The Inexorable Logic of Götterdämmerung Capitalism

Say a company owned a forest that it had harvested selectively for generations, delivering its shareholders a consistent ten percent return. Meanwhile, the world financial markets were offering bonds with a fifteen percent return. Lumber prices dropped, and the company's returns dropped, so the traders dropped it and it shares plummeted, so the shareholders were angry. The management, on the edge of collapse, decided to clear-cut the forest and invest the profits from that lumber sale immediately into bonds that yielded a higher return than the forest had. In effect, the money that the forest represented was more valuable than the forest itself, because long-term value had collapsed to net present value; and so the forest was liquidated, and more money entered the great money balloon. And so the inexorable logic of Götterdämmerung capitalism demolished the world to increase the net present values of companies in trouble. And all of them were in trouble.

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica, pp. 57.

I decided to do a little research to better understand what Robinson means by the term "Götterdämmerung capitalism" in the passage above. As far as I can tell, this is a term that Robinson himself, or someone near to him, invented, although a Google search shows vague connections between Götterdämmerung and capitalism all over the place. This is because about 90 years ago some folks likened the Ring of the Nibelung to Capitalism. Let me explain:

The Wikipedia article on "Götterdämmerung" explains that the word is German for "Twilight of the Gods", and is the title of the fourth opera in Wagner's tetralogy "Der Ring des Nibelungen" (The Ring of the Nibelung), which retells (with significant revision) the legends of Norse mythology. The title itself is a German (mis)translation of the Norse word "Ragnarok", which refers to a prophesized war of the Gods that causes an apocalypse. The war itself is a contest for a ring of power. Ever since the opera was created, people have likened the ring to any number of seductive vices that corrupt people, capitalism being one.

However, it is only recently that the phrase, Götterdämmerung capitalism, has been used. The plainest interpretation of what Robinson or anyone else means by the term is the destruction of the world due to a war among the "Gods" of capitalism, i.e. large corporations, and the handful of super-elite that run them.

Judging from the paragraph cited above, and the first 56 pages of the book, and various reviews I have read, Robinson is thinking primarily of the literal destruction of the world, i.e. the Earth -- the natural environment. But it would be interesting to find other interpretations/extensions of the term that pertain to the destruction of other facets of human experience that we might rightly consider to be part of the world, such as the relationship and influence between the Community and the Individual.

From other resources, it appears there are a number of people who seem to think that Götterdämmerung means the twilight of something, and that therefore, Götterdämmerung capitalism means the twilight of capitalism, or perhaps, the twilight of some form of capitalism. These are clear misinterpretations of the term, however.