Harvey on Iraq (as filtered through George Monbiot)

A friend passed this on to me.  I'm not convinced by
the argument, but I thought some of you may find it
interesting -- Khaldoun

Too much of a good thing 
Underlying the US drive to war is a thirst to open up
new opportunities for surplus capital

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 18, 2003
The Guardian

We are a biological weapon. On Saturday the anti-war
movement released some 70,000 tonnes of organic
material on to the streets of London, and similar
quantities in locations all over the world. This
weapon of mass disruption was intended as a major
threat to the security of western governments. 

Our marches were unprecedented, but they have, so far,
been unsuccessful. The immune systems of the US and
British governments have proved to be rather more
robust than we had hoped. Their intransigence leaves
the world with a series of unanswered questions. 

Why, when the most urgent threat arising from illegal
weapons of mass destruction is the nuclear
confrontation between India and Pakistan, is the US
government ignoring it and concentrating on Iraq? Why,
if it believes human rights are so important, is it
funding the oppression of the Algerians, the Uzbeks,
the Palestinians, the Turkish Kurds and the
Colombians? Why has the bombing of Iraq, rather than
feeding the hungry, providing clean water or
preventing disease, become the world's most urgent
humanitarian concern? Why has it become so much more
pressing than any other that it should command a
budget four times the size of America's entire annual
spending on overseas aid? 

In a series of packed lectures in Oxford, Professor
David Harvey, one of the world's most distinguished
geographers, has provided what may be the first
comprehensive explanation of the US government's
determination to go to war. His analysis suggests that
it has little to do with Iraq, less to do with weapons
of mass destruction and nothing to do with helping the
oppressed. 

The underlying problem the US confronts is the one
which periodically afflicts all successful economies:
the over-accumulation of capital. Excessive production
of any good - be it cars or shoes or bananas - means
that unless new markets can be found, the price of
that product falls and profits collapse. Just as it
was in the early 1930s, the US is suffering from
surpluses of commodities, manufactured products,
manufacturing capacity and money. Just as it was then,
it is also faced with a surplus of labour, yet the two
surpluses, as before, cannot be profitably matched.
This problem has been developing in the US since 1973.
It has now tried every available means of solving it
and, by doing so, maintaining its global dominance.
The only remaining, politically viable option is war. 

In the 1930s, the US government addressed the problems
of excess capital and labour through the New Deal. Its
vast investments in infrastructure, education and
social spending mopped up surplus money, created new
markets for manufacturing and brought hundreds of
thousands back into work. In 1941, it used military
spending to the same effect. 

After the war, its massive spending in Europe and
Japan permitted America to offload surplus cash, while
building new markets. During the same period, it spent
lavishly on infrastructure at home and on the
development of the economies of the southern and
south-eastern states. This strategy worked well until
the early 1970s. Then three inexorable processes began
to mature. As the German and Japanese economies
developed, the US was no longer able to dominate
production. As they grew, these new economies also
stopped absorbing surplus capital and started to
export it. At the same time, the investments of
previous decades began to pay off, producing new
surpluses. The crisis of 1973 began with a worldwide
collapse of property markets, which were, in effect,
regurgitating the excess money they could no longer
digest. 

The US urgently required a new approach, and it
deployed two blunt solutions. The first was to switch
from the domination of global production to the
domination of global finance. The US Treasury, working
with the International Monetary Fund, began to
engineer new opportunities in developing countries for
America's commercial banks. 

The IMF started to insist that countries receiving its
help should liberalise their capital markets. This
permitted the speculators on Wall Street to enter and,
in many cases, raid their economies. The financial
crises the speculators caused forced the devaluation
of those countries' assets. This had two beneficial
impacts for the US economy. Through the collapse of
banks and manufacturers in Latin America and East
Asia, surplus capital was destroyed. The bankrupted
companies in those countries could then be bought by
US corporations at rock-bottom prices, creating new
space into which American capital could expand. 

The second solution was what Harvey calls
"accumulation through dispossession", which is really
a polite term for daylight robbery. Land was snatched
from peasant farmers, public assets were taken from
citizens through privatisation, intellectual property
was seized from everyone through the patenting of
information, human genes, and animal and plant
varieties. These are the processes which, alongside
the depredations of the IMF and the commercial banks,
brought the global justice movement into being. In all
cases, new territories were created into which capital
could expand and in which its surpluses could be
absorbed. 

Both these solutions are now failing. As the east
Asian countries whose economies were destroyed by the
IMF five years ago have recovered, they have begun,
once more, to generate vast capital surpluses of their
own. America's switch from production to finance as a
means of global domination, and the government's
resulting economic mismanagement, has made it more
susceptible to disruption and economic collapse.
Corporations are now encountering massive public
resistance as they seek to expand their opportunities
through dispossession. The only peaceful solution is a
new New Deal, but that option is blocked by the
political class in the US: the only new spending it
will permit is military spending. So all that remains
is war and imperial control. 

Attacking Iraq offers the US three additional means of
offloading capital while maintaining its global
dominance. The first is the creation of new
geographical space for economic expansion. The second
(though this is not a point Harvey makes) is military
spending (a process some people call "military
Keynesianism"). The third is the ability to control
the economies of other nations by controlling the
supply of oil. This, as global oil reserves diminish,
will become an ever more powerful lever. Happily, just
as legitimation is required, scores of former
democrats in both the US and Britain have suddenly
decided that empire isn't such a dirty word after all,
and that the barbarian hordes of other nations really
could do with some civilisation at the hands of a
benign superpower. 

Strategic thinkers in the US have been planning this
next stage of expansion for years. Paul Wolfowitz, now
deputy secretary for defence, was writing about the
need to invade Iraq in the mid-1990s. The impending
war will not be fought over terrorism, anthrax, VX
gas, Saddam Hussein, democracy or the treatment of the
Iraqi people. It is, like almost all such enterprises,
about the control of territory, resources and other
nations' economies. Those who are planning it have
recognised that their future dominance can be
sustained by means of a simple economic formula: blood
is a renewable resource; oil is not. 

www.monbiot.com 


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com