The total capital. A guest article by Felix Feistel.
Terror is the essential form of rule in totalitarianism.
The total capital | By Felix Feistel
Published on: July 2, 2024
Source / Original article in German :
https://apolut.net/das-totale-kapital-von-felix-feistel/
Original title in German : Das totale Kapital
Translation : by Suavek.
I would like to thank the author for permission to publish this article.
Foreword :
by Suavek
Felix Feistel is the author of the article published in this Substack on April 25, 2024 under the title : “The processing trap” ( see the picture below ).
Since its publication, it has been the number one most popular article on this substack. At least that's what I can clearly tell from the system settings. Here is a link to it :
https://suavek1.substack.com/p/the-processing-trap-by-felix-feistel
The author now dares to tackle a fundamental issue. It is about capitalism, which has been presented to us in a completely wrong light for over 100 years. The problem is as old as the propaganda itself. It is said that a high quality of life can only be achieved through capitalism. Unfortunately, an important aspect is ignored. Capitalism can only "function" if it can expand. This is why wars were fought, which could open up new markets for the capitalists. In simple terms, no expansion means no permanent profit. School books and economics literature are silent about this simple but important characteristic. We also often misunderstand the term "free markets". In reality, the term should be "unregulated markets". The term "free" here refers to "free capital" and not to the freedom of citizens, who in such cases have to gradually cede their freedom (and rights) to the top 1%. There are many such and similar misunderstandings in relation to capitalism. At this point I am not in a position to mention everything about this broad topic. However, it would be important to say that the already limited earth for the US empire has shrunk somewhat, so to speak, because China, India and Russia are no longer willing to put up with everything. The petrodollar is finished, but the horrendous US debt remains a fact. There can therefore no longer be any talk of an expansion of the US empire. Since 2020 at the latest, we have seen a new type of this expansion. It is the bodies of unsuspecting citizens who are forced to have toxic pseudo-vaccinations injected under the pretext of a "pandemic". Capitalist expansion thus reached even our bodies, as a replacement for the printing press for printing the greenback that is no longer wanted. The collapsing system is trying to deny us the right to self-determination over our own bodies, which many still do not understand. It is the last frontier of the slavery in which we have lived since 2020. It is not the beginning or the middle of slavery. With the loss of self-determination over one's own body, the very last limit of slavery has been reached. Whole economies are being robbed or economic sectors are gradually being expropriated. Today this affects the little property owners and farmers, and tomorrow you and your children. I consider Felix Feistel's article to be a wonderful contribution to the clarification of recent events. However, it is by no means everything we should know about capitalism. In order to do justice to this topic, I must add that even a socialist system can go too far and slow down the effectiveness of the economy. We need a well-thought-out middle ground. Of course, a system must always be democratically regulated. Every power tends to excesses per se and must therefore be democratically put in its place. The deregulation of the banking system is the main problem we currently have. I hope that I can conclude the foreword with these brief words. By the way, I can't say that I agree 100% with everything Felix writes. However, I find his articles to be very well thought out, extremely interesting and very informative. I would also like to say that that Felix's texts can captivate the reader. It is a rare gift that he probably owes to the unvarnished, authentic feelings that he expresses here in text. Back then, we could have said "feelings that he puts on paper here".
I hope you enjoy reading,
Suavek.
A point of view from Felix Feistel.
When examining the phenomenon of totalitarian movements and systems, the question always arises as to how they can arise. How can it be that the masses suddenly allow themselves to be moved and, chasing an ideology, completely ignore common sense? How does the need for totalitarianism arise, an almost forced totalitarianization of politics? Isn't the totalitarian system something completely new, something that hasn't existed before? At least that's what Hannah Arendt writes, considering the totalitarianism she had to witness.
But there are some gaps in Arendt's work, some blind spots, which are perhaps due to the fact that these aspects were not visible at all during the war and post-war period. But in recent years and decades they have become more and more obvious. Because totalitarianism did not suddenly come to humanity. Rather, totalitarianism has long been a companion of humanity, and a driving force that has changed societies enormously, in the form of economics, in the form of capitalism. This is a system that has all the aspects of totalitarianism.
