OIKUMENE: The Capitalist Chimaera and the Han Chinese Dragon
There are two implicit assumptions that all economic theory, bourgeois or Marxist, shares – both of them quite erroneous and utterly pernicious. The first is that economic activity involves only “social relations”, that is to say, only socio-logical relations that are relative to human individuals and do not therefore affect the ultimate metabolism of human interaction with our ecosphere. The second is that capitalist social relations of production are “natural” and therefore (a) capable of “scientific” precision and certainty, and (b) entirely immune to human efforts to obstruct their “necessary” and “inevitable” progress to universal application.
Even the greatest critic of bourgeois political economy, Karl Marx, was not immune to these erroneous and pernicious assumptions: nowhere in his writings is there any mention of the catastrophic effects of capitalist development on the ecosphere; and, by contrast, everywhere Marx envisages the development of capitalism from the individual firm to what he called “the world market” as absolutely inevitable and unstoppable or irresistible.
One of the most insistent aims of our theoretical work has been to establish the folly of these twin assumptions: “twin” because, though quite distinct, these assumptions share the common matrix of the purely socio-logical yet bio-logical, hence entirely “logical” character of human being. Whether capitalism or communism (for Marx) is identified as the ultimate stage of human social development, in both cases the process or “progress” that leads to this ultimate stage is all implicit in the very nature of human being – and is, accordingly, entirely historically necessary. Even the Marxian critique of capitalism envisages the bourgeoisie as the historical carrier (Traeger) of a Kapital-Geist – capitalism as the teleological extrinsication of the Idea leading to the apotheosis of the Absolute Spirit, the Parousia of the Hellenistic Paideia, the revelation of the Second Coming in Christian soteriology.
More than simply a “teleology”, this rationalist exegesis of the socially antagonistic and ecologically catastrophic denouement of capitalist industry constitutes in fact an absurd optimistic leap of faith that serves merely to obfuscate and conceal its self-fulfilling prophecy of human annihilation, leading us to a fast-approaching apocalyptic precipice from which humanity will never recover and that will almost certainly lead to the early demise of human existence. – Because, as is vastly evident by now to all but the blindest and stupidest members of our species, far from leading to a futuristic Utopia, capitalism is making our lonely blue planet entirely uninhabitable. In short, capitalism’s chimeric delusion of achieving an oikumene – a harmonious and sustainable civilisation – once its mythical “market mechanism” expanded to all corners of the globe through free trade is unfolding into the manifest destiny that it always gestated - a nightmarish kakotopia of planetary desolation, a funereal pyre of cosmic conflagration. The real destiny of the capitalist oikonomia (economics) is not the attainment of the oikumene (note the telling common root of the two words in oikos, Greek for “village” or “home”), but rather the nihilistic curse of a scorched earth.
What Marx seems to have forgotten is something of which Max Weber – the only worthy, real bourgeois answer to the bearded genius from Trier – was supremely aware (cf. his lecture on “Sozialismus”) – and that is that capitalism does not univocally concentrate the labour force and turn it into a cohesive working class. Instead, capitalist industry, wage labour, serves also to divide workers and proletarians, first, by favouring overpopulation, and therefore by creating a “reserve army of the unemployed”; and second by creating political antagonism not just between bourgeoisie and capital, but also and above all between workers from different social, cultural and racial backgrounds – especially between those workers in the advanced industrial capitalist nation-states and those in the less advanced ones under the tyrannical control of ruthless totalitarian dictatorships.
The Red Dragon of the Chinese Communist Party from Mao Zhe Dung to Xi Jin Ping is the most abominable, execrable, pernicious and catastrophic exemplar of this process of the bourgeois “transmission mechanism” of global capitalist domination. Unlike what seemingly diametrically opposed theoreticians of capitalist economic development such as Karl Marx and Benjamin Constant believed, capitalist globalisation – “the world market” – leads neither to democracy nor to world peace (Constant); least of all does it lead to the unity of proletarians worldwide (Marx). It is true, as we have established in our Blog, that capitalist industry relies on the formal freedom of the labour force by means of money wages that workers are “free” to spend buying goods produced by workers under the command of capitalist employers other than their own. But this does not amount to democracy! Far from being pleonastic – as in the absurd phrase “liberal democracy” -, liberalism and democracy are utterly incompatible!
