Il Partito Comunista 408

In March, the case of the container ship Ever Given got stuck across the Suez Canal due to „a gust of wind”. Just to reduce transport costs, the bourgeoisie, with idiotic zeal, builds ships as big as a small city, 400 meters long and capable of loading 18,300 containers. For a week, the blockade of the waterway, through which 12% of world trade passes, has demonstrated how the circulation of goods, an artificial counterpart to the natural turnover of living organisms, can put world capitalism in crisis. The damage is estimated at 10 billion dollars a day, for the delayed sale of all that useless junk.

The huge ship, that stranded mountain of steel, a symbol of all modern capitalism and its hyper-productive madness.

Capitalism commits working humanity to an idiotic dissipation of energy to saturate the world with useless goods. The bourgeois class, for the sole purpose of conservation, ceaselessly spreads the reactionary ideology of ecology, made of „sustainable developments”, „green transitions”, when capital can never stop or even slow down on the mad race of production as an end in itself.

Now, in Italy, an ad hoc ministry „for the ecological transition” has been set up, promising new investments in infrastructures, still poured with concrete, but definitely „green”. On the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, we hear Biden singing the same song with his new plan „Build back better”, which plans to invest 2,000 billion dollars in infrastructure, 650 billion of which for roads, bridges and ports alone.

But the ideology of ecologism is looking for more noble support than advertising talk and finds followers among specialists in the natural sciences. In this field it has been proposed for a long time the addition in the geological stratigraphy of a new age, the current one, called Anthropocene, in which the human species would influence in a decisive way the future of the earth’s crust, water, atmosphere and living beings, the so-called biosphere.

We maintain a strong skepticism in the face of the alleged science of this era of social decay, and we are not at all inclined to consider as due to the human species the work of devastation that is instead imposed by the capitalist mode of production. What determines this ruin are the necessities of valorization of capital, in its chaotic action for the sole purpose of producing a profit, and certainly not to meet the vital needs of the species.

Marxist theory teaches us that capital is a relationship between men, which is not identified with the productive capacity of the species, with its technical endowment, with scientific knowledge and with the forces of nature, all of which are now subject to the reproduction of capital. Whenever the urgency arises to reckon with the devastating effects on nature of the mad race for the accumulation of surplus value, we look with strong suspicion at what is produced in terms of „scientific” analysis or, even worse, of incongruous proposals by the bourgeois political class, only interested in its slice of the social product.

But that we have entered the anthropocene is our thesis! The anthropocene is communism! That era of our history as a species in which the development of man’s capacities has come to be able to influence the whole life of the planet. It is a new and immense force. It is enough now to remove it from the arthritic but still rapacious hands of Capital. Tomorrow, the communist society, having stifled today’s nauseating, moralistic, terrorist, commercial „green” rhetoric, and no longer deaf and blinded by its internal conflict between opposing interests, will be able to see, know and foresee the very long cycles that regulate in grand, delicate and complex balances the life on our Earth. And, with caution, try wisely to intervene, in a project extended to the whole globe and to several generations.

Going along with the current fashion, even a recent study carried out by an Israeli university, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, has come to the „distressing” conclusion that the historically accumulated mass of minerals processed by man, excluding therefore the products of agriculture, would have exceeded that of living organisms on the planet, even excluding the water they contain.

We do not guarantee at all the seriousness of these university „studies”, that we know by now are more and more moved by mercantile and career interests, especially today when the exanguious financings are contended with the most indecent methods. Therefore, we cannot evaluate how much the data used in the research are reliable, or even falsified, nor if the authors at least show to know which quantities they are talking about.

The fact remains, however, that we feel no need for further study, as we knew this before. We are in fact well convinced of the problem of the progressive mineralization of the biosphere. Iron or wheat? Beyond calculation errors, given the immense amount of data to be collected and correlated, we do not deny a certain verisimilitude of the conclusions reached with our thesis. That is, if the overtaking of the mass of mineral products processed by our species, defined in the study as anthropogenic mass, on that of the total living biomass, which according to the research would occur as early as 2020, had not yet been reached, it will certainly be in a few years.

The biomass on Earth would be around 1,100 gigatonnes, relatively constant over a wide geological span (a „giga” is a 1 followed by 9 zeros). Conversely, the anthropogenic mass has evolved very rapidly in the last 120 years: even at the beginning of the 20th century it did not exceed 3% of the dehydrated biomass. Moreover, the race of the anthropogenic mass has experienced a formidable acceleration in recent decades, doubling every 20 years.

