[mobglob-discuss] The Infinite War and its Roots

[Macdonald Stainsby]

The Infinite War and its Roots
by Stan Goff

Most of the polemical resistance to the so-called "War on Terrorism" has
thus far been based on ethics and morality. And the moral dimension of the
war is important. But we must take a more critical look at this war, at
what is motivating the war, and what are the likely outcomes. While we can
mount moral resistance to the war, if we fail to critically engage the real
causes of it, we cannot mount an effective political resistance, which has
to be an effective response to the motive forces behind the war.
Here we will emphasize the dynamic between an American ruling class and its
governing junta -- which has seized power and is in many ways out of
control -- in an adverse historical circumstance that is not likely
correctable, and cannot, therefore, guarantee the survival of U.S.
imperialism. We have to study this dynamic concretely to understand it.
It is important at the outset not to think of big business (sometimes
referred to as "capital") as broken into discrete sectors, each sector with
its own static base and ideology. The concept of capital as broken into
static sectors, while it may be useful for a short time to conduct a
transient analysis, is fundamentally mechanical. Capital is a dynamic and
cyclical process of accumulation via valorization and systemic
reproduction. It has to stabilize and reproduce itself as a system, yet it
also has to "grow." This simultaneous need for equilibrium and
disequilibrium is one of the central paradoxes of imperialism. Total
capital at any moment is a set sum of money, for the sake of argument, but
it is in flux, changing forms throughout the production/reproduction
process, first productive capital, then goods and services, then
redistributed through interests and rents, then finance capital, etc.
Capital has a temporal nature. In this process, the system bosses, CEOs,
etc., are like an acting troupe, the members of which keep changing roles.
The notion that they are divided into sectors, then, is illusory, because
no fraction of capital exists independently in any sector. A crisis of
accumulation is not a discrete crisis limited to one "sector" of capital.
It is general. And the higher the degree of international integration and
rationalization of the capitalist class, especially in a technically
complex interdependency, the more generalized are the accumulation crises.
Anything affecting one "sector" necessarily affects all "sectors."
We cannot know every aspect of this dialectic, but we can focus on some key
aspects of it, bearing in mind the limitations of this focus, that I think
will shed some light on our situation. So I will focus on oil, on currency,
and on the evolving role and dilemma of the U.S. military. While we can
certainly acknowledge that currency and the military are constants in the
abstract and not a sector of capital, oil at first blush appears to be a
definite sector. But this, too, is illusory. Oil is not a separate sector,
first for the reasons cited above, but also because oil is no mere commodity.
Oil is the form of a deeper cycle of material reality than that on which
radical theorists concentrated in the abstract with relation to the
commodity and the vast social architecture they unfold from that enigma. It
is the embodiment of inescapable physical laws related to energy and
matter, and those are the laws, in conjunction with the laws of social
motion, that we are bumping up against, not just as a society but as a
species. Oil is a form of super-concentrated energy, originating as solar
energy that formed over hundreds of millions of years in unique biological
and geological conditions that cannot be replicated. Our species has used
over half of the recoverable oil in approximately 100 years.
World oil production is probably peaking right now , even as population
continues to increase and the demands of a crumbling world economic
infrastructure continue apace. Two factors might provide a transient
reprieve from this event. First, technological advances like 3-D seismic
enhanced recovery, nuclear-magnetic resonance techniques, horizontal
drilling, and so forth, and second, a worldwide depression, which would
radically decrease demand. It is not difficult to imagine some of the
long-term consequences of the end of cheap oil, even using the input-output
models of the neo-Malthusians. (Thomas Malthus [1766-1834] was an English
economist who became famous through his book, "Essay on Population." He
claimed that population increased faster than the means of human
subsistence. Facts contradict this, and show that a niche must be opened in
order to be filled. The neo-Malthusians have altered Malthus' concept
somewhat, by claiming that population will "overshoot" as means of
subsistence, like arable land, water, and fossil fuels are depleted. There
appears to be some validity to this. But their model is based on simple
input-output calculations that assume a human population trajectory based
on a static list of variables, with no account for the characteristics of
social systems. It implies, therefore, a kind of genetic determinism that
can easily devolve into racism.)
But we must take into account the social relations of energy, and
value-theory. It is not the finite physical limit of oil that matters right
now. It matters what is finite in the context of what is economically
essential. Does oil have any perfect substitutes? At this conjuncture, the
answer is an unequivocal "no." What is the value of oil in terms of
embodied socially-necessary labor-time? In other words, can the value of
oil rise fast enough for the whole economy to be contained? The answer to
that is an unequivocal "yes."
