Total Capital

Total Capital
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The fear of an eco-dictatorship is misleading.
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Since the issue of climate change has come into the public spotlight, warnings have also become louder. There are frequent references to an eco-dictatorship that is imminent and will be imposed on the people under the command of the party that calls itself green. However, this is nothing more than a diversionary tactic that obscures the true dictatorship that has long since established itself.

by Felix Feistel

[This article posted on 1/25/2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/das-totale-kapital.]



The climate justice movement has gained public attention, especially over the past year. Suddenly, climate change is on everyone's lips and is being widely discussed. Even the German government is suddenly taking action and passing a climate package. From the outset, this development has been accompanied by skeptical objections. The argument goes that the activists, in alliance with or even directed by politicians, want to introduce an eco-dictatorship and rob people of their freedom.

Apart from the fact that a large proportion of the activists are anarchists, who could not be further removed from establishing a centralised, totalitarian state, this view suffers from another crucial flaw. To fear a dictatorship presupposes that we currently live in freedom and that this freedom is under threat. However, this is by no means the case. Dictatorship has been around for a long time, and the freedom in which we supposedly live is nothing more than an illusion.

The dictatorship of capital
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It is the dictatorship of total capitalism that negates the freedom of each individual. In recent decades, economic and financial interests have eaten their way into every area of people's lives and, as it were, subjugated them. People count solely on the basis of their economic usefulness.

One of the most important analysts of totalitarian rule was Hannah Arendt. In her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she compiled her findings on the dictatorship of National Socialism. There she describes as a characteristic of totalitarian forms of rule that they replace the law, which is supposed to set the limits of human action, with an “iron band” that encircles all people and thus completely robs them of their freedom of action. Human laws are also only the expression of a higher law: the law of motion. This means that everything is subordinated to a never-ending movement toward an unattainable goal. In National Socialism, this goal was the creation of a “superhuman” through “racial hygiene.”

The movement that was supposed to lead to this goal expressed itself in the constant exclusion of new population groups as “unclean” or “parasitic” and culminated in their extermination. However, this movement could never come to an end and was thus forced to encompass ever new population groups. It had itself become a law, and totalitarian rule served to maintain this movement. To this end, it used terror to accelerate what was seen as a predetermined process. This terror was carried out by the secret service and police apparatus as well as paramilitary groups.

Eternal growth
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If we analyze capitalism in its current form, we will see striking similarities. Even today, the entire system serves a law of constant movement. It is eternal economic growth, which today no longer even has a defined goal. It is simply pursued for its own sake. Everything else is subordinated to this movement. In order to maintain the movement itself, everything that seems necessary is done.

For years, more and more areas of social affairs have been privatized, whether it be drinking water supply, education, or social welfare. The movement of eternal economic growth wants to claim all this and much more for itself. To the same end, taxes for companies are being lowered and wealth tax abolished, banks are being bailed out, austerity programs dictated, and free trade agreements concluded. At a frenzied pace, the entire planet Earth is being exploited, species are being destroyed, and the climate is being altered, solely to serve perpetual economic growth.

The results of these processes are then converted into figures that are supposed to represent the gross domestic product and its annual growth.

The entire complex life of humans and nature is condensed into a single number, the steady increase of which is the highest of all goals. At the same time, it is claimed that the higher this number is, the better off people are, while an ever-increasing proportion of the population is experiencing the exact opposite.

The well-being of all non-human beings, who are sacrificed to eternal growth, is completely neglected. It is a pure ideology that has completely detached itself from reality.

Of course, radical market capitalism no longer relies exclusively on physical violence to achieve economic growth. Whereas National Socialism acted with a sledgehammer, neoliberal capitalism uses a scalpel. Nevertheless, it still employs terror. Only this terror does not come in the form of stormtroopers in black uniforms, but as colorless bureaucrats and men in suits.

