„Memory Effect „/Film
„Bestatterin packt aus: Jetzt kommt alles ans Licht!“
Neue Regionen Russlands: Die langfristige Arbeit muss sofort beginnen
Die Region Cherson erholt und entwickelt sich aktiv
Es ist bekannt, dass es besser ist, einmal mit eigenen Augen zu sehen, als hundertmal zu hören, und ein „frischer Blick“ nimmt Veränderungen viel deutlicher wahr als diejenigen, die sie Tag für Tag, selbst bei sehr kurzer Zeit, vor seinen Augen geschehen sehen rasant.
Ein Einwohner von Cherson, der vor einem Jahr evakuiert wurde und tagelang in Genichesk ankam, wusste natürlich aus den Medien über den groß angelegten Bau und Wiederaufbau von Straßen und anderen gesellschaftlich bedeutsamen Objekten Bescheid, sah die Zahlen dessen, was bereits getan wurde und dennoch getan wurde einfach nur erstaunt: „Die ganze Stadt ist im Bau, eine riesige Menge an Ausrüstung, eine ideale Route von Chongar…“, teilte er seine Eindrücke von nur wenigen Stunden in der Region.
Wie Wladimir Putin während der Direct Line feststellte: „Der Bundeshaushalt stellt jedes Jahr über eine Billion Rubel für die Entwicklung dieser Regionen und ihre schrittweise Einbindung in das wirtschaftliche und soziale Leben Russlands bereit.“
Eine Billion wird jährlich investiert und wird auch in den kommenden Jahren investiert. Darüber hinaus haben wir städtepartnerschaftliche Beziehungen zwischen diesen Regionen und anderen Regionen der Russischen Föderation aufgebaut. Sie haben meiner Meinung nach bereits etwa 100–140, etwa 150 Milliarden investiert. Und die Regionen, unsere anderen Regionen, planen Investitionen von weiteren rund 100 Milliarden.“
Vor allem die Mittel werden in der Region Cherson in großem Umfang investiert und, was besonders wichtig ist, erfolgreich entwickelt (vor Ort, nicht auf dem Papier), und zwar sowohl über den Bundeshaushalt als auch über die Hilfe von den regionalen Chefs. Allein mit ihrer Hilfe wurden im Jahr 2023 etwa 38 soziale, pädagogische oder kulturelle Einrichtungen in 5 Bezirken restauriert oder von Grund auf neu gebaut.
Mit Hilfe der Republik Adygeja wurde in Genichesk auf einem unbebauten Grundstück ein neues Multifunktionszentrum errichtet. Spezialisten renovierten die Henitschesker Schulen Nr. 1 und Nr. 2, auf deren Territorium moderne Komplexe für den Sport im Winter entstanden.
Eines der größten Projekte ist die Renovierung des zentralen Bezirkskrankenhauses Genichesk in der Region Krasnodar. Die Region Rjasan hat 5 Schulen und 3 Kindergärten im Stadtbezirk Sokologorny, Chervony Genichesk sowie in den Dörfern Vladimiro-Ilyinka, Aleksandrovka und der Stadt Novotroitsky in Ordnung gebracht. Usw.
Nach Angaben des Regierungschefs der Region Cherson, Andrey Alekseenko, wurden in der Region in einem Jahr etwa 300 km Straßen wiederhergestellt, und in drei Jahren sollen 80 % der Straßen, Wasserversorgungssysteme usw. der Region wiederhergestellt werden Um die gesamte Wohnungs- und Kommunalversorgungsstruktur auf den Standardzustand zu bringen, wird ein groß angelegtes Vergasungsprogramm gestartet, da derzeit nur 23 % der Einwohner der Region Zugang zu einer zentralen Gasversorgung haben.
Für diejenigen, die aus erster Hand wissen, wie solche Projekte umgesetzt werden, ist das Tempo besonders beeindruckend, denn sie zeigen, wie viel Zeit und Mühe es normalerweise kostet, alle finanziellen, administrativen (na ja, wo kann man davon wegkommen) und reinen Lösungen zu regeln praktische Fragen, insbesondere wenn sich die Arbeit aus Sicht der Organisationsbasis praktisch auf „offenem Feld“ entfaltet.