Oil has no perfect substitute. Neither solar cell nor coal nor plutonium
can run trucks or airplanes. There are theoretical substitutes, but not one
shows any promise in the near term of even being developed. It is the
lifeblood of the entire global capitalist system, and has been for 100
years. If oil prices go beyond a very operational price of no return, so to
speak, the economy will most certainly be contained, very likely to the
point of collapse. Imagine the consequences today, for example, if oil
prices jumped a mere 50 percent. But if best predictions are correct, and
we are entering the era of post-peak production, a steady and accelerating
increase in the price of oil is inevitable, and soon.
So capitalism itself, utterly dependent on this single finite substance, is
faced with a very real and very threatening energy crisis. Progressive (as
in gradual) change is now producing an abrupt step-change. We may not
perceive it as such yet, because U.S. capitalists are very adept at
commodifying the mass-intellect, and making its assertions appear both
upright and noble, as we can see in the ubiquitous display of American flags.
Every oil shock since 1973 has corresponded to or promptly followed a war.
To understand why, we have to account for the concrete and current
structure of the world capitalist system.
The U.S. is now unarguably hegemonic. U.S. armed forces control every major
sea lane, and it has ringed the world with military bases . U.S. forces are
the international police of the Gulf States, where, by the way, imperialist
oil corporations extract the oil and pay rents to client regimes.
Those rents have to be sufficient to keep domestic populations from
becoming restive, and to continually restore their capital base. A barrel
of oil costing between $25 and $30 is enough to keep the principle OPEC
states calm (as this is written, however, there is a dollar devaluation in
progress), even as it strains those non-OPEC states whose recovery costs
are higher than, say, Saudi Arabia or pre-invasion Iraq.
The U.S. pays below a market price for oil for at least three reasons. One
is that the U.S. has offered F-16 fighter jets, Stinger missiles, and so on
to those client regimes, as well as capitalizing their oil extraction. Two
is that the U.S. has through a number of stratagems since the early-1970s
convinced those states to invest their profits in U.S. financial
instruments. If the Saudis attempted to take action against the U.S.
economy, for example, they would ruin themselves, since they have invested
the majority of their assets in U.S. securities. Three is that the U.S.
controls the air, land, and sea lanes and is willing to deploy devastating
military power into the region. So the U.S. is having its oil subsidized,
in a sense, paying less than market value, as a form of imperial tribute.
It is because oil is denominated in dollars -- which I can now call
"petrodollars" -- since the U.S. dropped the gold standard and all its
associated fixed currency exchange rates in 1971, that the U.S. has been
able to dominate not only the developing world, but its key capitalist
competitors. Other nations must pay their energy bills in (petro)dollars,
at a higher rate than the U.S., and those dollars come right back to the
homeland (via Saudi Arabia, et al) to invest in T-Bills and real estate.
In 1973 the Nixon Administration devalued the dollar, by then firmly fixed
as the currency of international trade by virtue of being the petrodollar,
and cleared its own debts to its European and Asian capitalist competitors.
American petrodollars were then cycled through American banks, which lent
them to Latin Americans and Africans, still reeling from the last oil
shock, who then required petrodollar loans to pay their own energy bills.
Economic growth has stagnated and fallen back in Africa and Latin America
ever since. This is the method by which the U.S. was able to shift the
burden of its own post-Vietnam accumulation crisis onto others, and to
shift the maintenance model of its hegemony from semi-fascist client
regimes to "structural adjustment" debt peonage under nominally
"democratic" governing bodies.
American imperialism is in the last instance petrodollar imperialism. As
Latin America, Africa, and now Asia, slide over the abyss, Americans have
doubled their car ownership. The rest of the world is, in this way,
directly bearing the burden of our high cost of living.
So if this system begins to unravel, as it has begun to, and the American
people see their standard of living take a sudden downturn, the U.S.
political regime will face a far graver political crisis than the crisis of
legitimacy that was opportunistically transcended by spinning Sept. 11.
Capital understands very clearly what is at stake, and it must take great
pains to ensure that we do not understand it.
But the ruling class fails to grasp the implications of "value-theory,"
that is, the very laws that give capitalism its character. The global
monopolization that is taking place right now is an attempt to escape from
those laws. The very fact of the current super-heated monopolization is an
indication that the competitive process is exhausted. Recent revelations
about the "creative accounting" scandals of major transnationals are
evidence of attempts to escape those laws through massive bunko scams.