Performance terror
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Absolute performance terror reigns in economic and working life. People are forced to perform wage labor in order to earn a living. They are completely dependent on money because it is the only way they can make a living. Without money, there is no roof over their heads, no food, no clothing. Thus, those who are able to work must place themselves in a position of dependence on wage labor and accept the jobs that companies offer them.

In doing so, however, they are spurred on to constant performance. They must be “productive” in order to generate added value for entrepreneurs, which, at least according to propaganda, flows into eternal economic growth. The fact that a not inconsiderable portion of this ends up in the pockets of the actors involved, i.e., corporate managers and major shareholders, naturally reinforces their conviction that they are doing the right thing. Those who are not prepared to be exploited for eight hours or more will sooner or later be shown the door and left to fend for themselves. In Austria, they have even gone so far as to repeal the eight-hour working day.

Companies that call themselves modern, on the other hand, try to increase the productivity of their employees in other ways. They grant them generous breaks and free time, giving them the opportunity to express themselves “creatively.” However, “creativity” is merely a buzzword that relies on intrinsic motivation, on a willingness to submit to the constraints of exploitation.

However, people's lives are completely subject to the constraints of wage labor.

In this relationship, the power lies entirely with the corporations and their shareholders. They alone own the companies, factories, machines, land, and even the rights to exploit the raw materials found in the world. This ownership, which excludes everyone else from the products of labor, combined with money and the majority's dependence on it, gives them this power. Subject to them are all those who do not have such property and must earn money in some way to buy goods from the ruling class. Their property is based on the expropriation of the majority, which now dates back decades or even centuries, and which they have been able to defend ever since. 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 labor is what largely determines the lives of the majority. Nothing shapes and determines people's everyday lives as much as it does. People have to spend a large part of their time serving the interests of others, often getting up early, contrary to their biorhythm and without any real purpose, to go to their workplace, where they are exploited in the interests of others. The result of this exploitation flows to the capital owners. The people themselves receive only a small remuneration that does not reflect the value of their work at all. In this relationship, employees have no right to co-determination whatsoever. Either they do what they are told, or they are fired, because there is a huge reserve army of workers ready to replace anyone who is unwilling. Companies are organized in a totalitarian manner, and the rulers are called growth and profit.

Even so-called self-employed people are not their own bosses. They are dependent on the jobs they are given. However, these are usually very detailed and leave the self-employed no freedom at all. In addition, the service providers who offer their services at the lowest possible price are usually commissioned. The reason for this is the ubiquitous 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 dumping competition from which they cannot escape. Either they go along with it or they go under. The majority of people therefore have no freedom over their time and labor; they are subject to the total coercion of productivity. Those who prove to be unproductive will not last long in this system and will end up on welfare.

Bureaucratic terror
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Here, the terror only continues. In the form of gray bureaucrats, the authorities enforce their regulations, which aim to force people who have been rejected by the system as useless back into it. They are driven back into the army of the able-bodied by all means of coercion, and some are even forced to take on work that is contrary to human dignity, as shown by the case of a woman in Berlin who was forced into prostitution by an employee of the employment office under threat of sanctions.

In the process, people are also subjected to pointless measures that are merely aimed at keeping them busy somehow. Those who do not comply are sanctioned and must eke out an existence below the subsistence level. Bureaucrats implement this practice without any sense of humanity whatsoever. The tenor: no one who is still able to work in any way and anywhere should be “a burden on the community.” However, this means that even those who are not subject to wage labor cannot freely dispose of their lives. They are constantly under pressure and are victims of bureaucratic coercion that threatens to deny them essential services.

The rules of economics bind each individual like an iron band, robbing them of their freedom. The principle of economic efficiency has eaten its way into every area of human life.

This can be seen in the obsession with self-optimization, for example through smartwatches and fitness apps, and in the way people submit to the constraints of the economy by organizing their entire lives around it. Everything has to be “worthwhile” in some way; nothing is undertaken anymore unless it promises some advantage. A life outside economic categories is no longer possible.

