Capitalism and Global Economic Dynamics

People often think that capitalism is just a system of markets

and businesses and trade, etc, etc.

This is fundamentally not true.

Markets and businesses and trade pre-existed capitalism for thousands of years.

What makes capitalism distinctive is that it is an economic system

where production is organized around maximizing profit.

You maximize profit by pushing down your input costs

as much as possible, and the key inputs to all production are,

of course, labor and resources.

Now, you can do that domestically in your own population,

only to a certain extent,

because eventually you're going to face a revolution from your working classes,

and you're going to undermine the ecological basis of your production.

And so, from its very founding,

capitalism has always required some kind of outside,

a periphery from where it can obtain cheap labor and resources

on a massive scale and suppress any rebellions with impunity and externalize the costs, right?

And that's why, with the rise of capitalism, the European colonial project got underway,

invading and colonizing territories in the Global South to organize their production

around plantations and mines, etc, for export to the core.

And so,

capitalism in the core states has always...

And during the 20th century,

with the rise of the anti-colonial movements, this was a huge threat to the core states.

At this point, they faced a choice.

Either we accept decolonization abroad and we shift to some kind of post-capitalist economy,

or we intervene somehow to restore the imperial arrangement.

And that's exactly what they did.

They opted very hard for the latter.

And they did that in the form of invasions and coups against sovereign-seeking states

in the Global South, deposing most of the leading anti-colonial governments in the Global South,

including in Ghana, Indonesia, and Chile, installing in their place typically right-wing dictators that were willing to go along with Western economic interests.

That's basically the model that capitalism in the West depends on,

and anything that threatens that arrangement is responded to typically with violence.

Today it's Palestine,

Iran, and Lebanon,

and also Venezuela and Cuba.

Previously, of course, it was Vietnam and Laos and North Korea.

It's a never-ending process of brutal Western intervention and invasion.

And if we understand that the underlying structural driver is the imperatives of capital accumulation in the core,

which requires interventions against sovereign-seeking states and the Global South and the prevention of any liberation movements in the Global South from

arising. Then I think we have to understand that the ultimate solution to this is,

of course, to transition to a post-capitalist economy.

This is imperative.