Abstract
Imperialism generalises commercial exploitation to nations. Just as a slave is not paid for her labour, a nation is not paid for its human and natural resources. It carries exploitation to extreme ends in the process of value destruction by the industry of war. It is a symptom of capital and capital’s state of becoming as it auto-negates to obey its own laws of development. It is capital’s way of mitigating the falling rate of profit. It is war making to disengage or allocate resources under permanent conditions of overproduction. Imperialism is a mutation of the law of value by the practice of violence . Although wars and violence existed in all class societies, their underlying reasons change as per the material circumstance of social reproduction. In the monopoly-finance age, imperialist belligerence counteracts overproduction by the intensification of waste production. In this chapter, I make the case that US-led imperialism remains as imperialist as it was during the twentieth century and lingers as the sole imperialist force.
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Notes
- 1.
Neoliberalism, as it arrives in Europe, becomes a bout of madness in an otherwise sane history. Here is how a less than radical thinker, Pierre Bourdieu explains the disfiguration of reality by the reigning power. There is no mention of violence abroad nor neoliberalism as a vehicle for broadening the stage for imperialist wars. At any rate, the point on moulding reality the whim of power, is in evidence. ‘Theory that is de-socialised and de-historicised at its roots has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one discourse among many. Rather, it is a strong discourse–the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum … It is so strong and so hard to combat only because it has on its side all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it contributes to making what it is. It does this most notably by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It thus adds its own symbolic force to these relations of forces. (Bourdieu 1998). See Bourdieu P. (1998), The Essence of Neoliberalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, https://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu.
- 2.
In Aristotle’s categories, the idea of substance, which is later worked out as mediated universal or general, appears as follows. ‘The most distinctive mark of substance appears to be that, while remaining numerically one and the same, it is capable of admitting contrary qualities. But one and the selfsame substance, while retaining its identity, is yet capable of admitting contrary qualities. The same individual person is at one time white, at another black, at one time warm, at another cold, at one time good, at another bad.’ http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/categories.1.1.html.
- 3.
Just to be sure, the real time of which I speak is the time of impersonal history. This is abstract or social time, or the time commanded by history to discipline and sift labour for maximum surplus value, but whose concrete manifestation is chronological time, to which it is subordinate. This time has a past, present and future, but knows no sequentiality because the decisions of dominant capital fall outside the personal will. This is quite different from Heidegger’s personal time which springs from personal despair, ‘the remorseless baring on the individual’s inner nothingness. Lukács notes that such time is associated with pseudo-objectivism, he says: ‘in Heidegger’s diseased philosophy, however, real time is de-secularized and becomes devoid of content, theological, concentrated purely on the element of personal decision. So the whole pretentious point of Heidegger’s philosophy of time and history does not go beyond his ontology of everyday life. For its content is still merely the inner life of the modern philistine frightened to death by nothingness, a nonentity in himself, and gradually becoming aware of his nothingness.’ (Lukács 1980).
- 4.
UNICEF (2010) 25,000: The average number of children dying each day is 25,000, UNICEF, April 2010, available at https://www.unicef.org/factoftheweek/index_53356.html.
- 5.
The Pan-African Alliance (2017) ‘A Nightmare In Heaven’— Why Nobody Is Talking About The Holocaust in Congo, Medium, 11 April 2017, available at https://medium.com/@PanAfricanUnity/a-nightmare-in-heaven-why-nobody-is-talking-about-the-holocaust-in-congo-53f8ab27fb97.
- 6.
Solidarity With the Syrian Struggle for Dignity and Freedom https://www.change.org/p/solidarity-with-the-syrian-struggle-for-dignity-and-freedom. 8 April 2013.
- 7.
Syrian Kurds accused of ethnic cleansing and killing opponents https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/18/syrian-kurds-accused-of-ethnic-cleansing-and-killing-opponents/amp/.
- 8.
Justification for FY 2019 Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) COUNTER-ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND SYRIA (ISIS) TRAIN AND EQUIP FUND (CTEF). http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2019/fy2019_CTEF_JBook_Final.pdf.
- 9.
https://mobile.twitter.com/maytham956/status/987829017008050177. #SyriacCatholic Archbishop of Hassaké Msgr Jacques Behnam #Hindo: #Kurds are taking houses of Christians in North-East Syria to give it to refugees from #Afrin to change demographics of the area.
- 10.
U.S. politicians get China in Africa all wrong By Deborah Bräutigam April 12 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/12/china-africa/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a75bfad6666e.
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Kadri, A. (2019). One Imperialism. In: Imperialism with Reference to Syria . SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3528-0_4
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