It is evident that not even the capitalists, even if they wanted to, and not even if they were united, have the slightest possibility of stemming this infernal eruption. This is demonstrated by the deluge of proclamations by eminent politicians and heads of state in the last two decades, of world gatherings devoted to ecological talk and to the „historic” treaties that were supposed to curb „climate change” and „defend the environment”.

Other consequences that capital cannot control are those of agriculture, deforestation and livestock breeding, all ancient activities but now implemented on a very large scale, aided by the enormous development of the means of production, which, however, do not give strength and wealth to this society but only generate new imbalances and new crises, as well as the misery of the proletarians who work there. The same can be said for mining activities, a real robbery of the goods of the subsoil.

Vegetable biomass is estimated at 900 gigatonnes while that of buildings and infrastructures is 1,100. Urbanism and capitalism, and land rent, worse if small and fractional, are incompatible with each other. Think of the „ghost” cities and towns, old or new from the plans of governments forced to deal with capitalist anarchy, and greedy for huge profits and rents from construction contracts. Not to mention the myriad of industrial plants abandoned due to the capricious change of the rate of profit between sectors and productive regions of the world: ruins that in every corner of the planet mark a monstrous civilization unable to provide even for its own survival and that clutters the space with its corpses.

Capitalism catapults immense quantities of goods in those hubs of the world market that are called cities. Hence the frenzied giantisation of cyclopean concrete agglomerations, temples of real estate investment, an instrument of solidification of otherwise evanescent capital. No plan can limit the expansion of cities beyond the „walls”, exorbitantly overflowing into the countryside. In this horrible world colonized everywhere by capital, the agony of associated life is consumed. A civilization that only destroys the work of the dead neither knows nor cares to recover what has been inherited from past generations. In squalor lives the species Homo sapiens: how history plays with words!

„The Basis of Marxist economic analysis is the distinction between dead and living labor. We define capitalism not as ownership over the heaps of crystallized past labor, but as the right of subtraction from living and active labor. That’s why the present economy cannot lead to a good solution which would achieve, with the minimum of present labor effort, the rational preservation of what past labor has given us, and the best basis for the effect of future labor. The bourgeois economy is interested in the frenzy of the contemporary rhythm of work, and it favors the destruction of the still useful masses of past work, not caring about posterity” (Murder of the Dead, „Battaglia Comunista”, 1951, no. 24).

We wrote this 70 years ago, before the word ecology was being bandied about by anyone and everywhere, even in the Stalinist East, it was being immolated on the altars of productivism.

The consequences are devastating for the entire animal kingdom, in an environment increasingly artificial and less suitable for their reproduction. The mass of all animals is said to represent a small fraction of the planetary biomass, less than 4 parts per thousand since they do not exceed 4 gigatons, while the mass of humans is much lower, amounting to only 0.01% of living species.

The plastics present on the planet are estimated to be about 8 gigatons, twice the mass of all terrestrial and marine animals. It seems that many end up forming large floating islands in the Pacific Ocean. Why is so much of it produced? Because the rate of profit in its production is sufficiently high. Is there a remedy? In this society, no. Even in these pandemic times, no government is willing to give up on „development”. All assemblies are forbidden, except in the factories!

The proletariat alone will have the task of saving itself and the human species if it is able to suppress the suffocating domination of capital and its demented endless reproduction.

Early this year, shares in the company GameStop (ticker symbol GME) shot up in value at a wild and unexpected rate, bringing enormous amounts of capital into the hands of a select few day traders and snatching billions of dollars from a group of hedge funds who had been betting on the continued decrease of the value of the shares.

The meteoric rise of GameStop shares did not take place by pure chance, however. On Reddit, a community of day traders who make up the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, whose members pride themselves on sinking money into high risk/high reward stocks, began to notice that several hedge funds had been shorting GameStop, leading to a continuous decline in the price of its shares, and, according to the users of r/WallStreetBets, the undervaluing of GameStop stock.

With mixed motivations – partly out of a desire to hurt the massive hedge funds to satisfy their moral resentment of them, and partly to enrich themselves – they hatched a plan that gained widespread support across the site: the users of r/WallStreetBets would buy GameStop stock en masse, thus driving up its price astronomically, costing the hedge funds billions and making a tidy profit themselves.

