Came across as I was reviewing the literature on Marxist theories of
economic crisis last night. It outlines two competing views on Gulf
War:--Autonomism against Lenin's theory of imperialism-- and sides with
the former albeit critically. The article attacks at Leninism as being
"outdated" and defines its position as focusing on the centrality of
"working class struggle". Good intro to pundits' views on Gulf War for
critics.
revolutionary cheers,
Mine
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html/Aufheben/auf3midoil2.htm
_______________________________________________________
Review: "Midnight Oil"
(Work, Energy, War, 1973-92). Midnight Notes. Autonomedia. Brooklyn
1992. £9.95. ISBN 0-936756-96-9.
_______________________________________________________
Introduction
Midnight Oil is a collection of articles produced by the Zerowork
(1974-79) and Midnight Notes (1979-) collectives, having as its focus a
thorough analysis of the recent Gulf war. There are a number of reasons
why the publication of this book should be welcomed. For a start the
making available of texts from the autonomist tradition, which have
previously been available to few people, can only have a positive impact
on revolutionaries in this country who, with notable exceptions, have
tended either to regurgitate orthodoxy or dismiss theory as academic
contemplation. It is also reassuring to find that despite the setbacks
experienced by the US working class over the last couple of decades some
US theorists are still capable of attempting to analyse contemporary
events - not everyone has responded to these defeats by seeking to
conjure the future out of some
mythical past like Zerzan or Perlman.
Coming after the Gulf-War Midnight Oil provides a pertinent
counter-point to the orthodox Marxist theories which reduced the war to
merely an inter-imperialist conflict. However, whilst we are sympathetic
to aspects of Midnight Notes'/autonomist analysis, and appreciate it as
a weapon against orthodox Leninist conceptions, we can not remain
entirely uncritical. Indeed, while at first sight the broad sweep of
analysis in Midnight Oil is impressive, on closer inspection we find
that it has fundamental weaknesses. A hint of such problems become
apparent if we remember Midnight Notes's predictions before the
Gulf War in the pamphlet When Crusaders and Assassins Unite. This
pamphlet, published in November 1990, in an attempt to provide a class
analysis for the US anti-war movement, argued that there would be no war
as there were no fundamental disagreements between US and Iraqi capital
as both wanted higher oil prices :
These differences over oil pricing control and debt policy can be
mediated, though this mediation process might very well include the use
of marginal military force. However, U.S. Crusaders are not in the
Arabian Peninsula to fight a large-scale, conventional shooting war with
the Iraqi Assassins, as frequently envisioned. For U.S. troops are not
in the Arabian Peninsula to fight the soldiers of a government that
plays the game of collective capital. A game that the Saddam Hussein
regime has shown itself perfectly willing and able to play. The U.S.
invasion of the Persian Gulf, therefore, is not like the war in Vietnam
where the U.S. military was sent to crush a directly anti-capitalist,
revolutionary armed movement. It is more like the post-W.W.II U.S.
occupation of Western Europe, whose main function was not to fight a
Soviet invasion, but rather to repress the rise of any revolutionary
forces within Western Europe itself.
Midnight Notes, and No War But The Class War (NWBTCW) in Britain,
attempted to move beyond Leninist analyses of the war to emphasise the
class war, but we have to recognise their limitations if we are to move
beyond them. Perhaps unsurprisingly 'When Crusaders and Assassins Unite'
and its predictions go unmentioned in Midnight Oil. However what is
important for us is not so much that Midnight Notes got it wrong but why
they got it wrong. When we test their analysis against the litmus of the
Gulf War the loose ends of their theory rapidly unravel. It is not
merely that Midnight Oil is inconsistent, as is
only to be expected from a collective project developing over 20 years,
rather it is that we find its underlying theory incoherent.
Leninism and the theory of imperialism
To understand the significance of Midnight Oil we have to put it into
the context of its opposition to the dominant Marxist explanations for
the Gulf War. In Britain the anti-war movement was dominated by the
left-liberal pacifism of CND which advocated sanctions to starve the
Iraqi's into submission instead of bombing them into the middle ages.
