It is said that Eisenstein hoped to make a movie out of Marx’s Capital. If anyone wanted to make a movie out of today’s capitalism, it would be a horror film. Like all horror films, this is a sequel. The convergence of financial crisis, environmental disaster and stalled imperialism that we see today has recurred across the modern period, beginning in the eighteenth century. It’s catchphrase is “the horror, the horror,” first coined by Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness concerning European imperialism, reapplied by Francis Ford Coppola to the Vietnam war. Today, as befits the third in a series, the crisis of capitalism, imperialism and the biosphere is planetary.

As the astonishing scandals unfolding at Barclay’s Bank indicate once more, if capital is the monster in this film, it is one that is now out of control. The particular issue concerns the fixing of interest rates by the bank to its own ends. Imagine that one month you want to pay credit card debt so you want interest rates low to keep the payment down. The next month you have some savings, so you want rates high so you can make a profit.  Of course, we have no choice. For banks, it’s different, as Reuters report:

Some 257 requests were made to rate submitters from at least 14 Barclays derivatives traders over four years. Traders at other banks also tried to influence Barclays’ rate, while Barclays’ traders put pressure on the rates offered by others. Most of the world’s biggest banks are under investigation…Barclays is the first to settle.

This is at one level another Bankster scandal, in which there’s one rule for them and another for us.

The traders making these fixes were nonetheless relatively low-level operatives. We tend to assume that behind them is some Dr. Evil figure manipulating the whole scheme, in the manner of Gordon Gekko. An oral history project on the financial crisis shows rather than no-one understood what was going on. The credit derivatives people relied on their computers to calculate what their trades had actually done. In 2008, they started to discover that they were losing more money than they could imagine every time they hit F9 to make the calculation. And these were the best informed people. One trader explained:

most in the bank didn’t understand our products. Even the risk and compliance people who were supposed to be our internal checks and balances …  I learned that the people high up know just enough for the role they’re in…

all major banks and corporations are doing this.

This is the horror–the machine you have created is out of control and you don’t know how to stop it. The trader developed night sweats, skin disease and has been diagnosed with PTSD. The interest rate fixes were sticking plaster over gaping wounds.

This does not get fixed by setting a new way to calculate LIBOR. As Christian Marazzi has put it, in his analysis of post-Fordist capitalism:

What is at stake is not only the understanding of our world, but our very being in this world.

Like Mr. Kurtz, we find ourselves in an existential crisis, in which the current ways of doing things are a horror, but so is the alternative: “the horror, the horror.” It is the apparent anonymity of the crisis that creates the horror–the very fact that the algorithms have done it. As Emmanuel Levinas put it in a different context:

In the night, when we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not “something.” But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence…The rustling of the there is…is horror.

As this suggests, for existentialism, the horror is in part the absence of God, or of rational purpose. Capitalism has claimed a spiritual dimension since Adam Smith’s fantasy of the “invisible Hand” and in modern America, capitalism is directly bonded with fundamentalism Christianity. So there is a reason that anti-capitalism is also anti-monotheism.

Imperialism sees itself as erasing nothingness, whether the terra nullius of supposedly empty space or the tabula rasa (clean slate) of the “heathen” mind, requiring conversion, the very “colonization of consciousness” (Jean and John Comaroff). When it looks at land it sees nothing but “wilderness as never having entered into any economic transaction” (Timothy Morton). What the missionary David Livingstone described as the Three Cs, “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization” were intimately linked. Perhaps there are in fact then three horrors.

In Conrad’s roughly contemporary novel, it is only after Kurtz has been retrieved from his inland ivory station that he gets a glimpse of what he has truly done–“the horror, the horror.” The death and destruction wielded by his company in pursuit of accumulation finally becomes apparent to him. The devastation of the rain forest described here is still just a backdrop but this was a period in which carbon emissions escalated dramatically and biosphere extinction moved closer. You can’t simply endorse Conrad because part of his story is about Kurtz “going native” and adopting indigenous religion. Religion is part of the horror, above all colonizing Christianity, the third horror.

In today’s Congo region, millions have died since the Rwanda genocide of 1994 opened an era of wide-scale instability. From time to time, there are newspaper articles and the liberals shake their heads but, as Zizek has consistently pointed out, paying attention to the horror of the Congo then and now means not reforming the system but abolishing it.

So how does this movie end? There are those market apologists who suggest that the 1890s financial panic turned out great with a decade of prosperity following it. Most with a degree of perspective see it as the precursor to World War 1. I’m not sure that capitalism can revive itself without a dose of war profits, but present-day counterinsurgency warfare has proved spectacularly unprofitable for the population at large.

I do think we should refuse existentialist despair. The solution to the Congo question of the 1890s was in the end fairly simple: stop colonizing it. But once the new automobiles wanted rubber tires that was not going to happen. It’s fascinating how clearly the fossil-fuel economy that was modern capitalism’s first intensifier is still its last support now that the machine has gone crazy.

Against craziness and religion, we can offer rational solutions: Stop burning fossil fuels. End derivative markets. End imperialism, and use the massively reduced military budget to fund education, health care and a living wage. Here’s the thing. In the first reel of the movie, it almost seems possible that the monster will win but in the end it never does.