Blood: a renewable resource

George Monbiot has a good piece in today’s Guardian — Too much of a good thing — which traces the causes for conflict in Iraq to the over-accumulation of capital. Of course, the US has a surplus of labour too, but a new New Deal is out of the question.

This fits with the growing trend in the American media to suggest that ‘Old’ Western Europe owes the US for investing in us after the Second World War. As Monbiot points out, they also owe us for allowing them to offload surplus capital, creating new markets and renewing the US and global economies into the bargain.

More offensive still, the US would have us believe that they are a friendly giant, on a humanitarian mission to save the Iraqui people. It’s a lie. They have been raping and pillaging national economies by basing global dominance on control of international finance instead of a powerful industrial base, strong-arming the world into following their brand of short-sighted feral capitalism. Whizzer idea, chaps! Unfortunately this scheme fucked up so badly that conventional, rather than economic, warfare is inevitable in order to clean up the mess by bringing tangible assets like oil under US control.

I can’t help but wonder whether hot wars like the one about to happen are more than a blip on the International Death Chart , or even if armed conflicts ought to be seen as a separate issue — is killing people with bombs in order to exert control different to killing people by propogating a global economy that rests on inequality? Is war symptomatic of the capitalist system, or just a part of the fabric of that system, essentially a messier equivalent to sending in the lads from the IMF?

I dunno.

Of course, it’s hopelessly naive and sophomoric to suggest some moral equivalency between taking out an ISA on the recommendation of your bank manager and spraying bullets into innocent baby-children, so I’ll just whack the final nail in the coffin of my credibility by quoting Godspeed You! Black Emperor: ‘I opened my wallet, and it was full of blood!’

Posted at 12pm on 18/02/03 by Jack Mottram to the politics category.
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