antagonism
bordiga archive
Murdering the dead

Earthquakes in India and El Salvador; a ferry sinks off the Greek island of Paros; an airliner bursts into flame at Singapore Airport; drought in East Africa; a train and its passengers burn in a tunnel in the Austrian alps; a petrol tanker explodes in Nigeria; workers die in a factory fire in South Africa; floods in England are hailed as the harbingers of global climatic change

Capitalism produces disasters almost as quickly as it produces commodities. We could follow a similar trail of the dead anytime, any place, anywhere. That is why the following texts by Amadeo Bordiga are, sadly, still relevant forty years or more after they were first written.

The attempt by the ruling class to find a scapegoat for disasters - the train driver who fell asleep or the ship’s drunken captain - is mirrored by the radical leftist search for a scapegoat from amongst the ranks of the bourgeoisie, typically the fat cat capitalist. Bordiga’s prognosis is more realistic but also more frightening, suggesting that the ruling class is incapable of preventing disasters even where it might have the will to do so: “when the ship goes down, so too do the first class passengers... The ruling class, for its part incapable of struggling against the devil of business activity, superproduction and superconstruction for its own skin, thus demonstrates the end of its control over society, and it is foolish to expect that, in the name of a progress with its trail indicated by bloodstains, it can produce safer ships than those of the past.”

Disasters are shown to arise from the innermost logic of capitalist society, not just from the negligence or malice of individuals (or individual corporations). Bordiga uses Marx’s theory of rent to explain why capitalism will squeeze the last drop out of less productive mines whatever the risk to the miners: “The lignite seams of Ribolla are among the least productive, while those of anthracite in Belgium are the most productive, and where there is no differential rent capitalism can never invest in more expensive installations to increase production and safeguard miners’ lives, unlike in the best mines in France, the Netherlands, England, Germany and America”. Fatally, at the same time “the theory of rent prohibits leaving the last, the most dangerous, mine closed”

It is not just because preventing disasters is expensive that capitalism fails to invest. Bordiga shows that capitalism is driven by “the ravenous hunger for catastrophe and ruin”, that it needs destruction. While disasters can destroy capitalist property, “The wealth that disappeared was that of past, ages-old labour. To eliminate the effect of the catastrophe, a huge mass of present-day, living labour is required”

For Marx, “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Bordiga goes a step further and shows that “To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses”. Hence “capitalism, oppressor of the living, is the murderer also of the dead”

antagonism
bordiga archive
Murdering the dead