Like totalitarianism, capitalism is a never-ending movement. It requires ever further development, ever further progress, without a defined goal. Aimlessness is a key aspect of totalitarianism. Because the movement with which totalitarianism advances must never come to an end. If it does that, totalitarianism will collapse. And so capitalism always requires further growth, without there being a defined goal for this growth. Because growth must never stop; there is no state when growth can come to an end. New investment opportunities, sales markets and increases in profits must therefore be created every year; more goods must be produced and sold and services provided every year so that the gross domestic product (GDP) is constantly growing.
If this requirement of eternal growth cannot be met, then capitalism will collapse, at least locally. A recession occurs, companies become bankrupt, people become unemployed, and the masses become impoverished. At the same time, these times of collapse offer good investment opportunities for global capital again, an opportunity to expand their own monopoly positions. Because for capital, i.e. those global mega-corporations, financial managers and oligarchs, there is no such thing as a bad crisis. Since they operate globally, they can take advantage of the crisis in one country or region of the world to use their assets to buy up these regions cheaply, reorganize the market, and create new sales opportunities.
This is exactly what happened in the last two world wars. These, instigated by Anglo-American capital, destroyed values on a large scale and at the same time created new ones. Because weapons had to be produced and then destroyed again, and especially after the Second World War, Europe had to be rebuilt, which of course made enormous profits possible, especially in the form of support through the Marshall Plan. The main aim of this was to bring US companies and products onto the European market and to enable this market to implement them.
This eternal growth only takes place because of itself, i.e. because of the movement. Furthermore, it does not fulfill any meaningful goal, even if it is often argued that it increases people's prosperity. But if anything, this is only a collateral benefit, and what's more, it has been nothing more than pure ideology for decades. Capitalism, with its pressure to grow, actually destroys people's prosperity by pitting people against each other in global competition, companies migrating, and public goods are privatized and made more expensive. Money that should go into maintenance and repairs is not made available because it would reduce the profits of managers and investors, and so the infrastructure deteriorates. At the same time, capitalism is constantly producing new toxins that are increasingly poisoning the world and therefore people. The system makes people sick so that it can squeeze them out forever in the corporate-controlled, so-called health system. Needs are constantly being artificially created in order to force new products into society that neither have any social benefit nor enrich people in any way. The result is a flood of goods that pile up ever higher without any consideration for the environment and at the same time cover the planet with waste and poison. The growth ideology currently requires the digitalization of everything and everyone, regardless of whether it makes sense or not, since this is a growth market. Access to human bodies, the compulsion to consume genetic injections, for example, or to use digital services are also current growth factors and are therefore being pushed at all levels. Growth does not, as one might think, apply to the prosperity of entire societies. It's about growing the profits of corporations and their investors.
Destroyed society
In this process, capitalism destroys the entire society it finds. The beginning of capitalism gradually transformed the agricultural states into industrial states. He drove people to flee the countryside into the cities and then annexed the country. The cities were bursting at the seams, while the country fell into disrepair and large estates grew out of hand. In this way, people's ability to grow their own food was completely destroyed, and people were thus driven into dependence on the monetary system and jobs. After capitalism's homelands in Europe and the USA were colonized by large landowners, corporations and bankers, capitalism began its journey around the globe in its quest for growth. In the form of colonies that had established all sorts of states overseas, the ideology of capitalism was retained and adopted even after the formal end of colonialism, and the supposedly communist countries are also organized under state capitalism.
The movement of totalitarian capitalism relocated industry from the West to the so-called third world countries because it was cheaper to produce there and there were no disruptive environmental regulations. The totalitarian, capitalist system became globalism, integrating every society, every state into a global marketplace. Culture, nations and societies were more or less abolished in favor of a market ideology and subjected to the logic of constant exchange. The system thus absorbed every single person. In this way, capitalist totalitarianism, like all totalitarianism, reigned into people's private lives. Because every individual was forced to submit their private life to the logic of this system. One's origins and education determine one's own position in this system and one's chances of survival. Interests must be subordinated to necessities and people must structure their lives according to the requirements of capitalism. Every person has to sell themselves in the global market society. Everyone gives their labor, their skills, and puts them at the service of eternal growth, subordinating them to the GDP. Every single area of private life, from birth to death, is determined and controlled by this system.
