The Making of a System in Crisis: the ungovernability of 21st century capitalism
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in their foundational exposition of historical materialism and the dialectics of social transformation, a mode of production in crisis does not collapse under the weight of its own failings; it has to be dismantled and replaced through the self-conscious action of a rising revolutionary class.
The multiplying crises of capitalism have led to internal dysfunction and debilitation that render its operations increasingly out of sync with the needs and basic sustenance of the vast majority of humanity and the natural world. It is rapidly reaching the limits of its own capacity for self-reproduction, and cannot seem to persist without inducing even greater calamity and instability. As the capitalist system trudges on along this erratic trajectory, a cumulative transformation is well underway: where more will have to be sacrificed so that capitalism may live on.
Capitalism and crisis have become so increasingly enmeshed, they now seem to advance in a tango of conciliatory co-existence. The fevered system bears the limits of rational human economic engineering, and is being transcended by mechanistic self-perpetuation that can only survive through endless accumulation and at any cost. The periods of harmony are fewer, and the wounds of system failure are absorbed deeper into the social body; such that the resolution of crisis through its socialization have become the modus operandi of capitalism itself.
Manifestations of dysfunction are multiplying within the trajectories of capitalism as a global system, and devolving degenerative and cannibalistic features. The inversive by-products of a sickening system include: fast-breaking episodes of economic destabilization, the hardening of top-down class warfare and remonstration with furious bursts of class rebellion, ecosystem collapse and large-scale social displacement, intensification of competitive war alongside frenzied militarization, widening spectrums and scales of state and public violence, the rot and decomposition of decrepit political parties and systems, and cultural decay at all of the joints.
Nevertheless, a system can persist in a long and even perpetual arc of decline—so long as it has sustenance to feed upon, a state to prop it up, and the absence of the object of its negation. The current status of capitalism in motion has been predicated on forcing into existence new bastions for accumulation and profiteering through greater exploitation of labor, oppression of whole nations and peoples, and the invention of new means for transferring wealth from poor to rich with fewer restrictions and inhibition.
The scale, character, and balance of power within the class struggle between capital and the state on the one hand, and labor and the oppressed on the other, determines the how the capitalist economy actual operates at any space and time. The weaker the organization and resistance of workers and oppressed to the perpetrators and conditions of their exploitation, the more the owners and operators of capitalism can offload the failings of system onto them through the aegis of the state. The more necessary the state for capitalist accumulation, the more conspicuously it operates as an instrument of class rule and reproduction.
In the most recent epoch of class struggle between capital and labor—its only capable rival—capital has won, decisively. Money seeking to create new value in perpetuity, by amassing, evolving, dividing, and penetrating into every social pore, has become gargantuan in the height, breadth, and depth of exploitation. Its desire for consumption has become insatiable. Once an entity more subordinated to the laws of motion dictated by the state (and the commensurate state of class struggle), capital now rules more completely.
Into the third decade of the 21st century, the dystopian reality that reflects the highest level of capital’s imagination for accumulation without limits is available for all to see; a self-engorging process streaming in real time that is driving itself—and us along with it—over the cliff of sustainability. In other words, it is taking more than it gives, and is destroying more than it creates–and at an accelerating clip. It is breaking apart its own outdated mechanisms for mediation and mitigation. While capitalists created capitalism, the directionality of the system has become increasingly uncontainable, unsustainable, and ungovernable.
How capitalism got us here
Capitalism is the invention and elaboration of complexifying and multiplying methods of systematic theft, branching out through the mechanism of exploitation; meaning the systematically-enforced method of taking from others the value that they produce through their own labor. At succeeding levels, this can include the taking of what they already possess or what is naturally theirs. It is the process of accumulation of wealth, borne out through the normalized violence of coercive and regulated inequality and then its social reproduction through the aegis of the state.
From a historical perspective, the starting point of capitalist exploitation necessitated the taking of the land, the destruction of collectivism and culture, the privatization of socially-produced wealth, and the mechanization of production. This was further elaborated into the creation of governing structures to operationalize and enforce the resulting class structure through the normalization and standardization of violence and control.
In the age of financialization and imperialism, the first stab of capital has been replicated into a thousand extractive needles; each taking while anesthetizing. Like a learning machine, the extortive processes have established ever-increasing thresholds of want. This is driven by the self-perpetuating need for further accumulation, and amid the tensions of competition between rival centers of capital; each normalized into the social consciousness as standard “economics”. The deformative effects caused by the endless pursuit of individualized, accumulated wealth amount to the suffocation of whole populations and nations in order for a few to attain incomprehensible levels of cosmic excess.
The deformative effects caused by the endless pursuit of individualized, accumulated wealth amount to the suffocation of whole populations and nations in order for a few to attain incomprehensible levels of cosmic excess.
What religion morally laments as the distinct human failing of greed, is in fact the original destructive gene in the organism of capitalism coming into parasitic maturity, with inordinate individual gain at the expense of others as the highest ideal.