Whilst the capitalist bourgeoisie seeks to preserve its relative “freedom” to exploit workers by mustering their powerful antagonistic push within the dynamic of its own expanded reproduction and accumulation, and so must therefore preserve the “formal freedom” of workers, it is also very keen to undermine and subvert the potential political unification of working-class solidarity by (as we pointed out just above) facilitating the expansion of a reserve army of the unemployed through overpopulation; and, worse still, by moving part of its industry to geographical nation-states where this reserve army is under the oppressive domination of ferociously murderous dictatorships such as the Chinese one headed by that master monster Xi Jin Ping. The capitalist bourgeoisie exports the otherwise explosive antagonism of its own working class to populations under the tyrannical control of truculent dictatorships such as the Chinese. But by so doing the Western capitalist bourgeoisie ends up creating powerful dictatorial regimes whose political rationale and survival are ultimately antithetical to the logic and dynamic of capitalist industry itself!
But wait! There is more. Those friends who may be nonplussed by our own ferocious assault on the murderous, barbaric hordes of Han Chinese who have been aided and abetted and armed by the craven traitors of our own Western bourgeoisie – those friends may be wondering why we make no distinction between the murderous leadership of the Chinese Dictatorship and its own people, the Han Chinese race! Wherever you look, you will find hordes of fools selling you the tall tale of how we should distinguish between dictators and the people over which they dictate. Do not be fooled! With very few exceptions, throughout history dictatorships succeed on the back of overwhelming popular support! Why? Simple. Because dictatorships are universally founded on imperialist expansion, on rewarding their populace on the back of pillage, theft and rapacity. And no dictatorship in history has displayed and effected more genocidal ferocity than the Han Chinese Dictatorship and its people! – Which is why we must spare no effort, no molecule of hatred against this most despicable mass of maggots and welter of worms!
Make this your New Year’s Resolution against all the puny beautiful souls who preach “love and peace”: We shall have no peace and shall spare no love until we have hunted down and reduced to slavery the Han Chinese race of rodents, snakes and maggots!
There are two implicit assumptions that all economic theory, bourgeois or Marxist, shares – both of them quite erroneous and utterly pernicious. The first is that economic activity involves only “social relations”, that is to say, only socio-logical relations that are relative to human individuals and do not therefore affect the ultimate metabolism of human interaction with our ecosphere. The second is that capitalist social relations of production are “natural” and therefore (a) capable of “scientific” precision and certainty, and (b) entirely immune to human efforts to obstruct their “necessary” and “inevitable” progress to universal application.
Even the greatest critic of bourgeois political economy, Karl Marx, was not immune to these erroneous and pernicious assumptions: nowhere in his writings is there any mention of the catastrophic effects of capitalist development on the ecosphere; and, by contrast, everywhere Marx envisages the development of capitalism from the individual firm to what he called “the world market” as absolutely inevitable and unstoppable or irresistible.
One of the most insistent aims of our theoretical work has been to establish the folly of these twin assumptions: “twin” because, though quite distinct, these assumptions share the common matrix of the purely socio-logical yet bio-logical, hence entirely “logical” character of human being. Whether capitalism or communism (for Marx) is identified as the ultimate stage of human social development, in both cases the process or “progress” that leads to this ultimate stage is all implicit in the very nature of human being – and is, accordingly, entirely historically necessary. Even the Marxian critique of capitalism envisages the bourgeoisie as the historical carrier (Traeger) of a Kapital-Geist – capitalism as the teleological extrinsication of the Idea leading to the apotheosis of the Absolute Spirit, the Parousia of the Hellenistic Paideia, the revelation of the Second Coming in Christian soteriology.
