The Covid Criminal Conspirators as the Present (& Final?) 'Tares" of Modern History.

Jesus presented another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and left. And when the wheat sprouted and produced grain, then the weeds also became evident. And the slaves of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field?

How then does it have weeds?’ And he said to them, An enemy has done this!’ The slaves *said to him, ‘Do you want us, then, to go and gather them up?’ But he *said, ‘No; while you are gathering up the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Allow both to grow together until the harvest; and at the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather up the weeds and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” Matthew 13:24-30

With the impact by Dr. David Martin’s explosive exposure this past weekend at G. Edward Griffin’s “Red Pill Expo” firmly in mind, this blog post will present a longer historical framework for thinking about the Covid Criminal Conspirators and their crimes against humanity. Of course, the effect of the “red pill – blue pill” factor is in play.

A book that on the one hand can be taken as stunningly prescient and on the other as the normal course of events in human history and specifically in the last 700 years is Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time. (One way to assess the influence of Arrighi’s book is to peruse this link to the number of topics on Wikipedia corresponding to his book’s argument.) Arrighi’s basic argument is that in the modern period – from the late Medieval period of the mid 1400s (mid-15th century) to the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there have been four cycles of the accumulation of capital in the expanding world-system of liberal capitalism and its political economy of controlled, or managed free-exchange. Obviously, the management of the systemic, endless accumulation of capital was itself a system created by political and economic structures – laws, institutions, organizations, finance and currency along with capital controls, trade agreements, transnational exchanges and processes, etc.  Those leaders of Western European nations and the U.S. who were given the power and legitimacy for the creation of such controls and management were necessarily the elite leaders and managers of the political and financial institutions.

Each of the four historical cycles lasted on average for about a century, with the earlier periods lasting longer and the more recent period lasting a shorter time. Traditionally, in accordance with Adam Smith’s theory of supply and demand in an open, free-exchange economic system of private property laws, contracts of exchange, trade agreements, and currency regulation, the cycles occurred as a result of the necessary and sufficient operations of the institutions and operations of capitalism according to capitalism’s economic theory, philosophy, ideology, and practices. As the world of nations adopted by entreaty or coercion the capitalist system and its institutional necessities, the post-WW2 project of the internationalization of American liberal capitalism has now expanded to all but a few nations and most of global humanity. Since the adoption by more and more nations, capitalism - for good and bad depending on which audience is under consideration, is a globalized system of institutions, legalities, and “stakeholders.”  China became a capitalist country officially in 1978.

This blog post will explain Arrighi’s contribution to an understanding of what is going on in the world today from a macro-economic perspective. Such a perspective sounds dull enough, but thinking very reasonably about the historical trajectories that have delivered global humanity to the current precipice of totalitarian tyranny is anything but dull. Yet in full disclosure, the purpose of this post is to use Arrighi’s scholarship to lay the groundwork for understanding the covid drama in longer historical perspective. Thus, this post will be only an introduction to further examinations of certain consequences of the modern world-system and to Biblical-theological perspectives.  Minimally, the historical factualness of the Biblical parabolic truth of “the wheat and the tares” as told by Jesus in Matthew 13 may have a more apparent historical reality today in the world events of the covid phenomenon than just interpersonal or local dynamics.

A chart by Arrighi (see below) provides an overall graphical view of the systemic cycles that have been noted and “discovered” from Arrighi’s research due to the processes and contradictions in the over 700-year capitalist political economy of the modern period. For ease of explanation by way of excessive simplification, processes can be thought of as structural or institutional organizations and legal regulations that make capitalism work at all levels of society that participate in the capitalist political economy. These processes are created and enforced by law, the courts, and the police as coercive and regulated enforcement agencies. But processes also include those organizations in the interstices of legal regulation – the criminal and extralegal processes. Contradictions are the crises which inevitably occur due to the processes that contradict each other in terms of their inputs and outputs. Contradictions such as the causes of the 1930s Great Depression and of other boom and bust periodic cycles are not just due to errors or misjudgments in the execution of known economic “laws”, but also due to the complexities and complications that emerge by unforeseen changes in all aspects of societies and their unanticipated consequences.

As the capitalist system has expanded to its present global system of relations between nations and the operations of transnational multinational corporations (MNCs), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and International Organizations (IOs), the number of moving parts and agencies of the global system has correspondingly dramatically increased, thus increasing further the complexities and complications by the vast increase of moving parts. Moving parts of course include every aspect of human life, including its creation of new agencies such as technology and its rise in the impact to human life on the planet by its effects in every aspect of human societies.

Chart: “Long Centuries and Systemic Cycle of Accumulation” by Giovanni Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century (p. 364) (https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KGqKvfJ0kW8/VuRFCNEA0FI/ AAAAAAAAAWQ/wEypk3LcDlsklqaAddTpILyv2ITat0bdg/s1600/SYSTEMIC%2BCYCLES%2BOF%2BACCUMULATION.jpg accessed 07Nov2021).

Here are some explanations for the graphical chart above. The length of time of each of the “Long centuries” has sequentially contracted. The “Long 15th & 16th century” Genoese systemic cycle of accumulation (SCA) lasted from the early to mid-fifteenth century to the early 17th century, or about 220 years. The “Long 17th century” Dutch SCA lasted from early 17tth century to the late 18th century, or about 180 years. The “Long 19th century” British SCA lasted from the late 18th century to the 1930s, or about 130 years. And the “Long 20th century” U.S. SCA began in the late 1930s – early 1940s of WW2 and is experiencing the historical “transition” to the next global hegemon – China/East Asia-?, in what may be about 100 years.