The immediate response of the 'revolutionary left' was simply to 'trot
out' the old anti-imperialism position of 'supporting the weaker country
against imperialist aggression' which refuses any real class analysis of
the war. However, in the case of Iraq the sheer absurdity of this
position became apparent. How could so called revolutionaries back a
fascist dictatorship with a proven record of butchering its own working
class? In the case of the SWP their knee jerk reaction of backing Iraq
was soon dropped as opportunism led them to change their line and
tail-end the peace movement in the hope of picking up new recruits
whilst the RCP maintained an unrelenting support for the Iraqi state. In
both cases a rigid adherence to the discredited Leninist theory of
imperialism led these groups to fail to grasp the initiative from
left-liberalism/pacifism in the anti-war movement.
Lenin's Theory of imperialism
The Leninist theory of imperialism owes its origins to Lenin's
Imperialism. Lenin's Imperialism was based on Bukharin's work which in
turn had developed out of the orthodox theory of the Second
International, as exemplified by Hilferding's Finance Capital. It argued
that since the 1870's the world had seen the concentration and
centralization of production into huge monopolies and cartels that
dominated national markets. This had brought about a new era of monopoly
capitalism which, for Lenin at least, was the last stage of capitalism.
In monopoly capitalism the huge monopolies tended to merge with banking
capital and because of the national importance of these huge capitals
they became increasingly regulated and protected by the state. Since
these huge capitals, organised in cartels, dominated the market they
could plan production and set prices. No longer was there an anarchy of
the market. The preconditions for a centralized and planned socialist
economy
were all but there. All that was needed was for the working class to
take power and nationalize the big monopolies and banks!!
But to make monopoly profits the big monopolies restricted domestic
production to push domestic prices up. Restricted production limited
investment which meant that there was both a tendency for
surplus-production and surplus-capital to be invested abroad. This meant
a drive for foreign markets and imperialism under the protection of the
state, but this brought each imperialist power into conflict with others
as its rivals. The orthodox/centrist Kautsky thought that this
imperialist conflict would ultimately be resolved peacefully through
ultra-imperialism. Lenin said it could only be resolved through war and
revolution. A point he thought vindicated by World War One.
Problems of Lenin's theory
Firstly his analysis is out of date when applied to the current
situation. Hilferding's work, which Lenin's analysis is largely based on
and relates to the era of monopoly capitalism at the turn of the
century, particularly to the situation in Germany. But with the
development and establishment of Fordism the division of the world is no
longer based on super-exploited colonies, rather the Third World appears
as marginalized economies within the world market that capital is unable
to fully exploit.
Perhaps more importantly Lenin's theory of imperialism is crippled by
its assumption of working class passivity. The working class is the
least developed aspect of Lenin's Imperialism as the dynamic to war and
the possibility of planning are derived
entirely from the relations between capitals. Thus the working class is
seen as passive, needing the objective conditions to mature before being
forced to take decisive action. This is particularly clear in Lenin's
conception of the labour aristocracy in terms of workers being 'bought
off' rather than in terms of them winning concessions that force the
monopolies to push prices higher. Therefore the result of Lenin's
Imperialism, with its assumption of working class passivity, is to
locate the movement towards communism in the contradictions of capital
as an objective economic system rather than in the revolutionary
self-activity of the working class.
Autonomism against Leninist theories of Imperialism
If the inadequacy of Lenin's Imperialism, as applied to the Gulf-War, is
its focus on the 'objective', i.e. capital, can we combat this by using
Midnight Notes' autonomist analysis to bring in the 'subjective', i.e.
class struggle? The great strength of Midnight
Notes and other autonomist-Marxists is their focus on the centrality of
class struggle. Through their focus on working class composition,
especially the notion of the mass worker, Midnight Notes' and other
autonomists grasp the need to go beyond
the era of monopoly capitalism described by Hilferding. By focusing on
the working class as an autonomous power within and against capital the
autonomists were able to account for Fordism and the resistance to it.
