Captialism is deathless – it does not know death, or at least, death does not touch it. Yet we will all die. An illegral immigrant is beaten to death – but how does this alter the American Dream? Floods wreck Bangladesh – but how does affect the ideal of a world market? These ideals arise from the body of capital, facilitating its movement. The existence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the G8 summit only propagate these ideals. But unlike the codes which governed the pre-capitalist world, they do not mean anything. Capitalism has already destroyed all codes.
Capitalism is like a cell whose DNA is damaged and which spreads cancerously from a particular tumour. A normal cell in an adult grows and divides only to replace a worn out or dying cell, or to repair an injury. With cancer, cells continue to grow and divide; cancerous cells are those which have forgotten how to die. Whether cancer develops as a tumour or, with leukaemia, in the blood, cancerous cells spread to other parts of the body, growing and replacing normal tissue. Cancer, metastatising, is deathless, but there is the paradox that it will eventually kill the host body and thereby kill itself. Cancerous cells will die even as they do not know death. Capitalism will die with its host body.
Is there a cure for capitalism as there might be a cure for cancer?
The great obstacle is money, the general equivalent. It is in terms of our experience of money, of money as it determines our experience, that our consensual reality is defined. It is because of money that we no longer believe in the world.
A value that supplants all other values is inscribed on coins, banknotes and cheques. Yet money is not just the measure of the value of commodities, it is a commodity itself. There are a number of great changes across this history of money. The most recent came when it was possible to raise finance capital. It is wealth that comes to assume the most value. Donald Trump is a monster miraculated from the body of finance capital. Be afraid, for it is not just that capital has liquified reality by turning it into commodities, but that those commodities have no weight or substance in comparison to the abstraction of wealth. All that matters is the future from which more wealth might come.
Why not let the Trumps of this world wait for their enormous returns? Acccording to Marx, money has the amazing property of increasing itself. Then why worry? Isn’t it a good idea to borrow from the future for the sake of a better life now? But others cannot wait. An investment is always a contract over time – it is necessary to wait for future profit. Although shares appear to resemble property, their value cannot be realised all at once. You can sell property at any time, but you will need to wait a little to realise a profit from your shares. Traders in shares must wait; speculators can even sustain a loss while they wait, but those who trade for their subsistence cannot wait. The horror is that the terms of exchange are set by speculators, not be those who seek only to live. The result? Thirst, famine, shelterlessness.
Capitalism involves a determination of time. More than that: it captures our awareness of time. It does not die, but millions are dying. Beyond those millions, it is the earth itself which dies. Capitalism is cancer and a cancer which is killing its host body. Then what is to be done?
Perhaps it is the problem of confronting the fact that our time is not infinite, and that even Donald Trump will die. But the ideals which arise like great phantasms from the body of capital seem stronger than death. It is only when he is dying that Ivan Illyich experiences beatitude. And the Ivan of Ivan’s XTC? Perhaps, then, it is the confrontation with the threat of the dying earth, of the fragility of life. But still, the ideals seem stronger and will do so until the ecological catastrophe finally arrives.
And when it comes, as it is coming? Perhaps there will be a new ethos, a new synthesis of time. The past: no longer must our traditions, our memories be stripped away by capitalism. The future: a place for hope, and first of all a hope for hope. But how do we avoid the desire to retrieve the barbarisms of the past, and for our hope not to dissipate in a vain utopianism? What is it that engages us from the past and from the future?
Lars Iyer's Blog 