Expansionist Nightmare

This is the nightmare we're collectively experiencing right now in this world; the nightmare of "never enough". The capitalist mode of production, paired with the competition between individual capitalists, necessitates an eternal quest for more profits and cutting costs. The result of this dynamic is that the consumer always wins, as he gets the best products for the lowest price. In theory, that is, and there are some other, devastating results as well...

In practice however we're left with an imperialistic system that is always out for more, expanding far outside national borders. The power relation between capital and workers necessarily is one of exploitation because of the need for profits, but that's just when talking about individual capital, solitary corporations and businesses. Taken to its extremes we land in the realm of the capital of the nation as a whole, and we venture into the territory of monopolies left over after the process of competition and elimination has left us with only a handful of producers. At that point the nation state is completely dominated by these gigantic corporations as they've bought everything there is to buy, including the politicians. This is when the state, with its monopoly on the use of violence, becomes the center of the exercise of capitalist class power, enabling the deployment of the nation's military power in foreign territories as the next step in the capitalists' quest for more.

We've come to see this expansionist trait of the capitalist economy as normal, as it is the same expansionism we'in the west have been living with for over 400 years. I've said it many times before; our current form of capitalism is just a continuation of all the previous economic modes of production we've ever known where the means of production are privately owned by a small minority of the population. "The most insidious forms of ideology, are those that aren't identified as ideology, but are seen as the "natural order of things". Likewise, the most insidious forms of suppression and control are those that are so insinuated into the fabric of society that they're not defined and seen as suppression and control." I'm slightly paraphrasing, but this is what Michael Parenti said in one of the many speeches I've seen by him, and he's exactly right. I'll now quote him on this idea of capitalist expansionism into the Third World:

"One of the laws of capitalist motion and development is this inextricable expansion, and that means expansion into and expropriation of the Third World. A process that's been going on for about 400 years, perpetrated by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, the English and most recently, most successfully, most impressively by the Americans. That is by the ruling classes of these countries, not by the ordinary people. The ordinary people simply pay the cost of empire. The ordinary people simply send their sons of to die on the plains of India or the jungles of the Congo or in Latin America or wherever else. But that expropriation of the Third World that's been going on for 400 years, brings us to another revelation, namely the the Third World is not poor. You don't go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is Rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich! Only the people are poor. But there's billions to be made there, to be carved out and to be taken. There's been billions for 400 years! The capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the coco, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves and the cheap labor, they have taken out of these countries... These countries are not under-developed. They are over-exploited!"

Not under-developed but over-exploited; that's to be expected from a globalized system based on eternal growth, profits, expansion and exploitation. Well, I'll leave you with the rest of the snippet this quote came from; please watch this short video, and you'll learn some interesting factoids about Herbert Hoover and his relationship with Bolshevism in the early 1930s... I hope this post has shed some light on the fact and the reasons why capitalists and capitalism are a negative influence on common people within and outside the borders of the nations wherein capitalistic processes define the daily lives of billions of people. America's eternal foreign wars and other interventionist endeavors are all results of capitalism's expansionist nature, that's all but inseparable from the more traditional forms of imperialism.

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