Re: Harvey on Iraq (as filtered through George Monbiot)

Khaldoun, thanks for the post.  Some quick responses.
(1)  Do you have access to the Harvey essay?
(2) Yes and no Khaldoun, and mostly no, to some of what you wrote.
Yes to the US need to continue to exercise influence over Saudi Arabia
and the Middle East. But no in the sense that even without waging war with
Iraq the US today does have  political-economic influence over the
Middle East, but the war is being planned for different reasons arising
out of an overaccumulated capital.  The plan to war is an outcome
of the enormous investment in the military-industrial complex, an overaccumulation
of military investment which desperately needs employment if it is not
to experience a continuing devaluation.   Yes, it is not just
a question of markets but then finding a solution to the overaccumulation
of capital is not necessarily a search in terms of markets alone, it is
also expressed in terms of using-up stocks of overinvested capital
in order to make space for more capital accumulation.  Moreover, destroying
existing spaces and creating new  Middle Eastern spaces may
also work to produce 'new markets'.  But the issue of the moment is
less the new markets and more the pursuit of   'primitive accumulation',
which is a recurrent strategy in the attempt to overcome periodic bouts
of overaccumulated capital.    Finally, yes to the link
with East Asia but no in that the links are geographical-political in a
manner not mentioned in your response.  I elaborate below on some
of these aspects.

I do think that behind the warmaking plans lies a crisis of overaccumulation of capital in established developmental paths, flexible or otherwise.  The financial withdrawal (Marx) is one symptom of such an overaccumulation of capital.  What happens to all the investment in the means of coercion-intensive accumulation especially when they lie underutilised?  What better way to take care of the problem of obsolescence of military capital than by finding profitable avenues for their employment in and through a war-regime?  Regardless of what you and I think the bombs have been falling on Baghdad for a very long time, irrespective of whether or not there is a war.    Making war forestalls investment-obsolescence in the warmaking apparatus,  no matter what you or I or the hundreds of thousands with me in the streets of New York (and elsewhere) protest and think against.  Bush is able to score so well today precisely because he appears to capture the path out of the contradiction between the relative overaccumulation of capital in general, its preponderance in the military-industrial complex in particular, and the absence of any domestic spatial solution to a historically recurring overaccumulation problem.  There is a bankruptcy of capitalist solutions with regard to the 'domestic' US front, at the same time as the development of the military-industrial complex has reached a critical turning-point.  There are two ways in which the turning-point can turn.  (1) One is either the destructive utilization of weapons of mass destruction in Third World spaces (it is mostly always the Third World which is the site for such uses), or, the creation of a space for enjoying the fruits of the earlier Fordist-Keynesian expansion (1945-73). The 'or' appears to be ruled out if the Bush administration gets its way.   (2) The other is the forestalling of the exercise of this option, which is what millions everywhere are trying to effectuate.  (Who wins in this bizzare war of wills, belive it or not,  is still open.  I say this!)  The US state appears determined to pursue the destructive path of annihilation and in the process self-annihilation as well; and  the people or the multitudes or whosoever you want to call the hundreds of thousands who took over the streets, with me, in NY, believe otherwise.  The stage is an open one.  Anybody at this moment can enter it and make choices.  I have made mine, thrown my weight behind the seething, reeking, unpredictable masses, and I have been overjoyed in doing so.  But there is another agenda at work which neither I nor anyone else can do anything about. (Recall Marx: we make our history but not under circumstances of our choosing).

It is not just a matter of "opening markets".  It is and it is not. An Iraqi infitah is of little use to the U.S. especially if Iraqi oil is Euro-based and not dollar-based (see A.G. Frank on this).   In some places the strategy of 'opening markets', in other places the savagery of military fundamentalism and primitive accumulation, in still others absolute abandon, these are indeed flexible accumulation devices to find a way out of a historically recurring overaccumulation crisis..  This is, in my understanding, quite an usual response to a problem of overaccumulation of capital.