At the same time, most people find it difficult to even mentally transcend this system that has become normal. It has become completely normal for capital to dominate every area of life. People have long since become accustomed to the gradual decline of society, the erosion of everything that could be described as values, and the complete leveling out of all cultural differences. Capitalism formally abolishes all groups, peoples, nations and cultures and integrates them into a mass culture in which it then sells people their lost peculiarities again in the form of consumer goods. Every political stance, even an ostensibly anti-capitalist one, is now expressed primarily in the political merchandise that capitalism sells. The capitalist system even sells you an exit from it, for example by selling time out in a monastery of silence, and thus a spiritual practice that has been degraded to a commodity.
Through wars and catastrophes, such as a staged pandemic, capitalism continually reshapes the entire world. The war on terror, the war against a virus, the war against fake news, the war against anti-vaccination activists, all of these wars and catastrophes only serve to recreate reality again and again and to destroy new parts of society again and again to reorganize. The same applies to reversing all values. If it serves the purpose of totalitarianism, all fixed categories, all certainties and everything that was believed to last are completely destroyed. Men can be women and vice versa, there can be any number of genders, all of which are of course discriminated against. And the fight against discrimination is being fought all over the world. People who at one moment are victims of Western wars soon become terrorists, terrorists become heroes, occupiers and oppressors become just rulers, rebels and resistance fighters become terrorists. Fixed values that societies live by, such as religion, become an enemy, and their own white population becomes Nazis and a threat to democracy. Democracy becomes a dictatorship, dictatorship becomes a democracy, the constitutional state is replaced by a system of justice to protect democracy and the rule of law, which, however, continues to be called the constitutional state and democracy. The terms and labels lose their content, are turned into their opposite and with them the entire society. Everything keeps being turned upside down.
The mass
In all of this, capitalism sets the masses in motion, an eternal, ever-accelerating movement that has no end. They allow themselves to be organized by capitalism by submitting to its requirements, by selling themselves, by participating in the logic of the market, even where it is completely inappropriate. Nowadays people expect something in return for everything, often even for favors done in private. The exchange logic is so deeply indoctrinated into people that they can no longer escape it. At the same time, capitalism has robbed people of their independence. Because he pretends to take responsibility away from people for many things and accustoms them to a pleasant consumer world, people find themselves increasingly dependent and often unable to take the simplest matters into their own hands.
In addition, there is a pronounced competitive logic that capitalism imposes equally on all people. In the competition for the better job, the higher status, the higher income, people are constantly involved in a battle of all against all, and they apply this logic to every area of their everyday life. The competition continues everywhere, leading to strife, isolation and what Hannah Arendt calls abandonment. People are less and less able to relate to each other and mostly live next to each other in anonymous big cities. This trend is being pushed to the extreme by digitalization, home offices and homeschooling, whereby people only sit in front of their devices and communicate with them.
The masses, as Hannah Arendt describes them, were created during the process of industrialization, when people were driven from the countryside to the city and thus uprooted. Here they fought for their survival and therefore had little interest in public affairs. At the same time there was a population growth, which meant that people became too numerous to be properly organized. The connection to one's own living environment that one could still have in the countryside was completely lost in the uniform workers' settlements with their completely overcrowded living quarters. The masses lived in hunger, disease and poverty with no prospect of improvement. Such an environment leads to contempt for one's own living conditions, and so capitalism, with its illusion of prosperity, promised improvement, a promise that people were happy to follow, which is why they allowed themselves to be integrated into totalitarianism. If you worked hard enough, the credo went, you could make it. Of course, that was hardly the truth from the start, but totalitarianism continually creates ideologies, illusory worlds that no longer have any contact with reality.
