that doesn’t work, confinement and mass murder. But let us not lose our bearings. Mutual care is how our species has evolved to survive, and it is how we re-assert our humanity. Cooperation is our human instinct.

Today the arc of history requires us to bring to bear all our powers as living beings with free will: empathy and courage, our natural intelligences and ways of knowing, creativity, decision-making capacity, hope (when hope’s hard to come by, willed optimism will do), connection, reciprocity, responsibility, faith, love. The urge to freedom is in our nature; beating it down requires unrelenting effort. It always flames back up. If we can organize to apply it strategically, together we can overcome this.