Rule through fear
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Under capitalism, humans are thus condemned to total inaction. According to Hannah Arendt, action is only possible in interpersonal relationships. Joint action on a political stage, which represents a sphere of freedom in which humans are freed from all worries and necessities of survival, is the only form of action. But in capitalism, humans can only behave, i.e., react to stimuli, and even then only within the narrow limits set by the system.

Humans are never free from worries and needs. They must constantly worry about finding a job, keeping it, or at least not being sanctioned by the employment agency. After all, they have to pay their bills, as well as their rent. They are therefore completely subject to the constraints of money. Community is also unthinkable in a world where everyone has become competitors and are completely isolated. The pressure to perform also deliberately destroys interpersonal relationships. The same thing happens through the method of stirring up fear.

In neoliberal capitalism, every person is constantly and everywhere subject to worries about their sheer survival, i.e., the worry from which they must be free if they want to act. The fear is often real, but it does not have to be. However, it is an integral part of the system and is constantly fueled by it. Fear ensures that people do not rebel against this system. It makes them accept any job, allow themselves to be exploited, or at least accept the crumbs of the social welfare system instead of rebelling.

Because everyone is constantly reminded of the alternative. Whether it's the negative example of the Hartz IV recipient, who is demonized and ridiculed on television, or the emaciated children in distant regions of the world. All these images serve only to make people accept their own fate, because things could be much worse. Thus, the repressive social system introduced in Germany as part of Agenda 2010 is merely an instrument of domination designed to oppress people and rob them of their free will. They can never shape their lives freely, but must conform to the will of their employer or the authorities. This system creates systematic fear in order to keep the masses governable.

Even those who think they have a secure job cannot feel safe. This is because their livelihood is constantly linked to the economic situation. Whether you are a permanent employee of a corporation or self-employed, your livelihood rises and falls with economic developments. In a time of permanent economic crisis, everyone must fear for their livelihood. This also intensifies competition among people and atomizes the last remnants of society into its individual parts.

Consumerism
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Another aspect 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 behind economic growth. People are expected 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 source, the companies.

In neoliberal capitalism, everyone is expected to accumulate things, to buy things, even if they objectively do not need them. The fleeting money is thus—superficially speaking—converted into fixed property. However, many consumer goods today are mostly of inferior quality. They are deliberately manufactured with an “expiration date.” They are supposed to break down fairly quickly and be replaced, which is also a tribute to eternal economic growth. The consequences for nature of the mounting mountains of waste and the ever-increasing demand for raw materials are devastating, but they play no role in the calculation. Nature, too, is sacrificed to the movement of eternal growth.

At the level of consumption, the system seems to open up a world of infinite freedoms and possibilities. What devices and things do we own that no one before us could even dream of? Smartphones, computers, tablets with the right apps, food processors, clothes dryers, robots as lawn mowers or vacuum cleaners. We can buy fruit from all over the world, even strawberries in December. Is this not the paradise of freedom?

However, this freedom is only apparent. Companies decide what they produce, how and where they produce it or have it produced. They always make these decisions based on economic criteria. In other words, they produce whatever they hope will generate the greatest profit and manufacture it as cheaply as possible.

What does not matter at all, however, is whether the product actually has any relevant use. Consumers have no say in what is offered on supermarket shelves. They can only choose from similar products, the only difference between them perhaps being the manufacturer. They have no influence on the decision of what and how a product is manufactured. Often, they do not even know the exact ingredients of a product, especially in the case of food and cosmetics.

As consumers, people are completely overwhelmed by the results of the manufacturing process and can only choose between what is already available. The ideology that demand determines supply is also untrue. Consumers can only demand what has already been produced. In addition, production often takes place without any initial demand. Products are thrown onto the market that no one has ever really needed or demanded. Almost everyone now carries the best example of this in their pocket: the smartphone. The supposed steering mechanism is therefore limited to what is already there. For companies, sales figures are simply feedback on which products they can sell particularly profitably and which they should remove from their product range. It therefore serves only to optimize profits.