Therefore both technology and working class organization reflect a
particular division of power produced as an outcome of past struggles.
This makes trade unions, social democratic, and Leninist parties
historically specific organizational forms.
Midnight Oil's great strength is its focus on class struggle whether it
be of migrant oil workers, Iraqi deserters, striking autoworkers,
wildcat coal miners, or Italian rent strikers. But whilst this focus on
working class self-activity is Midnight Oil's greatest strength it is
also its greatest weakness. The problem with Midnight Notes however, is
not simply that they overemphasize class struggle, rather it is their
inadequate understanding of modern capitalism. By concentrating so much
on struggles they tend to reduce the workings of the world market to
merely a question of power, one where capital collectively
manipulates prices in order to attack the working class.
Value and the Apocalypse
For Marx capitalism is not the latest incarnation of the omniscient
megamachine that comes to dominate humanity, nor is it a simple means
through which the capitalist class consciously conspires to exploit us.
Rather capital is a social relation through
which human activity returns as an alien and objective force which
subsumes human will and purposes to its own ceaseless drive towards its
own quantitative expansion. As such, for Marx, capitalism is very far
from being a consciously regulated system. As a totality capital is a
process that must continually reconstitute itself out of the conflicting
actions and purposes both between disassociated individuals and
antagonistic classes. Of course this is not to say that there are not
conscious attempts to plan nor of some forms of social co-operation,
e.g. the state, but that these are only moments subsumed within capital
as an unconscious subject and only arise from given conditions of
conflict and competition between individuals and classes.
Despite different political perspectives, both Midnight Notes and the
orthodox Marxism of Lenin and Kautsky see a fundamental change in
capitalism from that described by Marx in Capital - modern capitalism is
seen as moving towards a consciously regulated system. This is linked
with the notion of us entering the transitional stage to
socialism/communism. For orthodox Marxism this is seen primarily in
terms of inter-capitalist relations in the form of growing state
intervention and the
growth of monopolies, both of which lead to the planning of production
and exchange rather than regulation through the anarchy of the market,
i.e. the supersession of the law of value. For Midnight Notes/autonomism
the supersession of the law of value is seen more in terms of the
separation of labour from capital with the automation of production.
The fragments on machines
The theoretical basis for Midnight Notes' argument that the law of value
has been superseded is the now famous passage from the Grundrisse that
has become known as the fragments on machines. In these passages Marx
vividly describes how capital in
its drive to increase the social productivity of labour through the
mechanisation and eventual automation of production makes production
increasingly disproportionate to the labour employed. But since capital
is nothing but the expansion of alienated
labour, this tendency drives capital beyond its own foundation. Hence
crisis and apocalypse. As Marx notes:
As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great
well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its
measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be a measure] of use
value. ...Capital itself is the moving contradiction , [in] that it
presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time,
on the other side, as sole
measure and source of wealth...On the one side, then, it calls to life
all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of
social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent
(relatively) of the labor time employed in it. On the other side, it
wants to use labor time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces
thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to
maintain the already created value as value.
The notion that there is a tendency for the law of value to be
superseded is central to Midnight Notes' analysis of oil pricing. It
allows them to argue that, since value is no longer a necessary
measure/regulator of capital work has become merely a form of social
discipline. Hence the refusal of work is no longer a utopian demand.
Also, to the extent that labour is separated from capital and no longer
mediated by value we have only two antagonistic classes each with its
own distinct strategy. Therefore the collective capitalist seeks to
preserve its power through the imposition of work and the collective
worker seeks to resist and refuse this work.
In Midnight Oil, Midnight Notes seek to unilaterally apply this tendency
as if it was a long term historical tendency that is now at the point of
realisation. But in doing so they run into severe problems. If this
tendency has been realised then capital steps beyond its own substance.
