From The Philosophical Salon, May 30:
The acceleration of the “emergency paradigm” since 2020 has a simple yet widely disavowed purpose: to conceal socioeconomic collapse. In today’s metaverse, things are the opposite of what they seem. Inaugurating Davos 2022, IMF director Kristalina Georgieva blamed the pandemic and Putin for the “confluence of calamities” that the world economy is now facing. No surprise there. Davos itself is not a conspiracy hub, but the mouthpiece of the elites’ increasingly panicky reactions to unmanageable systemic contradictions. The Davos crowd are now hiding behind lies like a bunch of nervous children. While they continue to tell us that the coming slump is the effect of global adversities that took the world by surprise (from Covid-19 to Putin-22), the opposite is true: the tanking economy is the cause of these “misfortunes”. What we are sold as external threats is in fact the ideological projection of the internal limit and ongoing decomposition of capitalist modernity. In systemic terms, emergency addiction keeps the comatose body of capitalism artificially alive. Thus, the enemy is no longer constructed to legitimise the expansion of Empire. Instead, it serves to conceal the bankruptcy of our debt-soaked economy.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the deployment of capital’s full potential, also known as globalization, has gradually undermined capital’s own conditions of possibility. Eventually, the response to this implosive trajectory was the unleashing of global emergencies, which must be increasingly durable and supplemented by ever-larger injections of fear, chaos, and propaganda. We all remember how it all started at the turn of the millennium, with Al Qaeda, the “global war on terror”, and Colin Powell’s tiny vial of white powder. This released the Taliban, the Islamic State, Syria, the North Korean missile crisis, the trade war with China, Russiagate, and finally COVID-19 – in a crescendo of emotions. Now it appears that a new Cold War is in the making, perhaps the mother of all emergencies. The elementary reason for this course of events is that the closer the system gets to collapse, the more it requires exogenous crises to distract and manipulate populations, while deferring its downfall and laying the ground for its authoritarian changeover.
History tells us that when empires are about to fold, they ossify into oppressive regimes of crisis management. It is no coincidence that our age of serial emergencies began with the bursting of the “dot-com bubble” – the first global market crash. By the end of 2001 most tech-heavy companies had gone bust, and by October 2002 the Nasdaq index had fallen by 77%, exposing the structural frailty of a “new economy” powered by debt, creative finance, and the bleeding of the real economy. Since then, the simulation of growth via financial asset inflation has been shielded by the manufacturing of global threats, duly packaged and sold by corporate media. In truth, the rise of the “new economy” in the late 1990s was less about the internet than the creation of an immense apparatus for the simulation of prosperity, which was supposed to function without the mediation of mass labour. As such, it cleared the way for the neoliberal ideology of “jobless growth”– the illusion, enthusiastically embraced by the left, that a financial-bubble economy could ignite a new capitalist Eldorado. While this illusion has now blown up in our faces, nobody seems to have any desire to acknowledge it.
In fact, since Virus stepped in to raise the emergency bar even higher (before being paused and possibly recharged for future re-deployment) we are back to the same old financial shenanigans. While the West’s brand-new infection is called Russia – not least because of its proven historical record (USSR) – it is crucial to appreciate that the haste of enemy-making and fear-mongering is now desperate, based as it is on the aggressive denial of structural failure. Like Virus, the Ukrainian war screens us from the real horror of total social breakdown via debt & stock market crash. This perverse situation must be developed into its proper dialectical conclusion: the only way to put an end to the destructive succession of emergencies is to put an end to the self-destructive capitalist logic that feeds them.
After the folding of the last period of mass labour mobilisation – the post-war Fordist boom – capitalism entered its terminal crisis, where fictitious money is increasingly dissociated from labour-mediated value. Already in the 1980s, the irreversible erosion of capital’s labour-substance, triggered by the Third Industrial Revolution (microelectronics), gave rise to a transnational credit and speculative system that quickly penetrated all forms of money capital. This spectral monetary mass has continued to grow by self-fertilisation, to the extent that – as already pointed out, among others, by Robert Kurz –[i] only its artificial expansion enables the mobilisation of liquidity in the real world. Economic growth in the 1990s was fuelled by a “recycling mechanism”, whereby demand, purchasing power, and the production of goods and services were sustained by fake (speculative) money. The real economy was no longer grounded in labour incomes and revenues; rather, it was driven by price speculations on financial assets – heaps of fictitious money without value substance. This cycle of pseudo-accumulation, based on financial liquidity flowing back into production and consumption, is the defining phenomenon of our debt-driven, inflationary “emergency capitalism”. By necessity, ever-larger amounts of fictitious capital end up supporting production, so that a growing share of real accumulation participates in the speculative process.
The current grotesque overvaluation of all risk assets (stocks, bonds and property) suggests that the elites will continue to use their political playbook to buy more time and postpone the bursting of a debt bubble they began to inflate years before Covid and Putin became favourite scapegoats. The guardians of the capitalist Grail have planned for us a perennial state of fear in a desperate effort to delay the currency devaluation shock that has been brewing for decades. While they do so by increasingly cynical methods, they seem to be the only ones who at least realize that such a shock would bring the world system to its knees. This is why the financial aristocracy are willing to do just about anything in their power to secure the prolongation of our moribund economic model. In doing so, they demonstrate a greater understanding of our condition than those who, in theory, should be better placed to assess it: the so-called post-Marxist intelligentsia together with the postmodern left in all its inconsequential iterations. Regrettably, the “useful idiots” on the left have long betrayed their fundamental mandate to critique political economy, and are thus directly implicated in the unfolding catastrophe.
The technocrats at the helm of the Titanic have more than a hunch that the vessel is accelerating towards the iceberg. Having run out of policy bullets (as in the recent “austerity vs stimulus” debate), they have opted to promote a continuous programme of fear and propaganda in a bid to manage the unmanageable....
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Too facile in some of his arguments, superficial in others, but overall the author's description seems to fit the world we now inhabit.
Especially considering this was written before the recent unpleasantness in the markets.