The strategic devaluation and inauguration of the neoliberal regime in the
early 1970s was already a response to a generalized crisis of profits, a
crisis related to the organic composition of capital, and even the
petrodollar was a retrenchment. That retrenchment may now also be exhausted.
World oil consumption right now is about 75 million barrels per day. By
2010, that is expected to increase to 100 million barrels per day. This oil
is produced by two major groups, let's say, for the purpose of analysis --
OPEC and non-OPEC (NOPEC). OPEC is largely concentrated in the Persian Gulf
region. NOPEC is the North Atlantic, North America, Mexico, China, Nigeria,
and so forth. That doesn't tell the whole story, though. Gulf states' oil
does not peak in production until 2012, and half the world's remaining
easily extractable oil is there. World production is peaking right now. But
world production is an average. NOPEC peaked several years ago, now being
in permanent decline.
So, OPEC is getting stronger, and NOPEC is getting weaker.
Saudi Arabia -- an OPEC nation -- is the biggest pool, with Iraq next, and
the Caspian Sea region a theoretical third (but this is very much in doubt
). The U.S. has for years been trying to ensure domination of OPEC, and
they have accomplished that to some degree by ensuring the corrupt Saudis
and others through those aforementioned investments. Given that OPEC
production is still rising and NOPEC is in permanent irreversible decline,
OPEC is regaining dominance in the overall oil market. The point at which
OPEC regains definitive domination of world markets is called by some the
"crossover event."
Best predictions are that the "crossover event" will happen around 2011 .
This is certainly understood by the current Bush Administration, which is
heavily populated by members of the petroleum oligarchy.
Should forces hostile to U.S. imperialism (for whatever reason) gain
control over the Gulf States and its oil, they would effectively control
the lifeblood of the entire global economic system. U.S. hegemony would
collapse in an historical instant. Compared to this scenario, Sept. 11 was
a walk in the park. And the U.S. ruling class, especially the current
petroligarchy administration, knows this.
Since world oil production begins to decline on average almost immediately,
the U.S. as the biggest end user needs to figure out how to compensate for
the losses being sustained in NOPEC production. Their solution, from what
we can see now, may be to open the Caspian and accelerate extraction from
the Gulf States, particularly Saudi and Iraq. But the most optimistic
scenarios are that all three regions combined, might put out an additional
15 million barrels per day. Given that our extrapolated appetite will go up
25 million barrels per day within nine years, provided there is no economic
collapse that truncates demand, the U.S. remains in a dilemma.
Compounding that dilemma is the fact that simply getting that additional
oil out of the ground and to market will require an investment of an
additional $1 trillion in the region by someone.
Who will bear the burden? Colonized peoples, of course, outside and inside
the U.S., via the domination of the petrodollar.
This is almost certainly the plan of the Bush junta. The perennial problem,
however, is the mass of people in those nations, who are often militantly
radicalized by arrogant foreign plunderers. This puts the imperialists
right back on the horns of a dilemma.
The escalation of Palestinian resistance to Zionism and the fascist-like
response of the Israelis to that resistance, constitutes a threat to the
stability of the U.S. client regimes in the region, as does the declining
standard of living for the masses in all the Gulf States. These regimes are
corrupt and autocratic, and themselves caught in this web of dilemmas. And
it is upon them that the U.S. dollar depends, and upon the seignorage of
the U.S. dollar that U.S. hegemony depends.
This energy crisis, then, is now combined with a worldwide overproduction
crisis, felt even in the United States. And the current administration is
opting for war, a very expensive war, for the purpose of extending and
consolidating that hegemony, which will further strain the U.S. domestic
economy. As this is written, 48 of the 50 states are experiencing severe
budget shortages, and the federal government is threatened with default.
This is a desperate move by desperate people, and so it is a dangerous
period we are in.
It is no wonder the capitalists of other regions are raising their eyebrows
at the Bush Administration. They surely sense the potential consequences of
this administration's wild hubris, its military adventurism, its arrogant
abrogation of international treaties, its refusal to submit to
international law, and its continued support for the Israeli occupation.
Some of these capitalists understand that what is taking shape is the
military occupation of the world's major oil fields, in the face of fierce
resistance from the masses in those states, and they further understand
that this is the best way to ensure permanent loss of access to this
critical commodity for good.