This is what capitalism does, which maintains the illusion of prosperity through growth, which gives the impression of justice and freedom, where in reality subjugation and dependence prevail, and where capital is allowed to commit any crime, whereas a simple person is sanctioned for the slightest transgression. The masses reject the reality that can be proven empirically and are not open to experience. They replace it with a more coherent but completely fictional illusory world. That is why enslavement under capitalism is experienced as freedom, that is why the promises and promises of capitalism are believed, as are the alleged requirements, the “constraints” that make any alternative impossible. Any criticism of the prevailing system is dismissed and relegated to the realm of lies, fairy tales and illusions.
At the same time, capitalism is constantly creating new realities and using the media apparatus and state propaganda to manipulate people into ever new delusions. The threat of communism, terrorism, anti-vaccination, anti-Semitism, wars for democracy and human rights in the Middle East, capitalism is constantly restructuring reality. He must do this, otherwise the people's anger would be directed against him. Because the masses despise the society in which they live and have a strong desire to destroy it. Therefore, capitalism must constantly change them so that there is no stagnation and the desire of the masses for destruction is always taken into account. If things came to a standstill, the masses would realize that under totalitarianism, despite eternal growth, despite constant production and consumption, despite diligence and hard work, nothing has changed for them. They live in a slave system that, although at times pleasant and comfortable, colorful and glittering, flashing and shining, is a prison in which their deep needs are not met.
At the same time, the masses lack interest in their own well-being and common sense. They celebrate the production of ever new goods, submit to the system and believe they are free and independent. They destroy their psyches and their bodies in the factories and open-plan offices and at the same time work on their own abolition through advancing digitalization, all for the very short-term security of their next salary. And although this state of affairs is often perceived as unsatisfactory, those who are so dissatisfied defend capitalism as the best of all worlds and drag themselves to work and consume even though it does not satisfy them.
The system achieves this through propaganda and indoctrination. Propaganda is the communication of the totalitarian system to the outside world, i.e. with those who are not yet covered by the totalitarian system. Since such an outside hardly exists anymore in globalized capitalism, the system's predominant form of communication with the masses is indoctrination. This perpetuates the ideology of the totalitarian system and normalizes it so that people can only think within the given framework and shape their entire lives with regard to this ideology, this system. And capitalism is more successful than any other totalitarian system. It has long since become normality, a kind of natural violence that rages and shapes society. It has permeated every institution, every medium, every way of thinking and is taught in educational institutions whose sole purpose is to get students to integrate optimally into this system. In media such as films, series and other broadcast formats, capitalism is the basic condition on which every action is based. It has become the proverbial water that the fish does not recognize at all, since it is the medium in which we humans move.
The perception of capitalism as a natural force is also reflected in the propagandistic effort to give capitalism a scientific veneer. This is how economics was invented, which Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Prizes, made fun of and did not recognize as a real science, which is why he did not dedicate a Nobel Prize to it. Economics invents models and theories that all sound good, but have one crucial flaw: they have nothing to do with reality. In fact, economics continually fails in its attempt to interpret and predict the supposedly natural violence of the system. So perhaps economists are the real leaders of totalitarian capitalism, for the nature of leaders is that they pretend to be interpreters of the natural or historical force whose action they seek to ideologically support or accelerate. The fact that they fail and are constantly replaced does not harm the entire system or the so-called science. The totalitarian system uses supposed science as a substitute for the monopoly that the totalitarian movement hopes to achieve. Every measure is justified by reference to science, no matter how absurd. Only when science no longer serves the totalitarian system will all science be abandoned. For many years, capitalism has justified cuts in social spending with reference to economics; on the same basis, a minimum wage has been rejected, but generous subsidies for entire sectors of industry have been advocated. Always new theories and models, be it the GDP, the modern money theory, neoliberalism with its trickle-down effect, all these theoretical buildings that supposedly promised to improve people's lives, justified and justify all kinds of austerity measures, cuts and privatization measures , and yet never realize their promises. Instead, they were only an expression of higher processes of the developing economy, which continually required new ideas and new laws.
