Capitalism: 500 Years of Decadence, a Polemic Against Market Rule and Eurocentric Progress

The essay opens with a long quotation from The Communist Manifesto, the passage in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels describe how feudalism gave way to capitalism. In their telling, new markets outgrew the feudal mode of production and the handicraft workshop. Middle-class manufacturers displaced the workshop owners, and then the machine arrived and the millionaire industrialists displaced the manufacturers. Large-scale industry created a world market, the bourgeoisie seized political power in the modern representative state, and in less than a century it had produced more productive forces than all earlier generations combined.

The author's own argument begins where that quotation ends. Marx and Engels, he says, summarized the transition according to the logic of Eurocentrism, and the question now is what that worldview has made of the people living under it. He poses two questions to the contemporary world: what is life, and what is its purpose. His answer is that the world replies, "I do not know." He attributes that ignorance to five hundred years of decadence, which he describes as a stubborn drift toward collective suicide.

Much of the essay then traces this emptiness through European intellectual and cultural history. Dante, it says, separated life from religion, following Aristotle. Descartes reduced the human being to a thinking machine, so that feeling and sensation became mental processes open to measurement. Nietzsche declared that people invented good and evil rather than receiving them from heaven. From that starting point, the author says, atheism became an act of creation, religion a myth, and prophets mercenaries. He cites the Barber of Seville's line that gold sharpens the understanding, and Columbus's remark in Jamaica that gold can even open Paradise to souls. He also lists hard rock, techno, Impressionism, Cubism and abstraction as symptoms of meaninglessness. He faults institutional religion too, arguing that sacred texts were turned from icons into idols and from points of departure into terminal destinations.

The essay then turns to the present. Its evidence for decay is a list: emptiness in art, the disintegration of morality, chaos in the economy, repression in politics, merchants of religion, resurgent individualism, wars, genocides, massacres and the erasure of cultures. It names no specific event and gives no casualty figures. The author calls this the death throes of one age and the birth of another, and asks whether people must be crushed beneath its wheels.

The sharpest language is aimed at the market economy, which he casts as a religion. He describes a single insatiable god of the market, capitalism and imperialism, served by priests in the temples of Wall Street and its branches in Tokyo, Berlin, New York and Paris. America is called the vanguard of decadence. GATT, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are presented as one poisonous compound spreading through the economy of the world. The debt, energy and monetary crises are called offerings on the dollar altar, and unemployment, hunger, poverty, recession and bankruptcy are its destructive gods.

Here the author briefly shifts to the vocabulary of Marxist economics. He argues that profit comes from production, through the interaction of labour power with the means of production, and not from circulation. Price, he says, is the monetary form of value in exchange and need not express it truthfully, and crisis appears as a rupture between the two. He calls this the consequence of a distorted political economy and of the domination of a single culture and civilization.

The excerpt breaks off mid-sentence, as it begins to take up underdevelopment and development. The piece is a polemic, not reporting. Its claims about institutions and crises are asserted rather than documented, so a reader will want to weigh it as advocacy and look elsewhere for evidence on the policies it condemns.