In January 2021, the plan truly took off, with GameStop hitting a record high of $347.51 per share, where the price had been below $3 less than a year previously. This sparked a flurry of attention in both the more traditional mass media and on other social media platforms, with some bemoaning the terrible consequences they alleged would occur, while many cheered on what they saw as ordinary people fighting back against the parasitic elites.

However, closer examination of the GameStop incident exposes the nonsense at the heart of this romanticised view of things. For one, massive investors have thrown millions of dollars into GameStop stock, including some of the hated hedge funds, and even Elon Musk, the poster-boy of capital himself, has publicly celebrated the actions of r/WallStreetBets. Furthermore, the true beneficiaries of this are not at all proletarian – aside from the handful of working-class individuals who will scrape meagre profits from the incident, the rewards will be reaped by those who had the capital necessary to purchase large numbers of shares, namely the petty bourgeois day traders who make up the core of r/WallStreetBets, and the bourgeois investors who hopped on the bandwagon after GameStop began soaring, not to mention the other hedge funds already circling their stricken brethren. The obviousness of this fact can hardly be overstated – the figurehead of the entire movement, who goes by the username “DeepFuckingValue”, has made millions, but only because he was capable of investing tens of thousands of dollars at the beginning of the scheme.

The foolishness of these “socialist” cheerleaders goes beyond the above observations. In their enthusiasm for this redistribution of capital among the owners of private property, they have gone so far as to encourage proletarians, even those on the edge of total ruin, to throw their money into what is undeniably a speculative bubble. In one particularly egregious example, someone whose father had died as an indirect result of the financial crash of 2008, and who understandably held great resentment for Wall Street, was applauded for sinking everything they had, which was very little to begin with, into the GameStop bubble. While a small number of bourgeois and petty bourgeois investors will profit enormously, and a handful of working-class people will get out with a little more money in their pockets, as is the case with any speculative bubble the vast majority of those who invested, a body largely proletarian in character following the massive media attention focused on the event, will lose their whole investment, and in many cases will be ruined. The thoughtless excitement of these “socialists,” perhaps fuelled by a frustrated streak of adventurism, has harmed many of the proletarians they claim to be advocates of, and shows that these so-called socialists are nothing more than petty bourgeois activists whose enmity is directed not at capital and class in general, but at the bloated titans of commerce and finance. The beneficiaries of the words and actions of these “socialists” are the petty bourgeoisie, whose fate in the development of capitalism is to be proletarianised and have their property subsumed by the massive concerns as they inexorably monopolise the market.

The entire GameStop debacle has exposed with a glaring light a sad failure of “the left” – they have internalised their own propaganda about “the 1%” and the “99%”, and now large segments of their movement view class struggle not in terms of the proletariat seizing power and abolishing class relations, but rather in the amorphous entity known as “the people” fighting against “the 1%”, the largest of the big bourgeoisie. This view of the world is absolutely incorrect – while the petty bourgeoisie and the smaller elements of the bourgeoisie proper do in fact have interests which often oppose those of the big bourgeoisie, that does not mean they align with those of the proletariat, whose interest demands the abolition of property. This is a proposal which even the boldest forms of petty bourgeois radicalism cannot abide – when they claim to, deeper analysis of what they call for gives lie to this assertion – for the ideology of the petty bourgeois does not seek the abolition of class itself, but the universalisation of petty bourgeois conditions. Any “socialists” whose programme involves the advancement of petty bourgeois causes have nothing to offer the proletariat but empty words and foolish activism, and they should be given all the respect which their behaviour accords to them.

The failure of leftist sloganeering has been laid bare by the GameStop incident. All the rhetoric which heaped fury upon “the 1%” never reflected the true reality of class relations as they exist under the capitalist mode of production (or under any other mode of production, for that matter), and the anti-worker consequences, which are the natural conclusion of this line of propaganda, should make it clear to anyone who pays attention that it should be abandoned immediately by those who still cling to this and other varieties of idealist nonsense. All this makes one thing clear – the rhetoric and propaganda of the workers’ movement must be based not upon what slogans can best rally a broad coalition, but rather upon those which reflect the social relations of production and the class dynamic as they really are. Anything else, regardless of how many signatures or new reading-circle members it may garner, will only lead to ruin and ignominy, as all opportunism inevitably must.