Some pointers: (1) look at the geopolitical map, and you will see, as I mentioned to someone on this list, that what separates US occupation forces in Turkey, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Israel (a client state) as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan on the one hand, and the US occupation forces in Japan, South Korea and Phillipines on the other hand, is a vast Indo-Chinese landmass. Both India and China have "opened markets".  But there continues to be a real  zone of tension there, more so in China,  and to a somewhat lesser degree in Japan and  Southeast Asia.  (2)  In fact regardless of whether or not US invades Iraq there is no loss of sphere of influence over the Middle East: US interests are quite secure there, in fact they would be more secure if the US did not plan an Iraqi (oil-grabbing) invasion.  But once that zone is occcupied, it is the pressure on East and South Asia that will start to mount.  Both Iran and Pakistan understand this (it is part of the reason for the strange entente cordiale they negotiated in late December/early January).  The Saudi Arabian dynasty knows where its dollars come from, and unlike Iraq the Saudi Arab Sheikhs do bank on the dollar. (They may not in the future and perhaps this is what drives the US to push matters to the extremity of war in the Middle East).  They, like the Kuwaiti or the Jordanian ruling classes, have no means of preventing US intervention, apart from the ambivalences of an 'Old Europe'.  If they do strongly change their minds regarding US occupation of the Middle East,  (and I do not think they will change their minds despite some show of recent solidarity amongst Arab sheikh-states), it will only be because of the hundreds of thousands who will turn against them in the wake of a long-term US occupation in the Middle East.  Cast as betrayers of Holy Islam and more importantly as lackeys of foreign capital, the ruling classes in the Middle East  may first ally increasingly with the US occupation until the tide turns (and the tide will turn, let there be no doubt about it) against the rotten, corrupt, feudal Sheikhdoms of the Middle East, a rotteness that has punctuated the undying liberatory dreams of un-fundamentalist Arabs, a miasma of emasculated oil-oligarchs who have so far arrested and blocked the unruly aspirations of the middle-orient. (3)  It is certainly related to the overaccumulation of capital.  What else can explain the complete abandonment of the space of a "domestic" US - with its great and rising poverty and increasing inequalities of wealth, exacerbated by the recent Budget pronouncements, all of which underscore an unprecedented fiscal crisis - and the search for a "foreign" 'spatial fix'  for recurring problems of overaccumulation?

War is the way out.  As Schumpeter said it long ago, the bourgeoisie is not fit to rule.  It needs a master.  The amazing thing about the contemporary Bush administration  is precisely how popular it really is!  To many today Bush appears to be 'the man who can make decisions'.  I say this despite all the protests and demonstrations and all the wonderful street artists I worked with on 15th February.  Mussolini says 'the crowd loves a strong man'.  Carl Schmitt says that 'sovereign is he who can make the decision to produce an emergency'.  Today Bush seeks boldy to project this image: this 'valiant' posture, an attempt to reincarnate the mythological ruggedness of the pioneers, the ones who so 'heroically' conquered an alien land and subdued its primitive natives. Today it is the frontier mentality reborn, the language is that of 'liberation' of the world against evil,  and 'protection' of Americans at home through Homeland Security and extension of 'orange alerts' against unknown terror and against all those who do not have the right color or the right kind of patriotism.  War with all, starting with the evil Islamic fundamentalists,  until an aleatory dialectic turns the practice of repressive force against itself.

The antithesis to this escalating madness is the irrepressible delirium of the street-marchers and the explosion of disobedience against a repressive state apparatus, most beautiful, most tantalizing, most contagious, most desirable.

Ganesh Trichur.

Khaldoun Samman wrote:

--- Trichur Ganesh <tganesh@stlawu.edu> wrote:
<<Hey Khaldoun, do you know where Harvey wrote or
published this piece?>>

This is not Harvey's essay.  It is by George Monbiot
using Harvey to explain the US war on Iraq.  The essay
comes from http://www.monbiot.com/

I found the essay useful to a point, but I'm in one of
those points in my life where explaining every issue
with terms like "over-accumulation of capital" limited
in its explanatory power.  What I found useful in this
essay is the second half where Monbiot discusses
military keynesianism and geostrategic interests over
the control of oil.  As for the former part of the
essay, the US could have easily applied a policy like
the one it used on Egypt by forcing Sadat and Mubarak
to adopt the policy of Infitah ("opening" the market),
a policy the World Bank and IMF would welcome and
support.

Hence, the US could have dealt with its economic
expansionary needs without resorting to war and regime
change.  The fact that it has chosen this path should
be enough to force us to look elsewhere for
explanation; and I have a feeling that part of the
explanation has to do with the feeling of insecurity
the US has over the future of Saudi Arabia and Opec.
Any loss of influence over this region means a loss of
influence elsewhere, especially EU and East Asia.
Indeed, as Aburish ("The Rise, corruption and the
Coming Fall of the House of Saud") and many others
have warned, the hold on power of the Saudi regime is
in jeopordy of complete meltdown, and I'm sure many in
the US are quite aware of this.  The fact that the US
has poured in over two hundred thousand troops into
the Gulf is their response to this crisis.  Hence, the
war on Iraq is not the result of the overaccumulation
of capital in search of new markets.  Rather, the US
war on Iraq is intended as a prepatory stage to insure
the continuing influence of the US over the Gulf
region and elsewhere.

Khaldoun

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