Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught us that capitalism is a system primarily characterized by private control over the means of production. In other words: Factories and banks are privately owned. Business decisions are guided by whether they generate surplus value that can be appropriated as profit by the owners. Workers become a commodity, one that must, however, market itself and generate exchange value.

In this context, the state’s primary role is to safeguard these relations of production and balance the interests of the various factions of capital. In doing so, the construction of neoliberal ideologies sought to minimize state benefits for the poorer strata of society, destroy the protective mechanisms of poorer societies, and simultaneously transfer state resources to capitalist oligarchies. Those who demanded the elimination of subsidies were, in fact, the very ones who benefited from them. Elon Musk is a current example of this, having actively helped reduce government spending while simultaneously securing subsidies for SpaceX.

Capital has always been and remains constantly on the lookout for new avenues of exploitation. This requires, on the one hand, the necessity of permanent economic growth within society and, on the other hand, the constant development of new global markets. This not only comes at the expense of people but also devastates and destroys the ecology of this planet. The compulsion and the inherent dynamics of capitalism to constantly grow and achieve ever-higher profits lead to the depletion of the planet and, step by step—but also through tipping points—destroy the conditions of existence on Earth.

Marx and Engels already foresightedly analyzed in the mid-19th century how the process of globalization unfolds under capitalism—here is their famous and still relevant quote from the Communist Manifesto:

The need for ever-expanding markets for its products drives the bourgeoisie across the entire globe. Everywhere it must take root, everywhere it must expand, everywhere it must establish connections. Through the exploitation of the world market, the bourgeoisie has made production and consumption cosmopolitan.

Capitalism means the embedding of economic greed in the deep structures of a society. This manifests itself in an extreme wealth gap, with very rich multimillionaires and billionaires and an increasingly larger class of impoverished people. The Marxist theory of impoverishment applies not only to the wealth gap between the rich nations of the Global North and the nations of the Global South affected by global exploitation, but is now also evident in the wealthier nations.

US President Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance, and others are examples of the capitalist right wing, which is attempting, through radical means, to undermine the welfare state and install an extremely ruthless form of capitalism.

Capitalism expanded worldwide as part of its historic triumphal march. It not only spread from Europe into all geographical regions of the world, but it also penetrated hegemonicly into the inner spaces of human coexistence—as Elmar Altvater notes:

The micro- and nanostructures of life are assigned value and thereby manipulated in such a way that their transformation into commodities and their exploitation in monetary form result. Private retreats are not safe from the constraints of money and capital. Forms of social co-existence are increasingly structured in contractual terms and thereby subjected to the logic of monetary market equivalence. Capitalist valorization is an all-encompassing yet, within the confines of the planet, limited and limiting principle, whose rules must be obeyed as if they were God’s commandments.

In an ever-evolving and diversifying capitalism, zones are emerging worldwide where financial oligarchies live behind guarded walls, largely evade taxes, and refuse to fulfill the social obligations of a community. The system described by Canadian-born historian Quinn Slobodian as “crack-up capitalism” is characterized by him as follows:

Within the national containers, one finds unusual legal spaces, anomalous territories, and peculiar jurisdictions. There are city-states, tax havens, enclaves, free ports, technology parks, duty-free zones, and innovation centers. The world of nation-states is littered with zones—and we are only beginning to understand their influence on contemporary politics.

The capitalist Struggle for Resources

The privatization of public funds, destructive investment in weapons and the military, the lack of purchasing power among impoverished segments of the population, geopolitical rivalries, as well as the finite nature of the Earth’s resources and the struggles over them lead to economic crises that are managed in various ways. Eco-imperial tensions are—according to political scientists Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen:

Tensions between states and state alliances resulting from capitalism’s access to an ‘outside’ that is becoming increasingly available and uncontested in the ecological crisis. These eco-imperial tensions are becoming a structural feature of international politics; they are therefore not merely temporary but permanently present.

The extreme political right, in particular, exploits the crisis-prone nature of capitalism to promise authoritarian solutions to crises and, ultimately, to further exacerbate the wealth gap if it gains the power to do so. Human rights are disregarded; international law is violated. The struggle for resources such as oil, gas, and rare earths, and the billions in profits associated with them, shapes international politics and leads to wars and mass displacement.

Currently, the largest fossil fuel dealers—the US, Russia, and Iran—are fighting over global resources in the interests of their economies and financial capital. They are also fighting against an emerging capitalist faction and against cooperative initiatives that aim to solve the global energy problem with the help of renewable energy.

This critique applies not only to conditions in the Global North but also to the capitalist development path in the countries of the Global South—according to political scientist and activist Alexander Behr:

A brutal class struggle is also underway in many other countries of the Global South. The national bourgeoisie serves the interests of transnational corporations. In the short term, it can rely on a growing middle class that wants to secure its imperial lifestyle. But the hegemonic development path—whether state-interventionist as in China or neoliberal as........

© Common Dreams