What "Buying Greenland" Really Means
What Happens When Capitalism Runs Out of Things to Exploit — and Implodes into Regress?
You've probably heard by now that America's lunatic President wanted to…stifle your laughter…buy Greenland. Only it's…not for sale. Once the entire world made fun of him, which was richly deserved, including Denmark, to which Greenland belongs he then proceeded…to throw a giant baby tantrum and call off his upcoming visit to Denmark.
LOL. What the? It's the stuff of high comedy. Yet another level, there's in fact a deeper significance to this whole bizarre, ludicrous episode. Here's what "buying Greenland" really means: it's what happens when capitalism implodes into regress.
On the simplest level, American capitalism is out of things to exploit. And so it new needs new "resources" to tear apart and abuse. In case you haven't noticed, China and India — both exploited for their cheap labour pools by American capitalism — are now experiencing a severe backlash against it. The rise of Indian hypernationalism and the rise of Chinese technofascism are both reactions to the failures of American capitalism, to elites signing masses up to be the fuel in America's capitalist machine, which ended in inequality, despair, social fragmentation, discontent, resentment, and stagnation.
American capitalism can't so easily exploit these things anymore — and the truth is there isn't much left to exploit. Indian and Chinese incomes haven't risen enough to buy the things capitalism makes — because capitalism relies on making them cheap by underpaying those very people in the first place. As a result, "trade wars" and "tensions" have arisen, in the anodyne parlance of American economists. What that really means is that the system isn't working, so everyone's defecting from it now, breaking up with it.
Then there's the planet. American capitalism has been on a decades long spree of abusing it and exploiting it, too. Usually, military might is involved. Wherever people in countries rich with natural resources wanted to be social democracies — which was most nations — America's stepped in to make them capitalist. Quick, call the CIA — install a dictator: at least we can do business with him. Can't topple him? Bomb them all! That was the story of an endless list of countries, which Americans still aren't familiar with. Nicaragua, Iraq, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Afghanistan, and so on.
America's made war on more than half the world at this point — and the point of that hidden world war was to make capitalism the world's economy. Hence, America did absurd things, like installing the very dictators, Saddams and Gadhafis, it would later bomb. Whether it was for oil, for minerals, for timber, for rare earths, for cheap labour — the story was the same. You'd better sell that stuff to us — or else we'll make you. The bombs will fall and the armies will invade.
But the planet, too, is now out of things to exploit. At least the planet as we know it. The oceans are running empty of fish. The world is running out of water. The skies are so polluted that the climate is changing rapidly. The animals are undergoing the very first unnatural mass extinction in biological history. It's no overstatement to say that American capitalism has literally torn through the geology, biology, and chemistry of the planet, destabilizing them all, exploiting them past their breaking points.
And yet capitalism is an insatiable machine. It is the strangest thing in the universe: a thing which turns other things into nothing. All the forests and oceans and rivers and mountains — where are they now? They "made money." They were made into money. They were literally turned into capital. They are sitting in the bank accounts of the ultra-rich…doing nothing.
But that's still not good enough. Capitalism wants more, more, more. More stuff to turn into capital. To "make" more "money." So where will it find resources to transform into capital? Where will it find the things to transform into yet more money to stuff into the bank accounts of the ultra rich?
Enter Greenland. The climate is changing. The balance of the planet is altering. Beneath all that ice sits a veritable fortune. In oil, in minerals, in sand, in stone. There's plenty of "money" to be "made" from all those things. And now that the ice is melting, "making" that "money" is suddenly "economical", because all those resources can be gotten to more easily.
Hence, "buying Greenland." Imagine that you're a kleptocrat. What would be better than owning a giant island packed to the gills with natural resources…in an age where the planet is desperate for more, running out?
Maybe, if you could just "own" that island…you could dole out this mountain to that crony…this lake to that minion…this canyon to that henchman. That way, you could go on building your power base — using these natural resources, which are now in shorter and shorter supply every single year, to reward those who were craven enough to do your bidding.