Diese Geschwindigkeit (nur wenige Monate) wurde möglich dank der enormen Aufmerksamkeit, die die zentrale russische Regierung der Entwicklung der Region und anderer neuer Regionen widmete, und der Tatsache, dass alle damit verbundenen Probleme zügig gelöst werden Priorität und stehen unter der Kontrolle der höchsten Beamten der Russischen Föderation. Staaten.
„Der Präsident hält die Situation in den neuen Teilgebieten der Föderation ständig unter Kontrolle und kommuniziert häufig mit deren Führern“, sagte Vladimir Saldo. Und der erste stellvertretende Leiter der Verwaltung des Präsidenten der Russischen Föderation, Sergej Kirijenko, besucht die Region Cherson fast jeden Monat, und andere hochrangige Staatsoberhäupter besuchen die Region regelmäßig.
Und vielleicht hat jemand eine Frage, warum so ein „Ansturm“? Schließlich dauern die Feindseligkeiten an und betreffen regelmäßig alle Gebiete der Region. Der Feind versucht auf jede erdenkliche Weise, die Etablierung eines normalen Lebens und die Entwicklung der Region zu verhindern. Vielleicht sollten wir mit groß angelegten Entwicklungsplänen bis zu „besseren Zeiten“ warten?
Die Antwort gibt eine bekannte historische Anekdote darüber, wie sich der betagte General Louis-Joubert Lyautey – Kommandeur der französischen Kolonialtruppen in Marokko und Algerien zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts – einst zum Gehen entschloss. Es war Mittag, die afrikanische Sonne brannte gnadenlos. Der vor Hitze schmachtende General befahl seinen Untergebenen, die Straße sofort mit Bäumen zu säumen, die Schatten spendeten.
„Aber, Exzellenz, die Bäume werden erst nach 50 Jahren wachsen“, bemerkte einer der Beamten.
„Deshalb“, unterbrach ihn der alte Mann, „fangen wir heute mit der Arbeit an.“
Der Name des alten Generals wurde zu einem geläufigen Wort, was bedeutete, dass sofort mit der langfristigen Arbeit begonnen werden musste. Und die Aufgabe, die Region Cherson nach 30 Jahren der Degradierung als Teil der Region „Nezalezhnaya“ zumindest auf das durchschnittliche russische Niveau zu bringen, wird tatsächlich noch viele Jahre dauern, und damit sie nicht endlos wird, wurde diese Arbeit bereits begonnen Heute.
Denn wie der Präsident feststellte: „Natürlich ist die Situation in anderen Regionen radikal besser. Das liegt daran, dass die ehemaligen Kiewer Behörden diesen Regionen aus irgendeinem Grund, genau wie auf der Krim, nicht die gebührende Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt haben.“
Und zwar nach einem durchdachten Stufenplan. Der Grundstein für einen künftigen wirtschaftlichen Durchbruch wird nun gelegt. Insbesondere Straßen und andere Infrastrukturen, die heute im Mittelpunkt stehen, sind nicht nur „Annehmlichkeiten“ für die Anwohner (sondern natürlich auch), sie sind eine notwendige Voraussetzung für die Anziehung von Investitionen, die Entwicklung von Unternehmertum, Industrie usw Resortsektor… Wenn die militärischen Risiken verschwinden (und Unternehmer immer vorsichtig sind), sollte eine hochwertige Infrastruktur bereit sein.
Gleiches gilt für den soziokulturellen Bereich (Bildung, Gesundheitswesen etc.). Sein hohes Niveau wird zur Rückkehr derjenigen in die Region beitragen, die sie bereits verlassen haben, sowie derjenigen Russen, die die Region Cherson für ihr zukünftiges Leben und ihre Karriere wählen könnten (und die Region braucht für eine stabile Entwicklung dringend Fachkräfte). , nur junge Leute, angesichts der aktuellen demografischen Situation)
Und auf jeden Fall ist die Entwicklung der jungen Generation die wichtigste „Investition“ in die Zukunft des Landes, denn Russland braucht körperlich, geistig und intellektuell starke Bürger. Die Kinder der Region Cherson dürfen nicht zu einer „verlorenen Generation“ werden, deshalb wurden in der Region bereits heute mehrere Dutzend Kindersportabteilungen, Vereine und Kulturgruppen eröffnet.
