We know that capital advances itself steadily to crisis, through its own operation, and that it generally surmounts a given crisis in one of two ways. Either it approaches or reaches catastrophe, and through necessity, must rearrange or revolutionize itself in some way, such as through international war, civil war, mass labor or political unrest, or through other related modalities, or it simply displaces the crisis by displacing the conflict, such as by opening foreign markets, new fields of production, or new labor processes in different countries, or it displaces people or logistical obstacles that stand in its way. Both ways resolve crises by ultimately delaying them.
This is because capital at its very base tends to proceed towards a general crisis of the cradle. Capital may have to continuously revolutionize itself as it becomes stable on various tiers of organization at various times, but its antagonism to the very environment and ecosystem that gives rise to it cannot simply be surmounted, displaced, or revolutionized. Environmental degradation is the equivalent of the metaphorical brick wall: once you finally reach its limits, you're done.
I'm thinking here of that old "Snake" video game, where you have to navigate and steadily grow a snake, that must not cross itself or it is game over. Of course, the game inevitably advances towards this outcome, and it is up to you, the player, to get as far as possible and reach a high score before experiencing catastrophe.
A high score! Our captains of industry/finance/war/etc. are playing a game of their own, and going for that coveted high score. But the game may only be reset so many times.
The "Snake" quality of capital is coming out in several different ways, and we can start with a mounting crisis that doesn't even have to be completely terminal. As stressed capital concentrates itself around national entities, an increasingly globalized and interconnected world market is further threatened the more those very processes of globalization and interpenetration advance nationally domestic crises like inequality and resource depletion, thus the stressed and concentrated capital, which rends the world market as nations retract and bristle.
For example, theres been much hand-wringing over the effects of growing trade wars, and it is true that there are large amounts of Chinese capital tied up in things like international real estate, and the Chinese also hold a large amount of U.S. dollars, and they act as a global raw material consumer of last resort. There is also much to speculate about the sheer amount of manufacturing infrastructure in Asia, which a great war would certainly endanger.
To give another more specific example, there are foreign owned businesses like the Russian-owned aluminum smelter in Ireland, that upon having their operations withdrawn, could cause quite the stir in the European automotive industry. And so on. This is all precluding a simple acceleration into nuclear war, which makes these questions moot anyway.
Like that other nuclear crisis of the cradle, the environmental crisis, most readily articulated in climate change sets aside all questions of human catastrophe and capital in its aftermath, and cuts straight to the annihilation of most living things currently on the planet.
And so it is. To make use of a rather crude but effective metaphor, capital's tail is so long, that it cannot but shit where it eats - or sleeps. Even in the short term, all of the production infrastructure which has been concentrated in developing nations or protectorates for reasons of economic and political expediency is now threatened by the effects of climate change that are especially harsh in those very regions, as we saw with the saline bag shortage that was a consequence of the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico.
Yes, the worlds greatest polluters are rich industrial nations, and the worlds most climate-besieged territories are poor developing nations which are less able to defend themselves - a great injustice. But those places too make up the cradle of capital, which has extended itself across the globe, and concentrated and centralized its supply chains and production centers in those places. One may have guns, tanks, and concrete barries, but those things won't do much good when one can no longer replace them as they age or are destroyed.
And indeed, this is merely relevant to the short term. In the long term, capital and cradle and all are set to transform far beyond any picture of continuity that those things might imagine to themselves.