Terror
In accordance with these higher processes, totalitarian terror is carried out, which is the essence of totalitarian rule. This terror replaces the fence of the law that enables the freedom of the individual with an “iron band” that is intended to exclude any unforeseen actions on the part of people. It unites people into a single, gigantic being that can only move together and in which individual action is impossible. It is terror that fabricates this oneness by destroying the space between people, which is freedom. As a result, the space for action that is only possible through togetherness disappears. Terror succeeds in organizing people as if they only existed in the singular.
Terror is now the law that can no longer be broken. This terrorist stability is intended to serve the liberation of moving nature or history, or in this case the economy.
Terror is the essential form of rule in totalitarianism. The rule is based on a philosophy of terror. The terror is mainly aimed at supporters of the totalitarian movement. They are the recipients of terror, since terror ideologically justifies the totalitarian system through its application alone, with the result that the people subjected to terror support the system even more loyally. The very use of terror suggests that it is necessary, since otherwise it would not be used at all. This increases the trust of the masses in the system, which seems to repeatedly confirm its own necessity through its pure activism. The terror of capitalism is not based exclusively on violence.
Instead, absolute performance terror reigns in business and working life. People are forced to do wage work for their livelihood. They are completely dependent on money because it is the only way they can live their lives. Without money there is no roof over your head, no food, no clothing. So those who are able to work have to become dependent on wage labor and accept the jobs that the companies grant them.
However, they are encouraged to perform consistently. They have to be “productive” so that they generate added value for entrepreneurs, which, at least according to the propaganda, goes towards eternal economic growth. The fact that a not inconsiderable portion ends up in the pockets of corporate managers and major shareholders naturally strengthens their belief in the rightness of their own actions. Anyone who is not prepared to allow themselves to be exploited for eight hours or more will sooner or later be thrown out the door and can then see where they stay. In Austria, people have even gone so far as to want to lift the eight-hour limit on working hours. Companies that call themselves modern, on the other hand, try to increase the productivity of their employees in other ways. They give them generous breaks and free time and give them the opportunity to express themselves “creatively”. “Creativity” is just a buzzword that relies on intrinsic motivation, on a voluntary nature to submit to the pressures of exploitation. In addition, this creativity must benefit growth and profits.
However, people's lives are completely subject to the constraints of wage labor.
In this relationship, the power lies with the corporations and their shareholders. They alone have ownership of the companies, factories, machines, land, and even the rights to exploit the raw materials found in the world. This property, which excludes all others from the products of labor, combined with money and the majority's dependence on it, gives them this power. All those who do not have such property and who have to earn money in some way in order to buy their goods from the ruling class are subject to it. Their property is based on the expropriation of the majority, which was decades or even centuries ago and which they have been able to defend ever since. The corporate managers and shareholders use this power by linking the distribution of the fruits of expropriation to the increasingly cruel and ruthless conditions of wage labor. Wage work is what largely determines the lives of the majority. Nothing shapes and determines people's everyday lives as much as they do. People have to spend a large part of their time serving other people's interests, and often have to get up early, contrary to their biorhythms, without any real purpose, and go to work in order to be exploited in other people's interests. The result of this exploitation flows to the capital owner. The people themselves receive only a low wage, which does not reflect the value of their work at all. In this relationship, employees have no right to co-determination at all. Either they do what they are told or they are fired, because there is a huge reserve army of workers ready to replace anyone unwilling. Companies are organized in a totalitarian way, and the driving ideologies are growth and profit.
Even so-called self-employed people are not their own masters. They depend on orders that are given to them. However, these in turn are usually prescribed in great detail and leave the self-employed no freedom whatsoever. In addition, those service providers who offer their services at the lowest possible price are usually commissioned. The reason for this is the omnipresent pursuit of growth and profit. This means that costs must be kept as low as possible. However, this leaves the self-employed at the mercy of a dumping competition from which they cannot escape. Either they get involved or they go under. The majority of people cannot freely dispose of their time and labor at all; they are subject to the total pressure of productivity. Anyone who proves to be unproductive will not last long in this system and will end up on social welfare.
