Chapter Five - Wars and Oil Control

Summary

Wars are an integral part of the global economy. They reshape the social conditions that produce value, and they uphold the power of the social class that relies on the war economy for reproducing itself. Wars galvanise military technology and civilian spin-offs with public funds, which maintains the US-led capitalist class advantage in technological edge and intellectual property patents. Financially, funding for wars expands US indebtedness in the dollar. US-led wars enlarge the dollarised money supply that has in turn to be underwritten by further military expansion and hegemony over strategic resources, principally oil. In the financial age, the growth of moneyed debt spent on wars also requires higher tax levies and lower social spending on the central working classes: hence the now all-too-familiar austerity. Save the cultural otherness promoted via the war on terror, US-led wars reproduce the social relations by which Arab assets are devalued, including human assets. These wars not only subjugate the occupied or aggressed nations in the Third World; more importantly, they elevate US-led power and classes vis-à-vis other nationalist or advanced capital circles.

Ultimately, wars, as the aggressive facet of capital, generate a most desirable outcome for the bourgeoisie: they commodify human lives. As will be seen in Chapter Eight, where technology and market forces have disengaged billions of working people (recalling that at least 1.1 billion are unemployed by ILO poverty induced standards) the commodification of life or the merging of working people and their labour power implies that by dispensing with some of the working people by means of wars, capital demonstrates the worthlessness of the labour.