If capital is not the self expansion of value what is it? Capital
disappears! Unedited by objective categories of value and capital we are
left with two antagonistic subjects, the 'capitalist' class and the
'working' class locked in an apocalyptic life and death struggle. Have
we reached such an era? Is the continuing existence of capitalist
competition and markets merely an illusion left over from the past?
Midnight Notes staring into the abyss see the consequences of such a
conclusion and recoil from them:
If capital can, at will, change and manipulate energy and industrial
prices on the basis of multinational corporate power , i.e., independent
of the amount of work that goes into the production of commodities, then
we must abandon work and surplus value (exploitation) as our basic
analytical categories. Marx would be an honored but dead dog. We would
have to accept the position of Sweezy and Marcuse that monopoly
organization and technological development have made capital independent
of the 'law of value,' (viz., that prices, profits, costs and the other
numerology of accounting are rooted in (and explained by) the work-time
gone into the production of the commodities and reproduction of the
relevant worker). Capital it would seem can break its own rules, the
class struggle is now to be played on a pure level of power, 'will to
domination,' force against force and prices become part of the equation
of violence, arbitrarily decided like the pulling of a trigger.
Instead they try and get around the problems that flow from abandoning
the law of value by arguing that only certain sectors have escaped
labour, but these sectors - oil and food - are basic commodities whose
price determines all other prices and thus can be used as a weapon
through which capitalism as a global system can be organised against the
working class. In several articles, most notably the Notes on the
International Crisis, they take political control of oil as self
evident, but in The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse they try and
explain it in terms of differing organic compositions of capital.
Using Marx, The Work/Energy crisis and the Apocalypse argues that the
equalisation of the rate of profit means that prices must diverge from
labour-values due to differences in the ratio of living to dead labour
across various branches of industry. Since surplus-value can only be
expropriated from living labour, those industries employing a large
amount of labour relative to their employment of means of production
(i.e. those with a low organic composition of capital (OCC)) will be
able to produce relatively more surplus-value than those capitals
invested in industries that are highly mechanised (i.e. those that have
a high
OCC). An equalisation of the rate of profit arises through the transfer
surplus-value from those capitals invested in industries with a low OCC
to those with high OCC. For this to occur prices must be higher than
values in industries with a high organic composition of capital (OCC)
and lower than values in those with a low OCC.
>From this Midnight Notes then attempt to invert Marx by asserting that
this proves that prices can be disconnected from values in high OCC
industries like food or energy. Yet Marx was attempting to show the very
opposite, i.e. how despite variations in prices and values, values still
regulate production and exchange. It is through this very analysis of
the formation of a general rate of profit, and the formation of
production prices that systematically diverge from values, that Marx
shows how, through the competition between individual capitals, the 'law
of value' ensures that each individual capital is obliged to act as if
it simply a particular part of capital-in-general, despite any conscious
intentions on the part of the capitalist themselves.
So even if we accepted that energy and food were necessarily high OCC
industries, which we do not, The Work/Energy crisis and the Apocalypse
fails to provide an adequate theoretical grounding. Indeed Midnight
Notes even admit this themselves when they concede that capitalists only
have 'apparent freedom' when it comes to setting oil prices independent
of the labour that goes into the production of oil. However it is only
through considering Midnight Notes' view of history that the importance
of these theoretical inadequacies becomes apparent.
Oil as history
Is it true, as Midnight Notes contend, that the history of post-war
capitalism is the history of oil price changes?
As is well known, by the late 1960s working class struggles broke the
wage-productivity deal of Keynesianism. Workers demanded 'more money -
less work' resulting in a steep decline in profits. Midnight Notes argue
that in response to this offensive 'capital' (in the guise of the USA)
engineered the 'energy crisis' by forcing up oil prices, which resulted
in a
restructuring of capital and cuts in real wages. Thus the quadrupling of
the oil price in 1973-74 resulted in huge profits for the energy
companies and oil producing countries which were then recycled as
petrodollars, allowing massive investment in the
automation of factories and a shift of production to the 'Newly
Industrialising Countries' where labour was cheaper.