More than simply a “teleology”, this rationalist exegesis of the socially antagonistic and ecologically catastrophic denouement of capitalist industry constitutes in fact an absurd optimistic leap of faith that serves merely to obfuscate and conceal its self-fulfilling prophecy of human annihilation, leading us to a fast-approaching apocalyptic precipice from which humanity will never recover and that will almost certainly lead to the early demise of human existence. – Because, as is vastly evident by now to all but the blindest and stupidest members of our species, far from leading to a futuristic Utopia, capitalism is making our lonely blue planet entirely uninhabitable. In short, capitalism’s chimeric delusion of achieving an oikumene – a harmonious and sustainable civilisation – once its mythical “market mechanism” expanded to all corners of the globe through free trade is unfolding into the manifest destiny that it always gestated - a nightmarish kakotopia of planetary desolation, a funereal pyre of cosmic conflagration. The real destiny of the capitalist oikonomia (economics) is not the attainment of the oikumene (note the telling common root of the two words in oikos, Greek for “village” or “home”), but rather the nihilistic curse of a scorched earth.
What Marx seems to have forgotten is something of which Max Weber – the only worthy, real bourgeois answer to the bearded genius from Trier – was supremely aware (cf. his lecture on “Sozialismus”) – and that is that capitalism does not univocally concentrate the labour force and turn it into a cohesive working class. Instead, capitalist industry, wage labour, serves also to divide workers and proletarians, first, by favouring overpopulation, and therefore by creating a “reserve army of the unemployed”; and second by creating political antagonism not just between bourgeoisie and capital, but also and above all between workers from different social, cultural and racial backgrounds – especially between those workers in the advanced industrial capitalist nation-states and those in the less advanced ones under the tyrannical control of ruthless totalitarian dictatorships.
The Red Dragon of the Chinese Communist Party from Mao Zhe Dung to Xi Jin Ping is the most abominable, execrable, pernicious and catastrophic exemplar of this process of the bourgeois “transmission mechanism” of global capitalist domination. Unlike what seemingly diametrically opposed theoreticians of capitalist economic development such as Karl Marx and Benjamin Constant believed, capitalist globalisation – “the world market” – leads neither to democracy nor to world peace (Constant); least of all does it lead to the unity of proletarians worldwide (Marx). It is true, as we have established in our Blog, that capitalist industry relies on the formal freedom of the labour force by means of money wages that workers are “free” to spend buying goods produced by workers under the command of capitalist employers other than their own. But this does not amount to democracy! Far from being pleonastic – as in the absurd phrase “liberal democracy” -, liberalism and democracy are utterly incompatible!
Whilst the capitalist bourgeoisie seeks to preserve its relative “freedom” to exploit workers by mustering their powerful antagonistic push within the dynamic of its own expanded reproduction and accumulation, and so must therefore preserve the “formal freedom” of workers, it is also very keen to undermine and subvert the potential political unification of working-class solidarity by (as we pointed out just above) facilitating the expansion of a reserve army of the unemployed through overpopulation; and, worse still, by moving part of its industry to geographical nation-states where this reserve army is under the oppressive domination of ferociously murderous dictatorships such as the Chinese one headed by that master monster Xi Jin Ping. The capitalist bourgeoisie exports the otherwise explosive antagonism of its own working class to populations under the tyrannical control of truculent dictatorships such as the Chinese. But by so doing the Western capitalist bourgeoisie ends up creating powerful dictatorial regimes whose political rationale and survival are ultimately antithetical to the logic and dynamic of capitalist industry itself!
But wait! There is more. Those friends who may be nonplussed by our own ferocious assault on the murderous, barbaric hordes of Han Chinese who have been aided and abetted and armed by the craven traitors of our own Western bourgeoisie – those friends may be wondering why we make no distinction between the murderous leadership of the Chinese Dictatorship and its own people, the Han Chinese race! Wherever you look, you will find hordes of fools selling you the tall tale of how we should distinguish between dictators and the people over which they dictate. Do not be fooled! With very few exceptions, throughout history dictatorships succeed on the back of overwhelming popular support! Why? Simple. Because dictatorships are universally founded on imperialist expansion, on rewarding their populace on the back of pillage, theft and rapacity. And no dictatorship in history has displayed and effected more genocidal ferocity than the Han Chinese Dictatorship and its people! – Which is why we must spare no effort, no molecule of hatred against this most despicable mass of maggots and welter of worms!
Make this your New Year’s Resolution against all the puny beautiful souls who preach “love and peace”: We shall have no peace and shall spare no love until we have hunted down and reduced to slavery the Han Chinese race of rodents, snakes and maggots!
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