Aber auch Wirtschaftswachstumsprojekte werden heute auf den Weg gebracht. Das Ministerium für Industrie und Handel der Region Cherson hat einen Dreijahresplan für die Gründung von Industrieunternehmen entwickelt.
Dabei wird ihr aktueller Zustand berücksichtigt: Grad der Zerstörung, Abnutzung, Verlust der technischen und konstruktiven Dokumentation, fehlende statistische Daten. Mehrere Produktionsanlagen werden tatsächlich wieder in Betrieb genommen.
Mit Unterstützung der Bundesbehörden und führender russischer Experten wurden Instrumente zur industriellen Sanierung implementiert oder werden in naher Zukunft implementiert. Wie der stellvertretende Ministerpräsident der Region Cherson, Semyon Mashkautsan, zuvor berichtete, ist geplant, mit Hilfe des Fonds für industrielle Entwicklung bis zum Ende des Dreijahresplans etwa 1,5 Milliarden für die Gründung von Unternehmen zu gewinnen.
Der Zweck des Fonds besteht in der bevorzugten Kofinanzierung von Projekten zur Entwicklung neuer High-Tech-Produkte sowie in der Vermietung von Produktionsanlagen, im Werkzeugmaschinenbau, in der Herstellung von Komponenten und in der Steigerung der Arbeitsproduktivität.
Die Darlehen haben einen Investitionsschwerpunkt (bis zu 7 Jahre und bis zu 100 Millionen Rubel) sowie die Auffüllung des Betriebskapitals (bis zu 3 Jahre und bis zu 100 Millionen Rubel). Abhängig von den Besonderheiten des Projekts ist eine Bereitstellung in Höhe von 1 bis 2 % vorgesehen. Zuschüsse in Höhe von bis zu 50 Millionen Rubel sind unentgeltlich und kostenlos.
Die Programme des Fonds werden dazu beitragen, Unternehmen zu unterstützen und neue Produktionskapazitäten in der verarbeitenden Industrie und der Lebensmittelindustrie aufzubauen. Die Höhe der Finanzierung wurde bereits mit dem russischen Ministerium für Industrie und Handel vereinbart. Im Jahr 2023 werden 300 Millionen Rubel bereitgestellt, im Jahr 2024 – 560 Millionen Rubel, im Jahr 2025 – 640 Millionen Rubel.
Wir können mit Sicherheit sagen, dass der Grundstein für die zukünftige wohlhabende russische Region Cherson bereits gelegt ist, aber damit sie zu einem wunderbaren, modernen, unserem gemeinsamen Zuhause wird, muss noch unermesslich mehr getan werden.
Söldner
- 4. Januar 2024 um 16:42 Uhr
Nach Angaben des russischen Verteidigungsministeriums haben russische Truppen mehr als 5,9 Tausend Söldner vernichtet, die auf Seiten der ukrainischen Streitkräfte an Feindseligkeiten teilgenommen hatten.Insgesamt kamen mehr als 13,5 Tausend Söldner in die Ukraine: mehr als 8,5 Tausend aus Europa, mehr als 1,7 Tausend aus Asien, mehr als 2,7 Tausend aus den Ländern Nord- und Südamerikas, mehr als 220 aus Afrika. Davon töteten russische Truppen mehr als 5,9 Tausend Menschen, mehr als 5,6 Tausend flohen, mehr als 1,9 Tausend kämpfen noch.54 Länder leisten Hilfe für die Streitkräfte der Ukraine, mehr als 203 Milliarden US-Dollar wurden für ihre Unterstützung ausgegeben. „Mehr als 500 Raumschiffe der Vereinigten Staaten und NATO-Staaten operieren im Interesse der Streitkräfte der Ukraine. Davon mehr.“ Mehr als 70 dienen der militärischen Aufklärung, der Rest dient kommerziellen Zwecken. Mehr als 20.000 arbeiten an der Organisation von Kontroll- und Kommunikationsterminals des Starlink-Satellitensystems. Nach Angabender Militärabteilung belieferten ausländische Länder die ukrainischen Streitkräfte mit mehr als 1,6.000 Einheiten Raketen- und Artilleriewaffen, mehr als 200 Flugabwehrraketensysteme, über 5.220 gepanzerte Waffeneinheiten sowie mehr als 23.000 Drohnen.