This form of sociopathy has always infected the roots of class-oppressive societies, and there have always been mass graves built along the causeways of class rule. Nevertheless, the progression of the capitalist system in its most recent and liberated form has achieved a quantum leap. Since its long inception, majorities of the global population have been oppressed under the conditions of really-existing capitalism and amid its spread and changing architectures of political economy: slavery and genocide, land enclosures and removal; state and social violence through gendered, racial, national, and other forms of oppressive deprivation; and the exponential articulation of these phenomena through colonialism and imperialism.
While the system of capitalism destroyed earlier and cruder forms of class-rule, and introduced new social relations that raised the material level of existence for some, it has since upscaled new architecture for even greater magnitudes of exploitation and inequality—and multiple, derivative forms of existential barbarism have been borne anew. It is now even demonstrating its unique capacity to transcend human reason, and therefore its capacity to be governable; and therefore our capacity to persist into the next epoch without substantial destruction as part of its survival. This irrationality is reflected in the meme cynically acknowledging that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Through its human stewards, this system has created the grotesque tableau of this presumed-to-be modern world. Upon closer examination, the system of capitalism has only created the illusion of prosperity by giving a few of us trinkets for distraction and a window to watch the beneficiaries of our exploitation frolicking in their palaces, all the while intensifying and fossilizing our bonds and yokes, while also burning down the countryside. The essence of 21st century capitalism can be brought into focus through the adage “in every crisis there is opportunity”–but now the crisis is a beast with insatiable hunger, that in distress, sees its own tail as food. Or like Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son, we are now the grist that feeds the capitalist mill.
Totalities of capitalism
The trajectory of capitalism can be understood as an interlocking matrix of national and international class hierarchies, that emanate from local class structures and are operationally enlarged and extended through state-based, politico-military imposition, and consolidated through ruling class convergence. In the period of the last three decades, capitalism has greatly accelerated its integrative synthesis into a global system, allowing for the circulation, implantation, and concentrations of international capital in all directions. The innumerable transactional functions of capital have permeated into all aspects of life and become normalized; wherever and however exploitation can occur and a favorable rate of return can be extracted. Pathways of capital’s progression towards totality can be mapped in the following ways:
- that operates through a national state to advance the sectional interests of capital over labor; penetrating first through force, then through law; and finally, culture (learned, applied, and transmitted social behaviors);
- that operates internationally through alliances of international and nationally denominated capital seeking to extract wealth, especially from the oppressed classes in subject nations; creating scales of ownership, domination, and wealth extraction that have asserted (or reasserted) economic modes of colonization and alongside re-emerging military forms as competition re-centers conflict
- and these alliances compete in multiple forms as rival, hierarchical blocs vying for influence, power, and control. This competition inevitably gravitates towards war for acquisition of land and people, primacy of position in geo-strategic regions or zones, and for exclusive control or domination of markets for capitalist exchange; a process originally explained in Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
The configuration of this set of global arrangements is currently distressed, fracturing, and undergoing readjustment. Underlying contradictions and fractures of US-centric pre-eminence within this system have emerged and are making themselves known. Forensic analysis of this phenomenon includes: economic crisis in the heart of the imperialist system increasing in frequency and depth; towering income imbalances created by on-going, state-administered wealth transfers from the poor to rich; eco-system degradation and despoilment; socio-economic displacement; and a neocolonial debt model pushing many nations onto the verge of crash.
These factors are producing occurrences of destabilization, culminating into what characterizes the current period as one of deepening crisis: economic volatility, social polarization, and political upheaval; invasion, war, military buildup and positioning-posturing, and inter-imperial conflict and brinkmanship; and other flaring symptoms with global and even existential implications.
While the crises of capitalism that manifest in the years to come will worsen the conditions of existence for most people, the mode of production will reorder and persist. Nevertheless, the economic process of disjoining and the attendant large-scale impoverishment and privation will generate operational and ideological weakness and episodic breakdowns. Amid these interstices of vulnerability and volatility, will open windows of circumstantial opportunity for radical and even revolutionary change.
Life support capitalism
Dysfunction is a result of both extrinsic and intrinsic features of capitalism, changing combinations of factors which often work in miserable concert. Inequitable distribution of social wealth creates patchworks of excess alongside privation within and across national boundaries. Since the pandemic, the lack of healthcare for many, the prioritization of production over the preservation of life, and the myriad disruption of capitalist relations of production and consumption have created gyrations of inefficiency, disjointedness, clogs, and shortages alongside glut.
Internal crises of accumulation are increasingly pushing transitions in both the composition of state actors and their roles in managing capitalism. This is apparent through the entrance of more power-capitalists directly into the spheres of governance and political administration, and the state itself becoming more aggressive and methodical in the way in which it has defunded its social functions, while simultaneously reallocating and engorging with bottomless resources its repressive apparatus, military, and the ruling class itself when the economy falters.
As the global economy begins its slide into the next recession, most working class people have not recovered from the last. Capitalism undergoes frequent crisis. Since 1945, the US economy has been in recession 14 percent of the time, with the last series of contractions occurring at longer and deeper intervals than the previous.
