One Hundred Years of Catastrophe

"Summer is y-comen in!" sang the pair of wrens on top of the grape-arbor; putting in an extra vowel, just as if they had been Dagoes! It was a time for coming outdoors, a time for beauty and joy. But alas, the hideous slaughter in Europe was mounting to frenzy, becoming an extermination of the human race. The exploiters and imperialists whose greed had dragged Italy into the conflict were sending propagandists over here, to lure the Italian youth back into the slaughter-pit."  Upton Sinclair, Boston, a documentary novel

 In 1914 the working class failed to prevent war among the imperial powers. This was not because it didn’t understand the situation or its role. The 2^nd International was well aware of both:

“The capitalist and imperialist war- mongers must know what is at risk if they throw down Mars’ iron dice. We will warn them, we will threaten them: we in Germany, like our friends in France and England. It is only internationally that we can carry out our war against war, and it is internationally that it is being carried out. Just as we have confidence in our brothers in France, England and Austria, you can have confidence in us, in the German proletariat in struggle.”  Karl Liebknecht, Where Will Peace Come From?, 1912

In the event the war-mongers were able to split the working class along national lines and enroll them in their corresponding legions of death. The political failure of the working class movement to halt the war left the masses unable to resist the inducements to enlist.

“The visceral militarism of 1914 explicitly contrasted a peacetime that left citizens alienated, purposeless and vaguely discontented, with a war that promised to restore the traditional values and ideals supplanted by modernity. The industrialised order reduced men to anonymous cogs in machines; war would bring back heroism and gallantry to a world that was ‘old and cold and weary,’ as Rupert Brooke says.”  Jeff Sparrow, The Appeal of Violence - Rage Killings in the Neoliberal World

The defeat of the 2^nd International opened the door to a renewed, capitalist future. Old forms of rule were jettisoned, some under pressure from below. Even as the war ground on the future was apparent in new mechanical and chemical forms of warfare. The armistice brought no halt in this development which continued to race towards the technology of the apocalypse that is our legacy today.

Since neither the contention between imperial powers nor the struggle between classes was resolved by the war, only transfigured, it was not long before new conflicts and new monsters of political control emerged. But the most grievous outcome of 1914 which we face today is that it was capital which was allowed to complete the organization of global production, to engineer the final overreach in the exploitation of human and natural resources.

Where has this landed us today, one hundred years after the outbreak of war? The stored energy which has allowed the unprecedented acceleration of growth now requires far greater expenditures to extract and ever increasing military force to protect access to it. Both factors indicate a depletion of reserves, certainly not a basis for further growth. Possible geographical market expansion proportional to existing production and consumption is dropping. Deadly rivalries persist but the division of development strategies that emerged after WWI has been resolved into a single, global capitalism.

The devastation of the two world wars undermined the political support for capital in the Eurasian theatres but a substantial base was retained in the U.S. Its loyalty to the system has bought it imperial supremacy and a cushion against the austerity which is demanded elsewhere. But that will have to end. Indeed, in most communities it has ended already.

The social class which has consolidated its control through the catastrophes of the last century is manifestly finished. Its wealth is empty; claims against debtors who can only repay a fraction of what they owe, ownership of production which has long since stopped creating any real surplus, nominal wealth flowing into assets whose price is bid up by competing flows of the same nominal character. Its violence is also empty; overpriced weapons of amazing violence and no political value.

In 1914 war-mongering and intensified and expanded exploitation of labor and nature was an option. One hundred years later it continues to be so only in the fantasies of the ruling caste. Science quite plainly shows that there are limits within sight or already exceeded. And honest accounting would do the same for the global financial system.

Six years into the current crisis and nothing has changed except the accounting. Six years in which the public treasure has been used to paper over the chasm in the world’s private finances. We are close to the unmasking. From the ruling echelons we should not be surprised if war and austerity for the masses continue to be paraded across the public forum as the only permissible avenue forward. From the ground, however, the view will be different. The world which emerged in 1914 was not the one nurtured in the hopes of the workers’ movement but it was, manifestly, a possible world. One hundred years later that choice is no longer realistic. The ideology of capital and empire can only hide and deny. It has no solution so it must pretend that nothing original can emerge. With all the power at its disposal it will, nevertheless, not be trusted.

“I believe humanity will continue to live and struggle with the difficulties that it faces. It has had many difficulties in the past, it has overcome them all. The difficulties that it faces today may seem to be immense, and they are immense, but the qualifications of people for settling their difficulties are as great, and are bound to be as great as the difficulties. I have to leave you with that; that the large majority of the population are against what is going on, they have no confidence in the regimes that exist. This is not Marxism, this is not socialism, this is not revolution. This is a common understanding of what is taking place in the world around us. This is what I’m speaking about. Mankind is faced with survival or destruction and I believe that the large majority of people will turn for survival and will in time take the steps that are necessary to recover what has been in danger in previous centuries, and which can continue if only we get rid of those who insist on maintaining power which they cannot handle.”  From a talk given by C.L.R. James at Windsor, Ontario, in Canada on January 14, 1967.