Here the terror only continues. In the form of gray bureaucrats, the authorities implement their regulations, which are aimed at forcing people who have been rejected by the system as useless back into it. With all means of coercion, they are driven back into the army of those capable of working and some are even forced to take on work that contradicts human dignity, as the case of a woman in Berlin shows, who an employment office employee forced into prostitution under the threat of sanctions wanted. (1)
In doing so, people are also subjected to senseless measures that are simply intended to keep people busy in some way. Anyone who does not comply is sanctioned and has to eke out an existence below the subsistence level. Bureaucrats implement this practice completely without any sense of humanity. The tenor: No one who is still able to work in any way or anywhere should be allowed to “leave the public’s back”. However, those who are not subject to wage labor cannot freely dispose of their lives either. They are constantly put under pressure and are victims of bureaucratic coercion that threatens to deny them essential services. The rules of economics tighten around each individual like an iron band and rob them of their freedom. The principle of economic efficiency has eaten into every area of human life.
You can see it in the self-optimization craze, for example through smartwatches and fitness apps, in the way in which people submit to the constraints of the economy by aligning their entire lives with them. Everything has to be “worth it” in some way; nothing is done anymore that doesn’t promise some benefit. A life outside of economic categories is no longer possible.
Another side of the terror that the dogma of eternal economic growth exerts on us is consumption. It is necessary to justify constant production, the driving force of economic growth. People are now supposed to use the wages paid by employers to consume goods, so that a large part of the money they receive flows directly back to its place of origin, to the companies. Under capitalism, everyone is expected to accumulate things and buy things, even if they objectively don't need them. The fleeting money is thus — superficially seen — transformed into fixed property. However, many consumer goods today are mostly of inferior quality. They are intentionally manufactured with an “expiration date.” They are supposed to break down and be replaced fairly quickly, which is also a tribute to eternal economic growth. The consequences for nature due to the piling mountains of garbage and the ever-increasing demand for raw materials are devastating, but they play no role in the calculation. Nature is also being sacrificed to the movement of eternal growth, which is another sign of the abandonment of common sense. The system seemingly opens up a world of infinite freedom and possibilities for us at the level of consumption. What devices and things do we not own that no one before us could even dream of? Smartphones, computers, tablets with the appropriate applications, kitchen machines, tumble dryers, robots as lawn mowers or vacuum cleaners. We can buy fruit from all over the world, even strawberries in December. Isn't this the paradise of freedom?
However, this freedom is only apparent. Because companies decide which things they produce, how and where they produce them or have them manufactured. They always make decisions based on economic criteria. So they produce what they hope to make the greatest possible profit from and do it as cheaply as possible. What doesn't matter at all is whether the product actually has a relevant benefit. The consumer has no power to decide what is offered on the supermarket shelves. He can only choose from similar products, the only difference perhaps being the manufacturer. He has no influence on the decision about what and how a product is manufactured. Often he doesn't even know the exact ingredients of a product, especially food and cosmetics.
As a consumer, people find themselves completely overwhelmed by the results of the manufacturing process and only have the option to choose between what is already there. The ideology that demand determines supply is also not true. Because consumers can only ask for what has already been produced. In addition, production often initially takes place without demand. Products are thrown onto the market that no one has ever really needed or asked for. The best example of this is now something that almost everyone has in their pocket: their smartphone. The alleged steering mechanism is therefore limited to what is already there. For companies, the sales figures only provide feedback as to which products they can sell particularly profitably and which they should better eliminate from their product range. It therefore only serves to optimize profits. In most cases, companies first create demand anyway. To do this, they use the media, especially advertising. Here, needs are awakened using all the means from psychology's bag of tricks, and the right product is then presented to satisfy them. This advertising is becoming more and more intrusive, flashy and unrealistic. On the radio, the latest offer is practically shouted at you, on television, garishly exaggerated and completely unrealistic images and representations of people are used to awaken needs, and on the Internet you are harassed by pop-up windows as well as intrusive advertising clips before and during and after almost every video you watch. So there is, so to speak, a marketing terror that suggests to people needs that they never had before. In addition, alternatives to the products on offer are often suppressed. At the beginning of the 1920s, General Motors, together with the tire manufacturer Firestone and the Rockefeller oil empire Standard Oil, systematically bought up and scrapped trams in many cities in the USA so that Americans would switch to cars as a means of transport. We see the result of this today in the form of torn cities with gigantic parking lots and wide streets that seal huge areas. The lack of alternatives, combined with advertising that presents the automobile as an elegant solution, has turned the United States into a country of drivers.
