As industrial capital declines relatively in power, and the financial sector experiences ever-more volatile boom-and-crash cycles that reverberate through the global economy, banks have fewer options they can exercise in response, because they’ve already implemented whatever they can do to facilitate growth (they can’t go below 0% interest rates). These current forms of capital are reaching their ultimate limits.
To deal with this, capital has begun to be increasingly diverted into private/state hybrid enterprises. This is a way to force more commodities into the economy and to increase production for its own sake (for immediate destruction rather than for use). These enterprises include wars, foreign “aid,” geo-engineering, disaster response, and government subsidies (such as for farming). In addition, there is an increasing flow of public funds to private hands through the privatization of public institutions (prisons, detention centers, schools, military), and the creation of ever-more toxic new “needs” (such as pollution creating the need for more health care and insurance). As public social services are cut under “austerity” programs, public/private “partnerships” in the form of NGOs are proliferating. (By recruiting sincere progressive, these also serve to co-opt opposition).
NGO CO-OPTATION
The state will mandate and/or partly fund the masses’ increased involuntary consumption of all of these (through our taxes, through laws such as Obamacare, and through increased numbers of people being forced into institutions of various types).
As capital puts increasing pressure on wages while profiting off the warehousing of populations, the working class will be pushed into virtual slavery through prison labor and work-for-food arrangements (both of which are on the increase worldwide).
YOU WANTED JOBS
State control over production and over the allocation of resources, in conjunction with privately appropriated profit, plus the socialization of losses, is an economic aspect of fascism. Slave labor is another aspect. This trend is still emerging but is gaining strength. It is being attacked by some sections of capitalists for now; while at the same time they are competing to enter it, and are pushing for its expansion in order to ease their own entry into it. They recognize it as one of their only options of survival as capitalists.
There is an intensifying contradiction between short-term and long-term viability, and there’s a need for a major shift in how capital reproduces itself. In the current conjuncture, capitalism must destroy toxic value and restructure the whole economy. In this transition, their long-term needs as a class clash with their immediate imperatives as individual competing capitals/blocs.