In the last cycles, the US state has taken a more active and aggressive role in propping up the capitalist system in crisis. According to a Federal Reserve Bank historical analysis,
The Fed’s support to specific financial institutions was not the only expansion of central bank credit in response to the crisis. The Fed also introduced a number of new lending programs that provided liquidity to support a range of financial institutions and markets. These included a credit facility for “primary dealers,” the broker-dealers that serve as counterparties for the Fed’s open market operations, as well as lending programs designed to provide liquidity to money market mutual funds and the commercial paper market. Also introduced, in cooperation with the US Department of the Treasury, was the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), which was designed to ease credit conditions for households and businesses by extending credit to US holders of high-quality asset-backed securities.
As the New York Times observed at the time, “[t]he Fed’s new policies are so large, and operate on so many fronts, that they are difficult even to catalog.” From 2008 to 2021, the federal government opened up the coffers of the national treasury and funneled an estimated $10 trillion dollars into the bank accounts of investment bankers, corporations, and other financial asset-holders through various disbursement schemes.
Giddily explained by one Wall Street economist as “quantitative easing to infinity and beyond,” the TALF has been an even more immense and opaque over time, and served to be a life support system for ailing capitalism. Since 2008, the treasury has engaged in “QE” which means it has purchased bonds and mortgage-backed securities in order to drive down interest rates in lending markets and increase “liquidity” (the amount of money available to be lendable) to theoretically encourage more borrowing as a stimulus to the economy. Between 2020 and 2022, the US state has pumped an estimated $9 trillion into the economy to prop up its financial system; which along with the EU, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan, the major capitalist central banking systems of the world have collectively injected $25 trillion of public money into their economies to prevent a meltdown of the capitalist system. This amounted to the largest direct intervention of the state into the economy since the era of “war capitalism” during WWII.
The shoring up of asset markets, or more accurately, the veiled transfers of immense public wealth from the state to the global capitalist classes, have done little to improve the functioning of the productive economy or benefit the vast majority of the world’s working classes and impoverished peoples. Instead, they have primarily resulted in the ballooning of personal fortunes and the inflation of asset prices for the rich, who already own the lion’s share of financial assets on a global scale. According to one assessment,
The Bank of England estimates that the first £375 billion of QE led to 1.5-2% growth in GDP. In other words, through QE it takes £375 billion of new money just to create £23-28 billion of extra spending in the real economy. It’s incredibly ineffective, because it relies on boosting the wealth of the already-wealthy and hoping that they increase their spending. In other words, it relies on a ‘trickle down’ theory of wealth.
The engorgement at the top has coincided with rising public debt, as states then socialize the costs of bailouts for the rich. Massive spikes in the deficit have corresponded to public wealth transfers to capitalists, tripling to $1.5 trillion from 2008-9 during the Great Recession and doubling again from 2019-2020 to over $3.2 trillion the pandemic recession. Publicly-financed debt has become the lifeline of a seemingly limitless financial arsenal that has primarily inflated the billionaire class at the expense of the rest of humanity.
Bailouts have not only propped up the teetering system, but also set up the conditions for the longest consecutive expansion of capitalism on record between 2009 and 2020. The character of this expansion revealed the superficiality of the bailout-driven boom, as growth rates remained anemic, the state has bypassed any meaningful relief or benefit for workers, and resulted in unprecedented gain and wealth concentration at the top.
Bailouts not only propped up the flagging system, but also set up the conditions for the longest expansion of capitalism on record between 2009 and 2020. The character of this expansion revealed the superficiality of the bailout-driven boom, as growth rates remained anemic, the state has bypassed any meaningful relief or benefit for workers, and resulted in unprecedented gain and wealth concentration at the top.
Now, after over a decade of this artificial boom, the walls appear to be caving in once again—exposing an overheating economy that is grinding to a halt. Amid a rapid surge in the inflation rate, disruption of fragile supply chains, and low growth rates, capitalist central bankers are abruptly shifting tack towards yet another round of crisis intervention. The symptoms of the viral infection are presenting in multiform: from the spectacular fall of crypto currencies, the steepest drop in stock prices since 1970, and sky-rocketing inflation with no end in sight.
Inflation means making workers pay for capital’s crisis
The US ruling class and its subservient state, along with its counterparts in the rest of the capitalist world, are gearing up to make the working classes shoulder the costs of stagnation, recession, and inflation for the next several years to come. This confluence of factors is reminiscent of the crisis of the 1970s, and the state’s heavy-handed approach to resolving the crisis by aggressively driving down the wages and living standards for workers—and ushering in the era of “neoliberal capitalist restructuring” on an international scale. According to a New York Times account of this process,
The last time the fed intervened against stagflation interest rates were raised so abruptly, which that happened when Paul A. Volcker was Fed chairman from 1979 until 1987, it took brutally high interest rates, soaring unemployment and two recessions to wring high inflation out of the national psyche.
The effects of the class-war approach to restoring profitability had far-reaching and long-term effects. On behalf of capital, the state initiated the war on unions and suppression of wages and working conditions, the defunding and dismantling of the welfare state, ending progressive tax policy, the privatization of public institutions and resources, the deregulation of industry, the forcible opening of economies internationally through capital export “free-trade regimes”, and many more features that ultimately produced the multiple morbidities and dystopian political landscape of 21st century global capitalism.
