Capitalism’s endemic crises are so predictable they are commodified as reinsurance

Evidence

Not only radical Marxists, but also run-of-the-mill business and political leaders understand crises as endemic to this mode of production: where there is capitalism, there is instability. Capitalism’s drive to maximize surplus value comes into conflict with workers’ capacity, with competing social values, and with political frames like the nation or the state. The project of indefinite wealth accumulation is unstable and, therefore, prone to moments of political disruption, financial correction, or material obstacle. The Dutch tulip bubble, South Sea bubble, major stock market crashes every decade of the nineteenth century, the great depression, 1970s stagflation, the dot-com bust, and the global meltdown of 2008 are but a few of these crisis points. Volatility lurks: workers may unionize. Consumer confidence may lag. Sovereign tools like interest-rate reductions may be exhausted. Hurricanes may disrupt oil rigs. Floods may wreck supply chains. So high is the likelihood these difficulties will occur at regular intervals that they are subject to predictive analytics and become their own source of wealth accumulation, via commodities like “reinsurance” (through which insurers purchase and sell insurance on their own risk). Some theorists even argue that crisis poses less a threat to profit-making than a tool for it: creative destruction and shock doctrine are like controlled burns on the plains; when something goes wrong, entrepreneurs can sell new solutions. Crisis is officially ordinary, simply entailed in the everyday machinations of capitalism; “flow” floats as a figure of noncrisis: the equilibrium of the market, the uninterrupted intercourse of the many, the optimality of exchange. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 51

Categorization

• XREF: Reads against the general argument in this chapter and the reader’s project: ‘flow’ as the idealization of frictionless exchange. The economic-basis claim here grounds Kornbluh’s structural-Marxist (Jamesonian) move.
• SEED: Article angle: reinsurance as the meta-capitalist commodification of crisis itself, a concrete mechanism showing how instability becomes profit.