Interessante da leggere e secondo me pure da mettere sul sito:
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
{HYPERLINK "http://www.guardian.co.uk"}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.
Bax.s.
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