A second reference are the terms “MC” and “CM’.” MC stands for that phase of global capitalism in which capital among all capitalists is invested for the highest and best returns or accumulation for more capital (profits) used primarily in material expansion, or the industrialized production of commodities for consumption, including labor-power and nature (which has been made measurable and marketable or commodified). (p.6) The CM’ phase stands for that phase of global capitalism in which capital investment among all active global capitalists committed to the highest and best rate of return for increased accumulation has shifted predominantly to financial expansion. In financial expansion, the “total mass of money capital ‘sets itself free’ from its commodity form and accumulation proceeds through financial deals – money used to make more money. So, in financial expansion capitalists “switch their capital from trade and production to financial intermediation and speculation.” (p. 215) Hence, both of the 2 phases together comprise a full systemic cycle of accumulation.  

Note the insignias “s” and “t”. The insignia “s” is the “signal crisis” of every financial expansion and thus of the beginning of every historical “long century” for the successor dominant regime of capital accumulation as the global economic and military power. The “t” insignia is the “terminal crisis” as the ending of the period of financial benefits that have accrued to the capitalist financial investors centered in the preceding dominant regime and the beginning of the increased dominance of the succeeding regime of capital accumulation. The period between a regime’s “s” and “t” is that period of time when a regime’s center of leading global capitalists experienced the greatest payoff, or capital accumulation by financial expansion (which had been preceded by the regime’s prior material expansion). In that same period between “s” and “t” crises, global capitalists enjoyed the benefits of the “wonderful moment” of renewed wealth and power in different extents and ways differently for each regime. (p.215) But the historical “wonderful moment” passed. Fernand Braudel, a French historian who has been very influential to 20th century scholars including Arrighi, quipped that reaching the stage of financial expansion (at “s”) heralded “the sign of autumn” for “the coming winter” when the global power of the successor regime would replace the weakened former powerful regime by eventual shift of global power from the previous empire.

All of the dates shown on this graphic were the result of in-depth research and painstaking documentation in the archives and historical sources. There was no attempt to make the research results fit into pre-theorized scheme. Arrighi interpreted 3 distinct segments in each regime. For the Long 20th century, the first segment started in the 1870s and the signal crisis of the British Empire and lasted through and until the 1930s, that is, to the terminal crisis of the British Empire. From the 1930s , the second segment of the Long 20th century began, and which marked the signal crisis of the American Empire, lasted to around 1970. (Many economic historians have determined that the high point of American power was 1973 when Nixon was forced by international and national market dynamics to take the U.S. off the gold standard and make the US dollar the standard.) Arrighi’s 3rd segment for the U.S. regime of global hegemony goes through to its terminal crisis, which, in 1999 when the book was published, had not yet occurred. Arrighi didn’t and could not by hard evidence unavailable in his contemporary time, determine when the U.S. terminal crisis would occur. Granted, there are many possibilities to consider. But no doubt, based on the logic of his evidence in this macro view of history, the U.S. regime of global dominance has certainly had an unwieldy status and uncertain future after 9/11.

So, what can be said of Arrighi’s view of modern capitalist history and the emergent systemic cycles of capital accumulation. This historical graphic doesn’t argue for or against capitalism as a form political economy in comparison, say, to socialism. What it does suggest is that what the United States and the West has and is experiencing at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century has had precedence in other cyclic transitions in the modern world-system. The transitional shifting of global power from the democratic republican capitalist nation of the United States to the communist totalitarian capitalist nation of China – a repeated systemic pattern previously experienced in over 7 centuries by four previous “long centuries” of global dominance, has presented a historical challenge to those global capitalists whose fortunes and capital wealth has for decades shifted from a U.S. base to one that is transnational and based in China, freed from or unanchored to the successful operations of the institutions and politics of the United States and the West.  It also suggests that those captains of an American-style global liberal capitalism who managed Western capitalism’s power levers were faced with an inevitable change forged by the in-built contradictions and obstacles of continued wealth by the long, inevitable historical trajectories at work in the West’s developed rendition of a global political economy. This suggests that the recent decades’ development of the operational efficiencies of global communications technology, advanced supercomputer artificial intelligence, and bio- and geoengineering at both the nano and cellular levels and the whole-earth levels have provided global capitalists with the powerful means of control and management. With these macro and micro technological means, the Covid Criminal Conspirators are now attempting to manufacture an “unnatural” set of processes and dynamics through existing institutions headed by willing “stakeholders” in service to the global world-system in their attempt to change the systemic outcomes of global history which has been made over 7 centuries by the Western powers. Thirdly, in order to “jig” the world-system to make it conform with pre-arranged political economic outcomes at the global level to forestall or change the “normal” historical trajectories of the capitalist world-system, transnationalist and a-nationalist global capitalists had to manipulate the extraordinary and non-systemic inputs necessary to change the “normal” historical trajectories as expected outputs of historical international liberal capitalism. Just as 9/11 can be understood as an interruption and major “tinkering” of the systemic processes of international liberal capitalism, so the Covid Criminal Conspiracy takes on a more substantial depth of meaning when interpreted by historical data.