Choosing one's friends

Under the Assad régime thousands have been tortured to death, a hundred and ninety thousand have been killed by toxic gas and high explosives, and countless others have been maimed, while millions have escaped to neighbouring countries. Under the Baghdadi régime hundreds have been executed, some have been killed by high explosives and tens of thousands have escaped to neighbouring countries. Notwithstanding this gruesome arithmetic and because of a gory murder on video, Assad is being considered the lesser evil. 

Was it not in the US that a man of doubtful guilt was executed recently in a forty-five minutes long agony? He would surely have preferred to have his throat cut.

Capital’s accumulative imperative

Capital pays for investments and for labour, but not for surplus value. In exchange for the goods and services produced, capital gets back what it has paid out. But how can the surplus produce get back that which has not been paid out? This problem puzzled Marx and, a century ago, Rosa Luxemburg reasoned that it depended on imperialist expansion (1). It would seem, however, that there are other ways by which capital can obtain more than it has spent. The most obvious one is monetary creation, the durable cash of central banks and the renewable credit of commercial banks. More is spent than is earned, and surplus value is monetised. Capital accumulation supposes that surplus value is invested, that it is monetised and buys more investments. Foreign trade crosses monetary boundaries and though it is measured in currency, mostly in US dollars, it cannot be paid in legal tender and is a form of barter. When all exchanges are between commodities and money the field is level. But when exchanges are between commodities without the money, there is an unbalance if one side is always destined to consumption and the other to investment. The investment will transmit its value or acquire added value in a production process, and the end product (with surplus value) will be monetised on the market, whereas consumption can only be consumed. Its only possible added value is distribution. Exchanging finished products for raw materials brings jobs and surplus value, but the trading partner gets neither. In North America iron axe-heads and guns were traded for furs, and in West Africa glass beads and guns were traded for ivory and slaves, and the natives were plunged into a deadly spiral of fighting for resources and weapons. During the colonial period railways and armed administration were exchanged for mineral and vegetable products. And after “independence” guns and luxury cars maintained the commercial exchanges, with their resulting violence.

Surplus value has no equivalent demand inside the system, so it must be created or imposed elsewhere. Surplus value can be monetised by monetary creations, or it can be exported as consumption and come back as investments. The first ends with junk-bonds, sub-prime credit and financial breakdown. The second leads to colonial or neo-colonial empires confronting one another, and to growing confusion among the subordinate nations, especially when the exchanged resource runs out. Capital’s imperative is accumulation. To do this, it must prey on society and humanity in order to transform its surplus value into cash or raw materials for increased capitalisation. Causes produce effects. The world is aptly commemorating the last General Confrontation’s début, when competing empires went to war in a drama that mobilised nations for thirty years of mutual destruction. Evolving technology has changed perceptions and modes of production, and war, but there are no signs that capital’s fatal path has been modified, and the part it plays is constantly masked by other supposed causes such as fanaticism, greed, envy, hate, fear and the human killer-instinct, all of which may in fact result from the capitalist imperative. The right of capital to take surplus value is carved in constitutional stone as private property and is hard to contest, but the means it must have recourse to for the accumulation of its surplus value are unacceptable, unethical, dangerous and ultimately cataclysmal.

1. The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg, Routledge 2003

Or:http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/

Especially section three.

Taking sides

Assad, Netanyahu, Sissi and Maliki are far from representing liberal democracy, and yet the US and its European vassals are their objective supporters. Assad has continued his mass murders with Russian and Iranian supplies. The same goes for Netanyahu and Sissi with American supplies. And now Maliki is being propped up by US air-strikes. Action and inaction are equally signs of consent. And consenting to tyranny abroad can easily result in bringing it back home.