This “solution” produced the lost decade in Latin America in the 1980s, the Asian Crisis of the 1990s, generalized class war against unions, triggered deep social and economic crises across the globe, and accelerated a transition towards neoliberalism and neocolonialism as methods to restart accumulation amid prolonged stagnation and high inflation. This combination of factors is reemerging, although there appears to be less terrain to plunder, wages and working conditions are already low and suppressed, and state treasuries have already been pilfered.
At the precipice of retrogression, state overseers have no solution except to trudge on with even greater doses of the same illness-inducing prescription. There is no substantive debate about how to move forward, only who should be made to pay. It is not whether or not the state should prop up capital and generate a speculative boom, but for how long can the state play asset manager and profit underwriter for capital? And, how to deflect the suffering away from the top to the bottom of society through the socialization of capitalist economic failure?
The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects the annual deficit as a share of the economy to grow from 4.2% in 2022 to 6.1% in 2032. Interest costs are expected to increase in each fiscal year through 2032 and total $8.1 trillion over the next decade, according to the agency’s estimates. That represents the largest ever projection for total net interest costs over 10 years. A decade from now the agency projects federal debt to be equal to 109.6% of the economy’s size, which would also be the highest level ever, according to the CBO.
Capitalist economists are now asserting that the working class must be made to pay for the debacle resulting from the state’s rescue of capital—even as it has become apparent that the voracious accumulation of profit and concentration of wealth is a leading factor driving the current downturn and inflation. For instance, Lawrence Summers, a fixture inside the beltway of Democratic Party economics, has proclaimed that the state needs to impose policies that induce high unemployment for the next several years, with as many as 10 million people being laid off and pushed out of the labor force, in order to get inflation “back under control”.
This lines up with the Fed’s approach, under Republican and Trump appointee Jay Powell, which began the process of raising interest rates after over a decade of keeping them very low. The Fed claimed their upward rate adjustments are designed to curb rising inflation by focusing on suppressing demand for goods and services by lesser-income people in the US—and by extension—the reduction of employment, the lowering of wages, and the further defunding of welfare and state-funded benefits and programs dependent on tax generation.
The blatant class hypocrisy of this approach is overwhelming when considering that the current combination of recession, rising inflation, and under-consumption are all factors resulting from the last phase of “saving capitalism.” The new crisis is in large part a consequence of the last; as the state’s decades long lending spree to bolster the capitalist class’s grotesque consumption levels while forcing austerity down the throats of the working-class majority must now be paid for by the same.
Liberal critics of this approach rightfully point out that the working class also relies on borrowing, albeit less for motives of monstrous hording and speculative profiteering, and more for basic survival. Squeezing credit for working class people means fewer can purchase a house or car, and that the large number that already rely on borrowing and debt to cover exorbitant housing costs (a significant factor driving inflation), medical bills, rising food costs, and college tuition; will now be compelled to pay even more for less; and that raising interest rates at this conjuncture will lead to mass-layoffs, impoverishment, and further deterioration for millions of working class families. What’s more, it is already understood that these measures will have little direct effect on inflation itself.
Nevertheless, they have no fundamental critique of the intrinsic failings of capitalism, or of the state processes that uphold the interests of the capitalist class over the rest of the population; nor will prominent figures within the liberally-aligned or subordinated sections of the capitalist class substantively critique their leaders or colleagues by name or call for actions (beyond hand-wringing) that could potentially call into question a system they depend on or profit from; or more dangerously, that could potentially mobilize public sentiment and opposition to the system itself. This exposes the class warfare behind the state response to inflation, which is to attack workers instead of the capitalist class and the systemic factors driving the crisis: colossal inequality, manic financial speculation, oligarchic corporate concentration and control, crushing magnitudes of debt, and social exsanguination through persistent austerity and defunding.
Both of the so-called liberal and conservative wings of capitalist state management see no real alternative of resolving the current crisis and restoring “normalcy” as they see it other than through policy measures that intentionally create higher unemployment, suppress wages, reduce consumption, and increase poverty for the already emaciated working classes.
In sum, both of the so-called liberal and conservative wings of capitalist state management see no real alternative of resolving the current crisis and restoring “normalcy” as they see it other than through policy measures that intentionally create higher unemployment, suppress wages, reduce consumption, and increase poverty for the already emaciated working classes. The normalcy of capitalism is a system that perpetually generates social inequality through exploitation and the “anarchy of the market” to the point of recurring crisis—which then disproportionately and negatively impacts the working class and widens inequality and privation even further. We are now experiencing a third and perhaps novel stage of this process: where state intervention then demands even more pounds of flesh from a brutalized working class, so that capitalism can be restored and preserved, as is.
Boundless finance capitalism
Not only are the punishments for system failure meted out to the working classes, poor, and oppressed of the world; but crisis management has created opportunity for capital to recover, expand, grow, and flex in each cycle. A decade of crisis has been immensely profitable for the richest 1% of the capitalist class in the US and across the world. This is reflected in the astronomical rise in household wealth, financial assets (investments), and profit derived from ownership of assets, of which total values is now documented by the “wealth management industry”. The last few crisis years have represented a qualitative transition for the expansion of wealth enabled through opening of the treasury and the untethering of financial capital on a global scale. Aggregate global wealth rose by 28.7 trillion to reach $418.3 trillion at the end of 2021, enabled by increased financialization and state policy facilitating upward wealth transfer.