After capital has jacked the price of oil right up, Midnight Notes then
argue that it has to bring it back down again; because by the mid 1970s
oil producing states in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caribbean
had succumbed to popular demands and 'squandered' the increased oil
revenues on higher wages and social spending. Not only did this rise in
oil prices lead to the oil proletariat demanding higher wages but, in
countries like Iran, it also encouraged them to overthrow their rulers
in an attempt to gain control of the wealth they produced.
Therefore Midnight Notes argue that, in the 1980s capital abandons its
high energy price strategy and imposes austerity. This necessarily
involves cutting the price of oil in order to attack the oil
proletariat. Thus the US Federal Reserve Bank engineers a global
slowdown by constricting the money supply, which results in a steep
climb in interest rates, and when combined with a loss of export
revenues triggers off the debt crisis. As chief enforcer for capital the
IMF prescribes austerity for debtor nations, i.e. a more favourable
investment climate and production for export. However Midnight Notes
argue that working class
resistance to austerity leads to a threatened default on Third World
debts which forces the US to devalue the dollar by half, thus halving
the debt (which it is calculated in US dollars) in order to save the
global banking system.
As expected this extension of austerity was met with fierce working
class resistance, which leads Midnight Notes to argue that by the late
1980s capital had decided that its austerity program had failed, and
that it was planning a massive expansion with huge new areas like Russia
and China to be opened up. The idea being that the cheap labour and raw
materials of the socialist bloc could be used to undermine the wages of
western workers. But, given the world wide recession, investment was in
short supply, thus oil prices were to be used as the motor to create
surplus funds for a general restructuring of global accumulation.
This restructuring was to centre on the reorganization of the oil
industry, particularly in those areas where it had been nationalised.
International capital was hoping to force open these areas as a result
of falling oil prices, but when the IMF tried to force oil states like
Nigeria, Venezuela, Algeria and Morocco to cut welfare and wages there
were mass uprisings. Therefore Midnight Notes argue that if oil prices
were to be raised there would have to be a massive increase in
repression to prevent the proles appropriating a slice of the planned
oil revenue as had happened throughout the 70s and 80s.
Thus Midnight Notes argue that the Gulf War emerged out of the process
of recolonization in the late 1980s following the collapse of the
socialist bloc. If the oil fields in the Eastern bloc, Mexico, and
Nigeria were to be opened up there would need to be a whole new wave of
investment to make them profitable. But the regimes might be forced to
give some of the increased revenues to the proles. For Midnight Notes
the Gulf war was needed as an example to terrorize the proles into
accepting a life of extreme poverty amid vast accumulations of wealth.
Therefore;
the re-organization of workers in the planet's most important
oil-producing region was not an accidental by-product of the war, but
rather a central objective, and one shared, despite some disputes, by
the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi, European and US ruling classes. As the oil
industry in the Mideast (and internationally) was preparing for its
largest expansion in fifteen years, it needed both to recompose and
terrorize an increasingly rebellious oil-producing proletariat. In the
environment of an 'international intifada' against IMF austerity plans,
any new attempt to vastly debase workers' lives amidst new accumulations
of wealth based on oil price increase was going to require a leap in the
level of militarization.
Down the slippery slope to conspiracy
The central problem of Midnight Oil is that their attempt to reduce the
history of capitalism to the history of oil price fluctuations tends to
lead to a conspiratorial analysis where a unified capital manipulates
energy prices in order to attack the working class. No one denies the
impact of oil prices, nor their role in the restructuring of capital
after the working class offensive of the 1960/70s, but Midnight Notes'
analysis completely ignores the importance of the development of global
finance capital. Because it is beyond the control of any government,
global finance capital completely undermines Midnight Notes' notion of a
unified capital exercising conscious control.
Also Midnight Notes' fail to show anywhere in Midnight Oil how and by
whom oil prices are manipulated. Who decides 'capital's strategy'?