But maybe they won't sell it to you? Ah, here's an interesting fact. America probably won't bomb Denmark. But it has bombed a long, long list of other countries. Poorer ones. Less white ones. Do you see the point a little bit? Denmark is protected by belonging to a league of rich and powerful nations. If America bombed Denmark, nobody would invade America — but all of Europe would instantly close itself off to American tourists, businesses, financial markets, etcetera.But what about countries that aren't protected by virtue of union, power, history, and fortune, like a Denmark?
Well, my friends, the truth is that this episode — "buying Greenland" — gives a us a tiny portrait of the future. Demagogues, of the authoritarian-fascist variety, will decide that resource-rich countries — the most valuable prizes of all in a world whose resources have been exploited to the bone by capitalism — will belong to them, at least the relatively powerless ones. They will do whatever it takes to have them. Who will stop them?
And so the age of resource wars is now dawning. Wars for the basics of life, which capitalism has abused, misused, depleted, eroded, and corroded. Water. Air. Soil. Food. Less powerful countries that are made rich in these things — or rich again in them, made so by climate change — will be contests of a global prize for power and possession.
In that way, the world is regressing to a past age. An age of empires, battling over harvests and conquests. A zero-sum world, where Greenlands can only belong to one of us. A time of demagogues and increasingly poor peoples seeking new Lebensraum — "living room", or basic resources to live. The world is reverting to tribal lines, to violence, to aggression, to greed — and you can see it around the globe, from India to China to Italy to America. The world is turning predatory.
It's the end of the predatory age of human history. But the end of such an age is the most cruel and violent one of all — because it is when the predators battle for the last remaining bits of prey…and then consume one another, too. The end of the predatory age is going to be its climax — not its denouement.
Trump has floated a little "trial balloon", as the Americans say — in the same way that mafiosi might "joke" about "buying" your restaurant. He's laughing. But he's not kidding. Why should he be, though? America has a long, long history of "buying" territory it needs for Lebensraum, living room, with beads and fur — and severely harming, totally destroying, nations who won't sell it what it wants…cheap.
So Trump isn't a pioneer in craving Greenland. He's the culmination of a trend, a very American way of thinking, seeing, wanting. America's the country that's made resource war for centuries now. It is the original predatory state. But now the predatory attitude America pioneered is going to become much more aggressive, visible, open, strident, in America, in others, in a depleted, eroded world where the last few resources are prized, needed, contested all that much more.
Trump's hunger for Greenland tells us this tale in no uncertain terms. It reveals what the world's kleptocrats, fascists, authoritarians, are really thinking. What they crave. How they see the future. They see a world in which ecological devastation and social destabilization are only sharper scalpels with which to prey further. They are more predatory than ever. Even the idea of an age of chaos doesn't concern them one bit. There is money to be made.
It also reveals that many societies will feel they need their fascists and authoritarians and demagogues, turn to them, not away from them. If you need to become a society of predators to win the resources you need to survive…who better to lead you?
So what better time to "make money" — to turn what's left of a bruised, battered, bleeding world into capital — than when that world can't defend itself at all? When it's veins and muscles lie exposed, naked, and vulnerable? That is what ecological devastation and social destabilization do. One melts the ice beneath which treasures are buried. The other frays the institutions of democracy that keep the bad guys at bay. Everything that's left on the withered husk of a planet — now it can be "made" into "money."
What does "buying Greenland" really mean? It is at these precise moments, in these precise ways, that capitalism implodes — having eaten through everything else — into authoritarian-fascism. Stopping along the way at kleptocracy, robber barons, violence, shakedowns, and mafias.
The Trumps of the world — and there are many of them, in many countries — would be overjoyed to live on a dying, suffocated cinder — as long as everyone else in the world was their slave, everything was their properoy, and they lived in a palace of cheap, fake gold and jewels atop the heap. The question, my friends, is whether that is the future the rest of us want.
Umair
August 2019
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