By 2021, total US household wealth under financial management of the top 1% was worth about $38 trillion in 2021, and total worldwide wealth of the 1% under management amounted to $137 trillion—and expected to reach $230tn by 2030. Assets under management (international investments) of North American firms reached $58 trillion in 2020, and is expected to increase 26.4 percent to $73.3 trillion by 2025. The value of total global financial assets under management reached $111.2 trillion in 2020, and expected to rise to $145.4 trillion by 2025. The net worth of the richest financial corporations and investors has tripled in the last two decades, but the increase mainly reflects valuation gains in financial assets (77 percent of net worth growth; especially in real estate) and not in new investment in the productive economy, i.e., the means of production. Within the U.S. alone, an estimated $36 trillion of wealth is expected to be transferred from the superrich to their heirs between 2007 to 2061, in what will be the greatest generational wealth transfer in world history.
As part of this process, traditional, regulated, and publicly-traded wealth management firms like commercial banks are being eclipsed by privately held funds as the preferred vehicles for accumulation given their autonomous character.
The unprecedented state infusion of money into money markets and the availability of cheap credit has especially accelerated the expansion of these dark, unregulated outgrowths of the capitalist economy. The enormous growth of finance capital and its political instrumentalization of the state have allowed for the creation of vehicles for vast accumulation to develop, thrive, and exist; engines of accumulation that by design reside largely outside of the jurisdiction of state regulation and control.
This new frontier for wealth accumulation have expanded into a range of “private funds” which operate in in parallel with, and are eclipsing, the regulated “public funds” governed by the Investment Company Act of 1940—but are not subjected to its same legal requirements. Creation of private equity, venture capital, hedge, and real estate funds are limited to the richest private individuals and companies who can pass “wealth tests”, creating an exclusive club through which the ultra-affluent can multiply their fortunes. By 2021, the net assets managed by over 37,000 private funds in the US rose to $18 trillion in gross assets and almost $12 trillion in net assets; more than doubling since 2013.
Private capital markets, for instance, are where unregulated firms that pool capital and lend directly into markets comprised of several “asset classes”, such as private equity, venture capital, private debt, real estate, infrastructure, and natural resources. Through this process, they are able to circumscribe oversight and bypass the reporting requirements (such as earnings, risks, manager pay, etc.) of their publicly-listed counterparts.
In the period of 2020-2021, the number of new companies financed through private funds and capitalized at more than $1 billion (referred to as “unicorns”), nearly doubled from 513 to 959. These funds exist in a gray area that are part of a growing, externalizing extension of a shadow economy that allows for capitalists to conceal, offshore, evade taxation, or otherwise not have to reveal how and where their capital moves and operates.
Another type of private fund is called hedge funds. The top 20 hedge funds raked in a massive $65.4bn in 2021, (atop $63.5bn the previous year). This exorbitant haul represents the biggest annual gain since data started being collected on these funds in 2010.
Meanwhile, profits for companies in the S&P 500 spiked by 70 percent from 2020 and 33 percent higher than in 2019, which was already increasing from previous years. Profit margins, which measure how much money a business makes on each dollar of sales, rose well above the pre-pandemic average. On the whole, companies made an estimated $200 billion in additional operating profits last year because of that increase in margins. The stock market boom also reflected the gush of wealth transfer. Flush with easy cash, the rich have plowed huge quantities back into the stock market. As the Wall Street Journal giddily reported in late 2021,
Even with the recent turbulence from the Omicron coronavirus variant, the S&P 500 is headed toward a 27% advance for 2021 and has hit 70 highs. It is the third straight year of double-digit gains for the broad index, and the second in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite have gained 19% and 22%, respectively, this year, helping send the major indexes to their best three-year performance since 1999.
As a symptom of the sickness of capitalist normalcy, with the help of the state and the growing autonomy of finance capital, crises make capitalists richer and wealth concentrates on a previously unimaginable scale, while the rest of society experiences stagnation and decline.
Wealth concentration on a world-historical scale
Globalization refers to the mobility and concentration of capital across borders and competition between national and internationally-aligned sections of capital for control of markets: capital, labor, and commodities markets (i.e., imperialism). The bailout bonanza has boosted the movement of capital internationally, and has helped drive wealth concentration and inequality on world historic scale. This process has also coursed through and widened the wirework of financialization, referring to the multiplanar integration, growth, and effective control of banking, investment, and other forms of financial exchange over the real economy.
In this crisis period, we have seen finance capital gain in scope, size, and influence through buy-outs and mergers, capital concentration, expanding investment opportunities (capital export and profit repatriation or reinvestment) primarily created through 354 enforced free trade agreements, which through the US-centric World Trade Organization and quasi-statal banking and investing arms like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and others; have established the rule of international capital within and across all regions of the world. For instance, international capital has increased its holdings at the fastest rate in areas that have been subjected to “free-trade” and debt-restructuring, especially in Latin America and in the Asia-Pacific Rim countries.