The Europeans may be courting the Gulf States now, alarmed and angered by
the Bush overtures to Russia (which in turn makes overtures to both the
U.S. and EU, like a coy lover choosing between suitors), and the "Bushfeld"
junta's apparent attempt to restructure the geopolitical architecture to
the detriment of European capital.
The U.S. Government is certainly anticipating this contingency with great
anxiety. If the Saudis, for example, under the threat of domestic
destabilization from ever more angry and militant masses, and focused on
the U.S.-Israeli nexus, decided out of self-preservation to punish the
U.S., they might withdraw or liquidate all their U.S. (dollar denominated)
assets from the U.S. and invest them in euro-denominated assets. The only
sticking point for them is the fact that U.S. companies perform the lion's
share of extraction activities. Nonetheless, if they were to expel the U.S.
(a dangerous move, but these are desperate times) and contract with other
nations, it would be a devastating blow to the U.S. and have the added
incentive of restricting supply and raising the price per barrel, raising
domestic revenues to quiet their own restless populations. This nightmare
scenario for the Bush de facto Administration is surely fueling their sense
of urgency to emplace more and permanent military infrastructure in the
region to prepare for this contingency.
As the U.S. commits diplomatic suicide in Palestine, and destabilizes Saudi
Arabia, there is backroom talk within the Bush Administration of military
action against Saudi Arabia.
Arab and Central Asian resistance will be Islamist. The destruction of
pan-Arab nationalism and Arab socialism by imperialist forces, often with
Islamists as the instrument of that destruction, has left but this one
force to give voice to the misery and degradation of the masses. Our moral
(and even wishful) assessment of that does not change the fact that this is
true. At this point, whether the U.S. supports or opposes the Islamists is
irrelevant to Arab and Muslim masses. The U.S. is still supporting Israel,
the source of their greatest degradation and humiliation.
The more general economic dislocations of the coming crisis, along with the
necessity (from capital's perspective) of gaining control of the
diminishing but vital resource, has led to a radical rethinking of military
doctrine.
When I was working in Special Forces, we were part of a foreign policy
doctrine called Internal Defense and Development (IDAD). That was old
school. As I prepared to leave the Army, there was much emphasis,
doctrinally and technologically, on something called Operations Other Than
War (OOTW). The process of uneven development has begun to culminate in the
concentrated urbanization of much of the world's population.
In the past, capital had the capacity to "absorb" these populations who
came into the city based on loss of land or the lure of jobs. There was a
level of unemployment and misery maintained to "keep them hungry" and
compliant, and to buffer against worker demands. But with the rapid
restructuring for today's "globalization," there is far less economic
"expansion." Instead of the "proletarianization" of the masses, we are
seeing in many cases their "lumpenization," as many people are integrated
into various criminal enterprises. With the new reality in the world's
cities, and the domestic development of various politics of resistance to
"globalization," two military developments have emerged.
One is the ever-closer relationship and blurring of lines between military
and police. The other is the technological development of sub-lethal
weapons systems and highly sophisticated population control measures for
both police and military -- globalized military policing. This is one key
component in the mad doctrine of "full spectrum dominance" championed by
the feverish Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
We need only look at the Robocops that are now deployed in force for every
demonstration and the reliance on tactical units for more and more "drug"
arrests. Attorney General John Ashcroft is now preparing even further
erosion of Posse Comitatus, the law that forbids the military from
operating within the borders of the U.S. That erosion began with the growth
of numerous liaisons between military and police. I myself participated in
the army's training of the original FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) who have
since become famous or infamous, as the case may be, and with both Los
Angeles and Houston SWAT. The erosion also began with operations where the
military actually augmented the Border Patrol inside the U.S. These
contacts began in the early-1980s and have grown exponentially since.
The military doctrines being prepared for Pax Americana include doctrines
for global urban civil war.
This dialectical relation between energy, currency, and the military is at
least one key concrete condition for us to understand if we are to see into
the mind of capital (big business and its political establishment) in this
period of imperialism in crisis.
It appears that the "democratic" form of imperialism at this conjuncture is
coming to a close, and the mailed fist of yet another form of fascism is a
real possibility in the near term. There is no "democratic" way out of this
accumulation crisis, and as this crisis floods back from the periphery to
the core, capital's assault on the U.S. working class will be sharpened, as
we are seeing with Bush's concerted attack against the debilitated American
trade union movement. As in Argentina, when the inevitable tumble into
severe economic polarization happens, those who count themselves "middle
class" will be rapidly pauperized as the banking system closes its doors to
appropriate their savings.
