Re: Who Will Own Iraq?

["lvnadal" <lvnadal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eli Stephens" <elishastephens@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2003 4:16 PM
Subject: Who Will Own Iraq?


 Is the destruction of the currency an accident? The
> result of mindless activity of looters? Or a very
> deliberate decision, perhaps even instigated by US
> special forces? OK, NOW I'm getting conspiratorial.
----------------------------------------------------
 If I may, just some brief comments, and words of caution, about this
developing thread, which includes, concerns over plans for the "national
bourgeoisie," "lumpen" both proletarian and bourgeois, and
"entrepreneurship."

1. Regarding the planned or spontaneous nature of the disintegration of the
Iraqi currency and financial structure:  whether intended or not, this is
the inevitable result, reflecting in this standard of bourgeois exchange (
itself the second most important function of government-- the formation and
guarantee of a unitary currency)   the shattering of the economy, the
dispossession not just of the local bourgeoisie, but of the means of
production from the mechanisms for  exchange.  Of course it means that those
with dollars will reestablish and control exchange in the future.  Those
with "hard" articles to exchange for dollars, jewels, precious metals,
artworks, will become the new entrepreneurs. In every era, in every society,
entrepreneurship is simply the consultant's term for this type of primitive
accumulation.  The golden age of capitalist development achieves its luster
not in contrast to, but as a result, this continuous, sanctioned, sometimes
hidden, dispossession and looting of the previously accumulated objects of
wealth.

The entrepreneurial spirit, so praised and lauded by the bourgeois
sycophants, journalists, talk-show hosts, confessional religious figures, is
not about the "creation of wealth," but about pocketing the gold kicked from
the teeth of the dead and dying.  Souvenirs, anyone?  Or more accurately,
souveniring everyone.

2.Those without the "hard objects" will be forced to exchange their only
other objects, use-values, as it were-- their time and their bodies.  Women
and children will be forced into domestic and  sexual servitude, exported to
countries of Europe, the US,  and the Arab world.  This happened with the
entrepeneurial reconfiguration of the USSR and Eastern Europe, the "economic
miracle" of the Philippines and goes on more or less in every capitalist
society.  Others will become attendants to the forces of occupation, foreign
and ex-expatriate.

3. Regarding the destruction of the national bourgeoisie, the future plans
for the national bourgeoisie-- again nothing is planned and inevitably the
familiar courses of action will be repeated.  Already reports exist of the
US/UK  military and Iraqi police forces agreeing on joint patrols to
"control looting," which means simply to make sure the looting is controlled
by sanctioned elements, namely the police and the military.  It's a
beautiful thing when personal interest and common good coincide for the
bourgeoisie, isn't it.

However, a parallel alliance will inevitably take shape in other aspects of
the adiministration of the occupation-- technicians, former govt. officials,
traders, administrators, will all begin, perhaps slowly, to be integrated
into orbit around the occupation. The question is, what will there be to
administer?  The future for Iraq  exists not in myths of development, but in
the reality, as others have eloquently pointed out, of Afghanistan.

4. In this regard, the origin of this war, the need to attack the components
of production, material and human, the need to destroy the social network
supporting a standard of living known to be to capital as an expense without
corresponding offsets, manifests itself once again, in the elimination of a
"national bourgeoisie," a waving off, so to speak, of a class so immature,
stunted, an inept that it resembles its imperial counterparts in painful
detail.