Globalization and financialization have induced three decades of reordering global capital markets, leading to direct buyouts and concentrated ownership; the creating of subsidiary firms; transnational investment and profit flows; and the creation of unprecedented national and international concentrations of wealth alongside stagnation, increasing inequality, displacement, privation, and impoverishment. In 2021, FDI flows increased 88% to $1.85 trillion; with FDI inflows increasing 75% since 2020, and FDI inflows to non-OECD G20 economies scaling up 47% above pre-pandemic levels. FDI outflows to non-OECD G20 economies were 20% above pre-pandemic levels. FDI outflows from the OECD area accounted for 70% of total outflows.
Multinational investment banks, multinational corporations, other types of investment and capital export vehicles, have bought up large shares of the economy, especially within and across formerly-colonized countries. The US-Mexico capitalist nexus exemplifies this process over the last three decades. Cumulative saturation and transitions of control and ownership across multiple sectors of the economy have rendered Mexico into a labor and resource colony for transnational capital.
This state-driven wealth transfers have stimulated a feeding frenzy of buyouts and consolidation. In 2021, global mergers and acquisitions within and across borders hit their highest levels since records began more than four decades ago, reaching $5.8tn, a 64 per cent rise from 2020 and the fastest pace of growth since the mid-1990s. Completed cross-border merger and acquisition deals (M & As) exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 50% in advanced economies and by 25% in emerging and developing economies. The rate of profit on cross-border investments increased 25%. The number of M & As increased and surpassed pre-pandemic levels in the form of buyouts, dominated by billionaire class buying up existing capacity.
There was a 76% increase in completed deal values in advanced economies, especially in the form of private equity firms conducting “leveraged buyouts.” This legal framework allows for agglomerations of capital (acting through a “company manager”) to take over existing publicly-traded firms through “leveraged buyouts”, with the intention of breaking operations down into smaller components, laying off workers, and increasing productivity to maximize profitability.
In the US, for instance, this method of acquisition has allowed capitalists to purchase large shares of the housing, health care, and education markets. By 2020, US-based private equity groups managed $7.3 trillion in assets, making the sector of finance capital the fourth largest GDP in the world—after the US, China, and the four largest tech firms. In 2020, more than 8,000 of these buyouts were conducted, the most since records began in 1980. The motor of this process was the state. As the Financial Times observed,
But enormous government stimulus packages and sweeping central bank measures meant the pandemic did not derail dealmaking. The US Federal Reserve’s decisions to cut interest rates to zero and buy investment-grade bonds and exchange traded funds that own riskier junk debt, gave companies a lifeline and ensured private equity’s continued access to cheap debt for new deals. Broader economic measures meant firms could access bailout loans and furlough funds for portfolio companies. “Ultimately the lifeblood of private equity is cheap debt” [.]
While current modelling suggests that over 20 million people have died since 2020 from Covid-19, the wealth of billionaires has soared, in large part due to the incredible sums of money that governments have injected into the global economy, and how they have used that money to buy up larger shares of the global economy itself.
There are now 2,668 billionaires in the world, 573 more than in 2020 when the pandemic began. These billionaires are collectively worth $12.7 trillion – a real-terms increase of $3.78 trillion (42%). The richest 10 men have greater wealth than the poorest 40% of humanity combined, while a new billionaire has been minted on average every 30 hours since the pandemic began. In 2021, the number of new millionaires increased worldwide by 1.7 million, while total wealth income increased by $6.4 trillion more than the previous year.
As a monument to the outlandish scale of accumulation and concentration of wealth in this period, the five tech giants APPLE, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Tesla have each crossed the trillion-dollar threshold, collectively valued at $10.2 Trillion dollars in 2022. This scale of wealth combined makes them the third largest economy in the world by GDP, behind only the US and China.
Meanwhile, the incomes of the majority of the population have fallen between 2020 and 2021. The poorest 40% saw the steepest decline in income, which on average was 6.7% lower than pre-pandemic levels. According to UN statistics, the total population of the world living in extreme poverty (living in subsistence poverty on less than $2 a day) was 689 million before the pandemic and recession, adding an additional half billion more people by late 2021 when factoring in the all of the variables associated with pandemic, recession, and government policy that has sacrificed the well-being of their people to prop up the international capitalist class. Oxfam estimates that 263 million more people will be pushed into the ranks of those living in extreme poverty in 2022, climbing to an estimated 1.3 billion people. Critical demographers believe this is already an undercount, and calculate the real number to be much higher. Furthermore, poverty has been rising in poor and rich countries alike. Between 70 and 85% of the population in poor, colonized, and formerly-colonized nations live in poverty (less than $10 a day); while about six out of ten people in the most developed countries live in poverty relative to their costs of living (less than $30 per day).
This decline can also be observed within the discussion of supply chain production, which are the transnational nodes of production and distribution established along the paths of moving and implanting capital chasing cheaper and more exploitable labor across national borders (i.e., the global working class). Along these chains, 40.3 million people were in conditions of forced labor and 218 million children between 5 and 17 employed for little or subsistence wages. Approximately 8 out of 10 people in the world, including workers, and disproportionately women, oppressed nationalities and populations, elders, children, people with disabilities, and others; are already existing in precarity, hardship, and destitution—as we plunge headlong into the next crash.