It is this inevitable attack on the living standards of average Americans
that will either wake us to the folly of this manufactured patriotism and
push us into resistance to this regime, or in the worst case, into
atavistic racialism and fascism. Which it will be depends in some part on
how effective some of us are at telling people in advance what they can
expect...and why.
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Stan Goff retired from the U.S. Army in 1996, his last assignment being 3rd
Special Forces Group. He entered military service January 1970, and his
first assignment was as an infantryman with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in
Vietnam. His service took him to seven more conflict areas after Vietnam,
including Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Somalia, and
Haiti. His assignments included 2nd Ranger Battalion, 1st Ranger Battalion,
75th Ranger Regiment, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 7th
Special Forces, the Jungle Operations Training Center, and the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point.
He is the former Organizing Director for Democracy South and is now the
Director of the North Carolina Network for Popular Democracy. He also works
with the Southern Voting Rights Project of the Institute for Southern
Studies. He authored a book about the 1994 U.S. military intervention in
Haiti, called "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of
Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000).

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ENDNOTES 1. Valorization: In this context, we are referring to the process
whereby the value added to a commodity in the production process is partly
appropriated by non-working owners as profit.
2. Accumulation crisis: Systemic economic distress to capital based on the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall, overproduction, currency collapse,
etc. All recessions are actual accumulation crises.
3. "An Analysis of U.S. and World Oil Production Patterns Using
Hubbert-Style Curves" Albert A. Bartlett Department of Physics University
of Colorado at Boulder, 80309-0390 Mathematical Geology, Vol. 32, No 1, 2000
4. "Distribution and evolution of 'recovery factor'" "Oil Reserves
Conference," Paris, Nov. 11, 1997 International Energy Agency Jean
Laherrère Associate consultant, Petroconsultants
5. "Energetic Limits to Growth" Jay Hanson ENERGY Magazine, spring 1999
6. Value theory: The interpretation of economic activity based on the
"labor theory of value" pioneered by Marx and Engels, which states that the
exchange value of a commodity is fundamentally based on the abstract
socially necessary labor time required to produce it. The goal of
value-theory is to go beyond "supply and demand" accounts of economic
behavior to an examination of the actual social relations between people
that define a social system, including political relations.
7. "The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge"
Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D. Pardee Keynote Symposia Geological Society of
America Summit 2000 Reno, Nevada Nov. 13, 2000
8. "U.S. Military Bases and Empire" Monthly Review Editors March 2002
9. "Analysis of the IEO2001 Non-OPEC Supply Projections" Robert D.
Blanchard Northern Kentucky University April 9, 2001
10. "The Globalization Gamble: The Dollar-Wall Street Regime and its
Consequences" Peter Gowan University of North London Presented to the
International Working Group on Value Theory 1999 mini-conference March
12-14, 1999
11. Ibid.
12. "Making Better Transportation Choices" Molly O'Meara Sheehan State of
the World 2000 The Worldwatch Institute, 2000
13. Bartlett, op cit.
14. Duncan, op cit.
15. "Forget the Caspian Bonanza" Peter Beaumont and John Hooper July 26,
1998, Observer (London)
16. "The World Petroleum Life Cycle" Richard C. Duncan and Walter
Youngquist Presented at the PTTC Workshop "OPEC Oil Pricing and Independent
Oil Producers" Petroleum Technology Transfer Council Petroleum Engineering
Program University of Southern California Los Angeles, California October
22, 1998
17. Ibid.
18. Beaumont and Hooper, op cit.
19. Zionism: The movement founded by Theodore Herzl at the turn of the last
century in response to the worldwide experience of anti-Semitism, based on
the belief in a need for a Jewish state, which the movement determined
would be in Palestine. Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, and many
Jews have opposed and still oppose Zionism. It has been based since early
in its history on the explicit design to expropriate the land of others for
the express purpose of a state controlled by a religiously-defined group,
i.e., Jews. It is that design to base a Jewish-dominated state on the
expropriated land of Palestinians that has led many to equate Zionism with
racism. Being anti-Zionist is not synonymous with being anti-Semitic.
20. "The Militarization of Police" Frank Morales, Covert Action Quarterly,
spring-summer 1999
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Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
--
In the contradiction lies the hope.
                                     --Bertholt Brecht