In some cases, however, companies create the demand themselves. To do this, they use the media, especially advertising. Here, they use every trick in the psychological bag of tricks to awaken needs, and then present the right product to satisfy them. In the process, this advertising is becoming increasingly intrusive, garish, and unrealistic. On the radio, the latest offers are literally 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 bombarded with pop-up windows and intrusive advertising clips before, during, and after almost every video you watch. So there is a kind of marketing terror that suggests needs to people that they never had before.

In addition, alternatives to the products on offer are often suppressed. In the early 1920s, General Motors, together with tire manufacturer Firestone and Standard Oil, systematically bought up and scrapped trams in many cities across the US so that Americans would switch to cars as their means of transportation. We see the result of this today in the form of fragmented cities with gigantic parking lots and wide streets that seal off vast areas. The lack of alternatives, combined with advertising that portrays the automobile as an elegant solution, has transformed the US into a country of motorists.

The media as an instrument of terror
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The media machine also serves as an instrument of terror to legitimize the ruling system. Here, the ideology of eternal economic growth is propagated, those who do not conform to the system are treated with contempt, the unemployed, for example, are degraded in their reputation, or people who are concerned with ecology, self-sufficiency, and natural medicine are abused as amusing eccentrics for entertainment. News about economic growth and the financial and stock markets is inflated with an importance it does not deserve. The media has a justification ready for every absurdity of the system. It thus serves to reinforce politics and underpin the eternal movement of economic growth.

For example, presidents who refuse to submit to the neoliberal logic of exploitation are defamed. This was very evident in the case of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, who—despite all justified criticism—tried to help Venezuelans out of poverty. The media reinterpreted events in such a way that Maduro was portrayed as the evil dictator, and demonstrations in support of Maduro were reinterpreted as protests against him. Another example is the media campaign against bankrupt Greece, which culminated in headlines such as “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks.”

Politics and the media create their own reality that has nothing to do with the real world. Adam Curtis explains how this happens on the political stage and what consequences it can have in his documentary “Hypernormalization.” He uses Muammar al-Gaddafi as an example. Gaddafi was first portrayed as an evil dictator by Western powers when it seemed politically necessary. He was blamed for terrorist attacks in Western countries, even though intelligence agencies confirmed that Gaddafi had nothing to do with them. He was also accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction, which he never had, in order to portray him as a global villain. We all know how this process ended for Gaddafi.

This way of creating reality is a key function of the media, and it also applies to the euro crisis, unemployment, the Hartz IV welfare system, and the ideology of economic growth. Right now, everything is being done to contain the growing environmental movement by turning its demands into green capitalism and reducing all problems to just CO2 emissions. However, this only serves to perpetuate radical market capitalism and justify eternal economic growth. Thus, the German government's climate package is nothing more than an attempt to paint capitalism green.

Even mentioning a departure from the movement of eternal economic growth is considered heresy, and reactions to it are always characterized by contempt, scorn, and ridicule.

If the question is raised nonetheless, the answer is usually that only capitalism can produce innovations that are useful in combating ecological destruction. But e-mobility and biodiesel only increase the extent of destruction, shifting the problems to other areas so that they become invisible at first. Capitalism naturally only produces innovations that can be turned into money. Yet it is precisely in the context of ecological destruction that a departure from the ideology of profit and growth is necessary. However, capitalism does not produce this as a “product” because it fundamentally contradicts its basic conditions. Thus, attempts are made to channel the energy for change into pseudo-solutions that conform to capitalism and to sell this as the salvation of the world.

The media and politics thus create pseudo-realities in order to preserve the ruling system. Karl Marx already recognized this when he said that the ruling ideas are always the ideas of the rulers. And Karl Marx knew neither Walter Lippman nor Edward Bernays, two of the most important idea generators in opinion making.

Fundamental rights
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Even the objection that our constitution guarantees us fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of expression, is not a confirmation of our freedom, but rather the exact opposite. After all, why does a state need to generously grant freedom of expression if we are supposedly free? Moreover, freedom of expression quickly reaches its limits as soon as it leaves the realm of accepted opinions. The system of totalitarian rule rarely resorts to state censorship, as in the case of Indymedia.