The media machine also serves as an instrument of terror to legitimize the ruling system. Here the ideology of eternal economic growth is spread, those who do not submit to the system are held in contempt, the unemployed, for example, are degraded in their reputation, or people who are concerned about ecology, self-sufficiency and natural medicine are used as amusing quirks for entertainment. The news about economic growth and the financial and stock market is inflated with an importance that it does not deserve. The media still has a justification ready for every absurdity in the system. They thus serve as policy amplifiers and underpin the eternal movement of economic growth. In this way, the required reality is continually recreated. By spreading the lies to the masses and making them the norm, the only perceptible reality, through news, films, series and other broadcast formats.
Through this eternal terror and media indoctrination, people are welded together into a single mass that is dragged along by the forces of the economy and is completely at its mercy. At the same time, everyone puts their actions at the service of this economy and tries to meet its demands for growth and profit in their own way. By integrating all people into a global market, the space between people, which does not represent a market, is completely destroyed, which destroys freedom and makes people unable to act. It is simply no longer possible for him to act outside the sphere of the economy, since everything is subject to its laws.
The law of motion
Totalitarianism replaces the law that is supposed to define the limits of freedom with the law of movement. The ever-changing requirements of capitalism always require new regulations and laws. The laws are constantly being adapted to meet the needs of capitalism. Be it the Hartz IV laws, be it the deregulation of banks and the relaxation of approval procedures for products, or the free trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA, which are negotiated between states, the eternal movement of growth always produces new sets of rules and erases them that stand in his way. These are not about defining freedom and establishing continuity over time, but only about accelerating the supposedly natural economic process and bringing it to fruition. The iron band of law tightens around people, making them immobile in the face of the demands of capitalism. Inability to act, an important aspect of totalitarianism, becomes widespread in the face of the preponderance of capital. According to Hannah Arendt, people can only act collectively. However, in view of the isolation, the eternal competition and the constant struggle, this community can no longer be achieved.
All totalitarianism aims not only at gaining the means of power, but also at controlling people from within. And that’s exactly what capitalism does. Not only is the actual power concentrated in it, which is subject to the economy, which determines everything, and also to politics, which must constantly align its actions with economic requirements such as growth, GDP, jobs, debt and so on. He also controls people from the inside by implanting his logic into every single person, and hardly anyone is able to transcend it even mentally. People always think in economic categories, in the terms of capitalism. The capitalist system actually seems to have absorbed the entire sphere of reality and replaced it with a completely new one from which one cannot escape, not even mentally. This makes capitalism the most perfect of all totalitarian systems, whose aim is always to achieve exactly that, on a global level.
All of this did not come from a group of people in the sense that some people consciously established this system and pushed industrialization in order to gain control of the levers of power. But certainly industrial capitalism and commercial and financial capitalism have been more advantageous to some people from the start, putting them in favorable positions from which they could continue to expand their power and wealth. Therefore, it is only over time that capitalism has developed into such a comprehensive totalitarianism, creating an ideology that humanity has fallen into and which has produced some leaders. But the leaders themselves, as in any totalitarianism, are completely irrelevant. Even in capitalism, power comes not so much from individuals but from structures. It is a network of banks, central banks, corporations, asset managers and, today, international organizations and foundations with overlapping responsibilities that exercise power and enforce their interests through the power of states. At the same time, cabinets and parliaments were filled with loyal supporters by capital; in Germany, for example, Friedrich Merz, who comes from Blackrock, and Alice Weidel, who worked at Goldman Sachs. There is also a Blackrock agent behind the scenes, for example in the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Elga Bartsch, the chief economist there.
