Marx Saw Capitalisms Doom With Unerring Accuracy

Marx identified the tendency of capitalism to try and cut out the actual production of commodities in Volume 2 of Capital. In that work he (with a supplementary note by Engels) stated the following on page 137 of that work.

‘It is precisely because the money form of value is its independent and palpable form of appearance that the circulation for <…<M which starts and finished with actual money expresses money making, the driving motive of capitalist production, most palpably. The production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money making. This explains why all nations characterised by the capitalist mode of production are periodically seized by fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish he money making without the mediation of the production process.’

What this tells us is that even in its earliest stages, in fact at its height in terms of British industrial capitalism, the tendency to look to cut out the production process and just simply move from money to money is already an integral feature of the system. Combine this with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and you have the explanation of why it is that the race for a division of the world between the European colonial powers kicks off in the 1880s. By that stage Britain was losing ground badly to both the USA and the unified Germany. In fact Britain was being out innovated by US industrial capitalism by the 1850s. Why is this? There have been a myriad of explanations of this given by bourgeois academics over the last 150 years but the biggest two reasons are the two factors Marx outlined. To actually compete with US and German industrial capitalism would have taken a giant investment in updating the means of production and an even greater one into research and development. The British ruling class of course went for another option which is seize as many areas of the world as possible in order that they could hyper exploit the labour and natural resources there. Hence why the scramble for Africa hits at the end of the 19th century when the British hit the imperialist stage along with the (industrially weaker) French with the Germans rapidly joining the struggle.

What does this mean for our modern imperialism in the form of the US and its block of vassals? In practical terms it means that the US imperialists followed the exact same path as their British predecessors in terms of responding to a crisis of profitability by deindustrialising and increasing the export of capital. I admit that I underestimated how far gone the US ruling class truly are and also how strong the tendency towards cutting out production, minimising actual investment, corrupt short term practices such as stock buy backs really is. The fact that they are unable, even when faced with losing the war in Ukraine and getting overpowered by China, to actually change course is surprising in some ways. These tendencies that were identified by Marx now absolutely dominate the ruling classes of all the US block nations. To reverse them would take a drastic, genuinely Bonapartist system being introduced if capitalism is to stand a chance of surviving. As things stand it looks like the dominant tendency within the US ruling class will remain that of “cashing out”, in other words squeezing out as much profit as they can while they can and not caring about much else. This is why all decisions taken in the US political system appear to be ridiculously short term because they are reflecting the underlying tendency of the ruling class to grab a quick profit, even by means of getting bailed out by the central bank, then cashing out.

To actually turn this around, to really get meaningful investment and updated means of production put in place the US would have to put in place a system that borrows from the Chinese. They’d have to put in place a system where the capitalist class is, effectively, removed from political power and is told “use it or lose” it in terms of its capital. This won’t work though as the only reason the Chinese are able to exercise political control over the domestic capitalist class is because they have already had a revolution that removed the power of the old, comprador bourgeoisie. The US is at the apex of the imperialist system and if they tried to do such a thing it’d cause all kinds of rebellion from the bourgeois which will happily fund destructive, reactionary political tendencies in order to hang onto its loot.

It is of course possible that a new balance of class forces will emerge inside the USA that will compel the more far sighted bourgeois to actually make some changes. At this stage though I cannot see this happening what seems to be favoured is just finding a way to keep the looting going for another few years. These tendencies are what will doom imperialism. Here then we must return to the “socialism or barbarism” question because the bourgeoisie will happily embrace barbarism to defend their parasitism. In order to overcome this rotting system the communists will have to develop an understanding of how truly far gone it is.