Furthermore the 'documentation' they cite showing the USA conspired with
OPEC to triple oil prices does not support their case. It merely shows
that, with the tripling of oil production and exploration costs in the
USA, the American oil industry was able to influence the US government
not to intervene when first Libya and then the other states took the
opportunity of the crisis in the oil industry to push prices up to
levels determined by the marginal producers in the USA. The oil crises
of 1973,1979 and 1986 could be better explained as critical conjunctures
in the development of the oil industry away from the conscious and
planned regulation of production and exchange by the big seven oil
companies, backed by the US and British governments, to a unified global
oil market which to a large extent escapes conscious control of
governments and monopolies.
The limitations of Midnight Notes' method and analysis are starkly
exposed in the articles Oil, Guns and Money and Rambo on the Barbary
Shore. Although Rambo on the Barbary Shore appears ostensibly to concern
Saudi Arabia's doubling of oil production in 1985-86 and its relation to
the US bombing of Libya, it in fact encapsulates Midnight Notes'
conception of how capital manipulates the market. The argument is
summarised in Oil, Guns and Money where, referring to the devaluation of
the US dollar by one half in 1985, they argue that:
This manoeuvre, in one stroke, lowered the value of debt held by
countries from Mexico to Poland by one half. But this was no charity. If
the lowering of interest rates in 1983 had been prompted by Mexico's
moratorium, the dollar devaluation was prompted by South Africa's
moratorium on payments to foreign banks in August 1985. The potential of
South African capital to succumb to black workers struggles within the
country and to provoke other governments around the world to similarly
halt loan payments was enough to force western capital to change the
terms of global debt. In this manipulation of monetary values
we see capitalist planning at its most abstract and reified levels,
where decisions seemingly removed from the labors on the shop floor or
in the kitchen ultimately entail the most profound effects. One of the
most important consequences of the dollar's devaluation, for example,
was the simultaneous devaluation of oil. As the dollar was taking a free
fall in the market, Saudi Arabia doubled its production within nine
months and thereby halved the price of oil. The US government arranged
this oil devaluation to keep the US import bill from skyrocketing. With
a dollar half of what it was worth before, imports, particularly
oil, would have doubled in cost. The US was already becoming the largest
debtor nation in the world and there was the fear that the dollar
devaluation, if taken alone, would have thrown the US over the edge of
solvency. These twin manoeuvres of 1985-86 - the dollar and oil
devaluations - exhibit how the international market is consciously
structured by capital.
This whole analysis is riddled with errors which are symptomatic of
Midnight Notes' theoretical inadequacies. Firstly the US dollar was not
devalued unilaterally at a stroke. The devaluation of the dollar that
followed the Plaza Accord took nearly two years and required concerted
intervention of the central banksof the major industrial powers armed
with reserve funds that were only a fraction of the huge flows of
capital surging around the international money markets. Secondly the
devaluation does not necessarily halve the debt, particularly if the
debt is denominated in US dollars and the exporter, e.g. Mexico, is
trading mainly with the US. It is true that resistance to debt forced
rescheduling under the Baker plan and simultaneously limited the US
government's strategy of using interest rates to indefinitely defend an
overvalued dollar, forcing them towards international co-operation to
devalue the dollar in 1985. But we can not simply explain fluctuations
in the US dollar in terms of oil pricing as Midnight Notes are prone to
do. Halving the dollar does not mean that oil prices have to be halved
to prevent the US' import bill doubling since oil is denominated in
dollars. Consequently the twin manoeuvres of 1985-86 do not show how
the international market is structured by capital, on the contrary they
show how attempts to consciously regulate international markets are
highly circumscribed!
Conspiracy at Midnight?
Overall Midnight Oil is an important work because its unrelenting focus
on working class struggles provides an important corrective to the
objectivism of Lenin's Imperialism and its defenders. However Midnight
Oil is fatally undermined by Midnight Notes' tendency to ascribe
outcomes to the conscious strategy of a unified capital. Throughout
Midnight Oil
Midnight Notes fail to show how capital constitutes itself. They imply
that the US state formulates capital's strategy, but then fail to
explain how US policy is formulated. The problem is that Midnight Notes
conception of a unified capital results in them conflating capitalism
with the actions of individual capitalists. Capitalism does not have a
strategy, although capitalists pursue different strategies. Capitalism
as a totality is mediated by the world market and emerges from the
conflict between and within different capitals and the working class.
