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As the wealthiest single percentile is fast approaching its pre-1929 share of global wealth the mood of triumphalism at the top of the economic pile has reached fever pitch. Straw hats and champagne on the lawn have given way to private jets and the too-rich-to-be-accountable arguments before the courts as the Hooray Henrys and Henriettas abandon their now futile justifications for their unearned and fabulous wealth. This embracing and celebration of fortune in high society is the social manifestation of the carnival atmosphere on the trading floor. The super-rich investors and their Gordon Gekkos – the absolute apex of the Capitalist monster – have broken into a victory song. Class war has been won, and they know that they’re the winners.
Capitalism need no longer wear the mask of the magnanimous as it did in the face of an adversary still fit to fight. Working people and organised labour the world over has been soundly licked, and even where is has not been completely crushed it has been infiltrated by fifth columnists and subdued. No longer in fear of a rebellion from the lower orders the pretence has been dropped and the outriders of the moneyed class have come out to proclaim their coup with the bold and unapologetic gospel of Libertarianism and Anarcho-Capitalism.
Capitalism’s revolution has not yet come into full flower. It has not quite reached its desired end. When in 1681, when the bourgeois state was still on the future horizon, Louis XIV’s powerful finance minister asked the merchants of France how the king might best help them, M. Le Gendre stated with beautiful prescience the destiny of Capitalism in saying: “Laissez-nous faire” (“Let us be”). For all his monarchic ambitions for the Kingdom of France, Louis’ glorification of France by the destruction of its neighbours was bad for business; that is bad for the mercantilists’ plans for personal enrichment. Even before the birth of the mercantile bourgeois state the fathers of Capitalism knew their hopes were ultimately in the destruction of the state. This is to say that for Capitalism the creation of the bourgeois state was not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
Lenin was wrong to imagine that imperialism was the final development of Capitalism. The post-nation state is the final end of the bourgers’ dream. Some three centuries later, after their forging and subsequent abandonment of their helots – the industrial working class – their grand strategy is nearing completion. As their riches swell, forcing the bottom fifty percent to eke out a subsistence living on their crumbs, they are dismantling the very instruments of state that were built to feed their one time wage slaves. The large workforces of the past are now surplus to requirement, and so are now to be simply cut off. Left unchecked this terrible flower will be stopped only when everything that makes the world liveable is utterly depleted.
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