Individual oligarchs like Bill Gates, or behind the scenes the Rockefeller clan and other families, can have great influence within this system. But this is more tied to her position than to her person. When they die, the vacancy is filled by descendants or chosen successors. The power system itself is a complicated network that operates internationally. It has, so to speak, an onion structure, as Hannah Arendt already described for totalitarianism. The further you penetrate into the inner circles, the greater the power. At the same time, no one knows where the core of the system is. Is it the WEF, Blackrock, the United Nations, the US government, the Pentagon, the Rothschild Bank? Even the participants in the various formats probably don't know exactly where the center of power should be located, which is because it doesn't exist. Because the system is controlled by a series of overlapping interests that are put into action at their intersections.
Totalitarian rule is not just a radicalized form of previous models of rule, but a fundamentally new one. Previous categories, ideals and values fail in the face of a system that pursues population policy and has no problem systematically killing people thousands and millions of times. It is a system in which everyone is subjectively innocent. Those killed are innocent because they have not sinned against power. They did not commit any objective crime that would harm the power in any way, but they were simply killed for who they are. The murderers, in turn, are innocent because they did not act with the motive to murder. Instead, they wanted to serve the totalitarian system and enforce its ideals and values.
Capitalism kills millions of people worldwide through hunger, displacement, wars, work and disasters. Because all the people who are starving could have been fed long ago, all the victims of war are victims of belligerent capitalism, and everyone who dies when a factory or a mine collapses is a victim of extractivism, wage labor and the danger of poverty that capitalism systematically generated. At the same time, in this system no one is responsible, no one is guilty. Those killed are innocent because they did not sin against the system. On the contrary, they died in the performance of the duties imposed on them by this system. But the murderers, i.e. the corporate and bank managers, the paramilitary gangs who, for example, drive indigenous people from their lands, are also innocent because they simply implement the requirements of the system. It is a system of organized irresponsibility that has taken on a life of its own and in which many small gears mesh together to carry out the great work of destruction.
It is this totalitarian capitalist system that has been operating in the background for a long time and, due to normalization, unnoticed by most people. It has long since made all the structural violence, the economic way of thinking, the competition and the struggle a habit, and has slowly built up the power of the oligarchs and the structures. Both culminated in the corona totalitarianism, which continues today under different circumstances and which served to smash reality once again in order to create a new one. The reason for this is the end of leisurely economic growth and the collapse of the financial system, which necessitated a transformation. Capitalism is therefore the cause and starting point of the great transformation. It requires the destruction of everything that exists at irregular intervals, then emerges as political and military totalitarianism and experiences a phase of extreme acceleration. The transformation serves to establish a new reality that modifies the economic model to enable new growth opportunities, new profit opportunities and an expansion of the power of capitalist structures, while saving the system from collapse without calling it into question.
The system acted similarly in past totalitarianism, in that politics was absorbed by totalitarianism and driven into the phase of absolute destruction, which resulted in a devastating war. Today we know that both world wars were financed and promoted by Anglo-American capital, and that it also benefited from the post-war boom. And that's how it will always be in the future, with the difference that capital no longer has a real home, but operates globally and would therefore not shy away from the destruction of the USA or Great Britain.
If capitalism itself is not overcome, then in the future there will always be a form of totalitarianism, war and destruction. However, this may not be what most people want.
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Sources :
(1) https://www.gegen-hartz.de/news/hartz-iv-entweder-prostitution-oder-sanktion
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Thank you for posting this article, food for thought.
But the older I grow, the more I think that a real change cannot come from a system, but from every one of us become self responsible. Every system is corrupttable if there is not a vast majority of people aware, compassionate and responsible. I know, it's an utopian vision...