The Powder Keg of Capitalism

In a nuclear explosion there are people in close proximity who vanish into thin air. Solid matter one second, scattered gas molecules the next. A little farther away others are consumed in the 200-mph winds of the nuclear firestorm. Like the vaporized they too never really knew what hit them. Those on the periphery will be sparred a violent death. They will die but more slowly, a little time to feel death and to contemplate the end.

Don’t know who first said it, but it amounts to that rarest of circumstances when, “the living will envy the dead”.

The world we live in is on the cusp of a nuclear holocaust, whether it be figurative or the real deal. The figurative bomb is the one Karl Marx warned was endemic to capitalism. Marx called the bomb the system’s internal contradictions. Capitalism has now heated to the point it’s ready to blow. We are sitting on a powder keg.

Capitalism has lived out its destiny to occupy every corner of the globe. So it now stares down the barrel of its most explosive internal contradiction. There is nowhere left to grow and it must grow or die. There are no untapped markets left and every human being, outside of a tiny parasitic ruling clique, has been enslaved. Some are chattel, the rest are slaves to debt.

The system has not been stayed by the world’s working people as Marx hoped and multitudes have dreamed as they laid down their lives for socialism. In its death throes capitalism will launch a killing spree of historic proportions. Millions will be murdered, poisoned, and deprived of lives by way of neglect, deprivation and torture. It will strip the planet of its eons-old carbon layer, burn that carbon layer for fuel and quarterly profits, warm the planet and acidify the oceans until the Earth is uninhabitable.

But because there are divisions in that tiny capitalist ruling clique, humanity may never get to the famines, diseases, floods, droughts, storms, plagues, fires and gulags on the horizon. At some point the US corporate-state directed by Goldman Sachs and the other big banks, or the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party’s state-capitalist apparatus, or Vladimir Putin and the newly minted Russian oligarchs, or the European Union, India, Pakistan or Israel will give in to the panic. That one desperate attempt to go it alone, to survive, will take over in one place.

And the nuclear missiles will leave their silos and submarines.