These intrinsic features of the capitalist system—to generally increase inequality based on exploitation—have been greatly accelerated by global recession of 2008, 2020, and what is now the third global recession that we are entering. A significant facet of this acceleration has produced debt crises within and across nations that are rapidly weakening at the most vulnerable links of the system. International capital has become more aggressive and parasitic; dragging whole populations and countries into perpetual debt and structured under-development.
Global debt parasitism and looming collapse
Not only did the state turn over national treasuries to the 1% on an international scale, it also wiped away hundreds of billions in existing debt for the richest capitalist speculators. Debt erasure has not been the case for the vast majority of debt-holders and nations—who have only seen their debt loads inflate to increasingly unsustainable levels.
By 2021, global debt rose to an unprecedented $303 trillion as a result of recession and pandemic, and in 2022 has added an additional $71 trillion (so far). This has further precarity and deepened economic under-development through wealth transfer in the form of debt servicing. Current international debt levels amount to over 256% of global GDP, both the highest amount and rate of debt in history.
Since the recession of 2020, more than one hundred countries have requested emergency financing from the IMF—the pooled investment fund controlled by rich nations and used primarily against poorer countries—has provided more than $100 billion in financial assistance to more than eighty countries since the pandemic; now with looming recession and economic disruption, it has raised its lending capacity to $1 trillion, the highest rate of allocation in its history. This is lending that comes with “structural adjustment” requirements that require cuts in social budgets and high interest rates to trap and lock impoverished populations and nations into decades more of burdensome debt.
Debt servicing for all the world’s poorest countries is estimated at $43 billion in 2022 so far, equivalent to nearly half their food imports and total public spending on health care combined. In 2021, outstanding debt obligations in these poorest countries represented 171% of all spending on healthcare, education and social protection combined for low-income countries.
By 2022, the number of countries in “debt distress” has doubled to include over 60% of the total countries in the world. Currently, 13% of nations cannot pay their debts, 43% are in “high debt distress”, and 33% in “moderate debt distress”. This is creating “debt bubbles” that will likely continue to pop or deflate over the next year. Like the crisis of 2008, the fantastic disbursement of “cheap money” to capitalists has led many of them to reinvest or re-lend in search of quick money into the debt-owning bonanza.
But this method of accumulation is already bottoming out. By early, 2022 “Emerging Market” bond payments to investors suffered a 15% drop, the largest drop of in decades due to pandemic, rising inflation, rising interest rates, slowing global growth and the geopolitical and financial disruption. In other words, poor countries are struggling to pay their basic interest payments on loans, much less the principal.
Sri Lanka, for instance, has already defaulted and the ensuing crisis is throwing much of the population into extreme precarity, including hunger and lack of basic services on a wide scale—culminating in a mass uprising, storming of the presidential palace and the direct overthrow of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. At least fifteen other countries are potentially facing a similar path towards economic meltdown. As IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva observed: “Countries with high debt levels and limited policy space will face additional strains. Look no further than Sri Lanka as a warning sign.”
This coupled with the fact that the G20 Central banks, following the lead of the richest nations, are rapidly raising interest rates which will push even more poorer countries to the precipice of default. Between April and July of 2022, 55 central banks made 79 significant rate increases, “marking the largest number of large rate moves at any time since the turn of the millennium and eclipsing the most recent global monetary tightening cycle in the run-up to the global financial crisis.” Large swathes of the populations in these countries will bear the brunt of coming privations. Even in the US, total debt as a percentage of gross domestic product has doubled since the beginning of the last recession in 2007. Debt held by the public now equals roughly 100% of GDP. This occurs as Inflation rates have reached their highest level in over 40 years—reaching 9.1% in July 2022—and as the economy enters into the next recession.
In the US, consumption rates for the bottom half of the population have remained low and sustained largely by debt. Total consumer debt balances increased 5.4% from 2020 to 2021 to $15.31 trillion, a $772 billion increase—and double the 2.7% increase from 2019 through 2020. The rise in rates will reduce credit for those who depend on it for survival, while increasing the costs associated with carrying the same debt.
The NY FED Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the first quarter of 2022 shows a solid increase in total household debt of $266 billion, to $15.84 trillion. Balances now stand $1.7 trillion higher than at the end of 2019. Mortgage and auto loan balances rose by $250 billion and $11 billion, respectively. In the first quarter of 2022, credit card balances are $71 billion higher than in 2021. Thirty-five percent of US adults, or over 90 million people (a large chunk of the working class), do not have the money to cover an unexpected $400 expense without going into debt. Currently, an estimated twelve million people, disproportionately impoverished workers, workers of color, and renters; use predatory payday loans to make ends meet. Seven of 10 borrowers use the loans for basic expenses such as rent and utilities; and 58 percent of borrowers use it each month. In one poll, over 80% of the population—the bulk of the working class, say the economy is “not good” or “poor” for them. In another poll, only 5% of working-age voters described their economic situation as “good,” while only 1% of respondents described their economic conditions as “excellent”; which in actuality, lines up percentage-wise with those benefitting from the policies of crisis capitalism.