Even if capital has a strategy, which it does not, Midnight Notes fail
to show how it is organized and by whom. Given that Midnight Notes see
capital as an undifferentiated unity imposing an agreed strategy on the
working class, we would expect to find them focusing on organizations
like the UN, the IMF, G7 etc. However there is little analysis of those
organizations which could be seen as arenas for hammering out 'capital's
strategy'. Such an omission can not simply be a mistake by Midnight
Notes, rather it is a consequence of their method which does not look at
capitalist divisions because their theory has assumed
these divisions away.
When their conception of a unified capital is applied to concrete events
its inadequacies are glaring. For example Midnight Notes saw the Gulf
War as a collective capital imposing an agreed strategy of increasing
oil prices. Initially this caused them to
take the position, in 'When Crusaders and Assassins Unite', that there
would be no war, or at most token skirmishing. After all, why should
there be a war if there are no fundamental disagreements between Iraq
and the US? However, when they are forced by events to admit there was a
war then they merely reduce it to collective capital militarizing oil
production. This results in them tending to argue that Iraq and the US
colluded in the invasion of Kuwait, via April Glaspie, as part of a
co-ordinated strategy of increasing oil prices. Whilst the invasion of
Kuwait was a consequence of the Ba'athists inability to impose austerity
on their own working class, it is not the case that it was part of a
co-ordinated global plan for militarizing the world's oil industry, as
the disarray of the US government's response clearly illustrates.
By imposing a pre-defined conception of a unified capital onto events
Midnight Notes are able to change their position on the Gulf War from
seeing it as a 'phoney war' to seeing it as a method for the Iraqi
regime to impose austerity. This culminatesin them arguing that the
Iraqi state did not believe the US would intervene and even if it did
that it would be in the Ba'athists interests. It is true that the main
targets of the UN bombing were civilians, infrastructure, and retreating
troops who were the main force of revolt within Iraq, but from this
Midnight Notes argue that the war was in the Ba'athist's interests
because it finally enabled them to impose austerity on the Iraqi working
class.
However, the triumph of the Ba'athist state over the working class
uprisings was by no means guaranteed. Also it is not the case that the
Iraqi state sought saturation bombing, resulting in massive destruction
of productive capital, and the risk of overthrow, because it thought it
might possibly improve its ability to impose austerity. Excepting the
decimated oil industries of Iraq and Kuwait, Midnight Notes fail to show
that oil production is more militarized after the Gulf War than it was
before. Even with civil war raging in Yemen oil prices are only $16 a
barrel, the level they were prior to the Gulf War. This is hardly
the mass increase in oil prices that Midnight Notes expected as the
result of collective capital militarizing oil production through the
Gulf War. With oil prices predicted to settle down to $13-14 a barrel
for the forseeable future we can conclude that either
capital does not have a high oil price strategy atall, or that it has
been incapable of imposing one. It is clear that oil prices are not
operating as the motor for a new phase of accumulation to pull the world
out of recession.
Finally when we apply Midnight Notes' theory to other conflicts like
Somalia and Yugoslavia we find that their method breaks down. The war in
the former Yugoslavia provides a perfect example of the disunity and
divisions among the various capitals. Whilst the Leninists see the
conflict as an imperialist war fought out by proxies, autonomist
analyses tend to see it as a conspiracy by a unified capital using
nationalism and war to divide and subjugate a combative working class.
These two positions represent the opposing flipsides of the same
undialectical coin. Theorising conflicts such as these is only possible
if we can understand how the class struggle is mediated by competition,
and vice versa. The autonomists' antipathy to dialectical thinking means
that whilst they can provide a corrective to the diatribes of the
anti-imperialists they cannot supersede them.
Return to Aufheben home page
--
Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222
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