Much more often, defamation is used, as the example of Dr. Daniele Ganser shows. Silencing undesirable views is also a proven means of suppressing opinion. If all this does not help and the danger posed by the dissident becomes too great, then criminal offenses are invented and the person in question is ground down in the mills of justice in order to silence them, accompanied and justified by the media. The most recent example is Julian Assange, who is still in prison in the UK, being subjected to torture and threatening to die as a result. Hardly any media outlet sees it as its duty to defend Assange and his important work of enlightenment.

The same applies to other fundamental rights, such as freedom of assembly. The G20 protests in Hamburg showed that overly radical criticism of the ruling system, expressed by a large crowd, leads to harsh repression by the state apparatus against these crowds. If necessary, agents provocateurs are used to stage attacks on the authorities in order to have a reason for cracking down on the demonstrators. In addition, anti-capitalist groups are often monitored and infiltrated by secret services. The state police and secret service apparatus thus serves as a further instrument of power for the ruling class, which has little overlap with the political class. This makes the state an instrument of capital to secure its power and oppress the majority of people.

The value of life
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Human lives do not count in this world. As Jean Ziegler once put it: National Socialism took six years to produce 60 million deaths, neoliberalism manages it in just over a year. He is right, because the direct victims of Western-style totalitarian capitalism include people all over the world who are starving, living in war zones, fleeing their homes, or dying of curable infectious diseases. This consideration must not overlook all the other living beings that fall victim to capitalism. These include the trees that are felled every day in the rainforest for gigantic plantations and the millions of animals that lose their lives every day.

Humans in capitalism are therefore never free. Freedom is reinterpreted to mean the free choice of submission. Humans are allowed to choose which wage labor they want to submit to and which of the hundred similar flat-screen TVs they want to buy. However, they do not know true freedom. They cannot even imagine a life outside this system, a life under completely different conditions that would allow for truly free development. The media have also contributed to this by portraying the ruling system as naturally developed and the best of all worlds. The power of the market is thus compared to an “invisible hand,” which is supposed to represent a law of nature, so to speak. However, it is impossible to rebel against the laws of nature. The total domination of capitalism is thus made unassailable and declared non-negotiable.

Demagoguery of the ruling class
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If, in this system of bondage and destruction, a young generation with legitimate concerns points out that we cannot continue with constant production and constant consumption because we will otherwise destroy ourselves, then this affects the only areas in which we are suggested to have freedom: work and consumption. Many jobs contribute to the destruction of this world and therefore cannot continue to exist in the future. But the supposed freedom of consumption is also at risk, because a large proportion of products, such as cars and televisions, can only be manufactured by destroying our natural resources. Since the concept of freedom has been narrowed down to these two areas, many people now feel that the demands of the environmental movement threaten their supposed freedom. They are unaware that this freedom is not freedom at all.

This fear is fueled by the ruling class, which needs cheap labor and consumption to secure its wealth and power. They manipulate the subjugated people in such a way that they defend their own lack of freedom with the absurd accusation that the environmental movement wants to introduce an eco-dictatorship. However, this is nothing more than pure demagoguery, which completely reverses the true circumstances. This demagoguery, however, fuels a division in society that consolidates the power of capital owners.

Climate change is not a threat to freedom, but probably the last chance to escape the dictatorship of total capitalism and build a truly free society before human civilization collapses. We should seize this opportunity and stand up to the ruling class. For only they profit from this system of oppression and exploitation.

Felix Feistel, born in 1992, studied law with a focus on international and European law. He worked as a journalist while still a student; since passing his state exams, he has been working full-time as a freelance journalist and author. He writes for manova.news, apolut.net, die Freie Medienakademie, and on his own Telegram channel. Training as a trauma therapist according to Identity-Oriented Psychotrauma Theory and Therapy (IoPT) broadened his understanding of the background to events in the world.