The stagnation or collapse of living conditions for the majority of the world’s population since 2020, especially among the dislocated middle classes, and the working classes and oppressed nationalities and populations of the world, is also reflected in variations and trajectories of deepening political crisis and the decomposition of traditional bourgeois political systems, institutions, and arrangements.
Geopolitical decomposition
The period of the last three decades has demonstrated how the course of capitalist crises, state intervention and the emergence of life support capitalism, and the discordance that has emerged have destabilized and undermined holdover political arrangements and conventional wisdoms from the previous epoch. The ruptures within the economic foundation of the global system are eroding and decomposing political parties and misbalancing international and inter-imperial understructures. We are witnessing the effectuated strains, fractures, and widening degrees of separation in the geopolitical economy.
The ruptures within the economic foundation of the global system are eroding and decomposing political parties and misbalancing international and inter-imperial understructures. We are witnessing the effectuated strains, fractures, and widening degrees of separation in the geopolitical economy.
This can be studied in four key areas: the abrupt collapse or existential splits within established bourgeois political parties and the fast rise of new formations; the rise of class struggle, popular rebellions, and revolutionary uprisings; and the breakdown and attempted reorganization of imperialist power arrangements such as the invasion and war in Ukraine. As a symptom of the emerging inter-imperialist rivalry, capitalist nation-states are gearing up for larger war and the re-division of colonies, former colonies, and spheres of control as part of the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar imperialist world. For instance, from 1999 to 2021 military spending has increased 66% for the US, 292% for Russia, and 592% for China. Total military spending surpassed $2 trillion in 2021—the largest amount in history.
Deep, prolonged, underlying crisis has been building underneath the synthetic boom for the global 1%. The volatility has produced rippling detonation of social unrest since the “Great Recession,” as protest, rebellion, and revolt are ripping through the concentric ligaments of the global capitalist system. The finance press is already sounding the alarms of the coming waves of heightened class struggle on a national scale, with the Economist openly concluding that insurrection is the “coming order of the day.”
Since 2008, more than half of the world’s countries have experienced “deteriorating social conditions,” according to the 2022 Global Peace Index. The measure documenting the frequency of “violent demonstrations” shows the largest gain over the fourteen-year period, with an increase of nearly 50 per cent affecting 126 countries.
Class polarization and its manifestations have already rendered longstanding bourgeois ruling arrangements unsustainable. In more tenuous electoral systems, especially where neoliberal and neo-colonial capitalism has reasserted rapacious plunder of state systems, we are witnessing the destabilization or outright collapse of the traditional bourgeois parties and reshuffling and regroupment into new and ephemeral formations. Over the last decade especially, established bourgeois parties have collapsed, split, or become marginal or widely discredited in countries or regions like India, Venezuela, Pakistan, Thailand, Philippines, Mexico, Colombia, Greece, Peru, Ecuador, Italy, Brazil, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, and many more; and across Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and the Caribbean.
This is also reflected in electoral trends, where abstentionism has led to significant declines in voter turnout across the globe over the last three decades. Lastly, there has also been a rise of authoritarian regimes on a global scale. A 2022 study that measures the political norms and governing institutions around the world that purportedly support basic civil rights and liberties has registered that democratic rights have been in decline globally for the last 16 consecutive years, with conditions in 60 countries (including the US) deteriorating in just the last year alone; and with only 20 percent of the world’s population living in countries that guarantee democratic participation.
Across the globe we are witnessing the unfolding decomposition: abandonment of bourgeois political parties, the perceived bankruptcy and diminishing trust in ruling class elections and declining confidence in their governing structures and institutions, the collapsing political center and long drift to the right of the global bourgeoisie and their ruling methods; and the re-excavation of the archaeologies of the far-right and far-left by growing segments of the population. In a phase of destabilization, when previously entrenched and stable systems shift to life support, politics are expressing themselves electorally in volatile shifts, swings, and transformations; the ideological glue that has underpinned ruling class hegemony is melting and political reorientation is in flux.
Crises in the economy have profound political repercussions. As the convergence of crises in the system set into motion the next great phase of unrest and political disruption, capitalist governments are incapable or unwilling to devote the same level of energy or even a fraction of the resources they gave the rich towards bolstering or propping up the living standards for the vast majority of the world’s working class populations. In practice, they can only save capitalism by further socializing the costs of capitalist failure, by stubbornly ratcheting up more austerity and extractive forms of wealth transfer, and by destroying more of the social economy and infrastructure through defunding.
The capitalist state’s engineering experiment on an international scale has reached its conclusion, with consequences that have made the system even more unstable, untenable, and the future more uncertain. The propping up of fragile and ailing markets has become unsustainable; and the built-up resistant tensions are now pushing back more quickly and with great force. The foundation of this model of accumulation has run its course, and now offers only deeper and prolonged crisis. If we are to not go down with the hole-ridden ship, then we have to heed Marx and Engels' call, and figure out how to give the pestilent body of capitalism the existential shove into the grave that it needs and deserves.
Justin Akers Chacón is an educator, activist, and writer in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. His recent works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis, Haymarket Books, 2nd edition, 2018), and Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018), and The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border (Haymarket Books: 2021).
