Why Do They Spy?

Capital is broke. In 2008 credit collapsed beneath a global overproduction of commodities. The full shock of this has been contained by a shift of the private debt held at the highest levels of monopoly capital onto the public. But this has not resolved the structure of the crisis. It has, for a time, tranquilized the nerves of the titans of finance and permitted yet another, unsustainable, expansion of credit. It has also, in its corollary expression as public austerity and continued high unemployment, worsened the condition of the working class and, so, contributed to the weak demand part of the overproduction crisis formula.

This scheme, as ineffective and transparent as it is, was born in meetings just prior to that year’s presidential election. It works not so much to prevent the collapse of credit but to deny, to ignore, that such a collapse has occurred. A moment’s hesitation by the Republican candidate in the face of this concurrence was enough to shift the election to the Democratic candidate, a man of African agnatic descent; a fortunate expedient but one which has resulted in the nervous breakdown of the Republican Party.

If the manifest signs of the crisis are unavoidable in such cities as Athens, Cairo, and Detroit it cannot be denied that there has been considerable success hiding it in many other places. The willful, if nervous, disregard for the crisis in the world’s capital markets and in America’s political and entertainment narratives should, I think, be interpreted as testimony to the gravity of the situation and even to the ultimate inability of capitalism to resolve it on its own terms.

Overproduction ends when enough capital is destroyed, and known to be so, for surviving capital to resume profitable production and for the world to once more crave and afford its commodities. It is a real question, in a world completely penetrated by the market and rapidly exhausting its resources, whether any such reboot of a system not only producing accumulation but requiring it is still possible.

And, so, capital is broke and is blocked from formulating a real exit from its crisis. Practically this leaves only its old antagonist, the working class, to build a resolution to the situation we are all of us in. What should be remarked about the actual response to this point is its seemingly abiogenetic eruption in location after location across the globe. From Port Said to Wall St. to Istanbul the opposition announces itself without warning. And everywhere it arises it undertakes the construction of itself as a new place, a new commune.

Capital, lately so confident in its ideological victory over a working class it views as both crushed in its organized form and complacent in its role as private consumer, must be finding its dreams unsettling. Manifestos and informants can hardly be still as effective as they once were in uncovering the threat. It is no wonder that it now feels the need to record and read everything. 

The organizational roots of current espionage lie in the 2nd World War when it was sufficient to intercept and decode the competing imperial powers. But today it can hardly begin to grasp the importance of all the data that its nearly divine technical forces are now able to deliver to its door each morning. The sum total, in its expression as exchange value, must be turned over to the machine for resolution. Any human evaluation would be too slow to be anything other than an impediment. 

The political data has to be suffering under similar constraints. Search terms are outdated by the time they are employed. The story as it is heard at the highest levels is either incoherent or structurally outdated. Members of the ruling caste who are actually exposed to the unfiltered situation become infected with distrust and are ignored. The working class and others who live there are still in the process of decoding what they are seeing. But at least their eyes are open. It is the blindness of capital that is driving its limitless hunger for data.