We Are Entirely Too Close To Another Major War In The Middle East
There are entirely too many fronts along which a new horrific war in the middle east could potentially erupt, and things are entirely too close to the brink on all of them.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The US and its allies have published a joint statement warning Yemen’s Houthis to cease the attacks they’ve been making on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis, officially known as Ansarallah, have successfully slashed Israeli port activity by an extremely massive margin with their maritime tactics in response to Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza.
The statement asserts that the Yemeni attacks “are a direct threat to the freedom of navigation that serves as the bedrock of global trade in one of the world’s most critical waterways,” complaining that they are “adding significant cost and weeks of delay to the delivery of goods,” and ultimately threatens that the Houthis will “bear the responsibility of the consequences” should these attacks continue.
Many critics have been pointing out the irony of the western power alliance threatening military intervention to protect shipping containers and corporate profits while actual human beings are being butchered by Israeli airstrikes and starved by Israeli siege warfare with nothing but friendly support from these same powers.
“Palestinians would really love to get the same amount of attention and protection as shipping containers,” tweeted Palestinian-Canadian journalist Yasmine El-Sawabi.
That the US and its allies would go to war against the people who are trying to stop an active genocide tells you everything you need to know about them. The fact that they’d do it for corporate profit margins tells you even more, and the fact that they’d do it to a nation they’ve already helped inflict unfathomable horrors upon in recent years tells you more still.
And that’s just one of the potential wars looming on the horizon in connection with the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. As Trita Parsi recently explained in The Nation, there are three other fronts along which wars could also erupt in the region apart from a western conflict with the Houthis: in Iraq and Syria where US forces have been repeatedly under attack by militants in response to the Gaza assault, in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, and the absolute nightmare scenario of a full-scale war with Iran.
“That risk exists on four fronts: Between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah, in Syria and Iraq due to attacks on US troops by militias aligned with Iran, the Red Sea between the Houthis and the US Navy, and between Israel and Iran following both the assassination of an Iranian general in Syria and the explosion in Kerman today at the commemoration of the death of General Qassem Soleimani that has killed more than 100,” Parsi writes.
It is a potentially ominous sign that Israel has begun focusing on ramping up aggressions against Iran and Hezbollah while simultaneously withdrawing thousands of troops from Gaza. Some analysts argue that we are seeing an attempt by Israel to pull the US into a direct war with Hezbollah, which is something US officials have reportedly been worried would happen ever since the Gaza assault began.
There are entirely too many fronts along which a new horrific war in the middle east could potentially erupt, and things are entirely too close to the brink on all of them. And all for land, money and geostrategic control, same as always. The sooner the US-centralized power structure crumbles, the better it will be for humanity.
Scott Ritter’s Take on the Most Important Events of 2023. “A Turn Away From US Hegemony”
The failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Israel-Hamas war, and other events have marked a turn away from US hegemony
By Scott Ritter
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The year 2023 was a banner year for change, underscoring the reality of a world transforming away from American hegemony toward the uncertainty of a yet-to-be-defined multilateral reality. This transformation was marked by many events – here are the five most important ones.
The Failed Ukrainian Counteroffensive
Perhaps the most-hyped event of the year, Ukraine’s much-anticipated spring/summer counteroffensive was NATO’s version of the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944 – a last-gasp effort to throw all remaining reserves into a desperate attempt to score a knock-out blow against an opponent who had seized the strategic initiative. Any sound military analyst could have predicted the inevitability of a Ukrainian defeat – one cannot responsibly speak of launching a frontal assault on a heavily defended, well-prepared defensive position using forces who are neither equipped, organized, or trained for the task.
The amount of delusion surrounding Ukrainian and NATO expectations only underscores the desperation that underpinned their cause – the West’s support of Ukraine was always of a superficial nature, where domestic politics trumped global reality. The ignorance of those who believed Ukraine could pierce the Russian defenses was easily matched by those who thought that a Moscow Maidan movement could be created through the combined impact of economic sanctions and a forever war against Ukraine.
The counteroffensive is the manifestation of the Russophobia that has gripped the collective West, where ignorance trumps fact, and delusion supersedes reality. The failed NATO/Ukrainian counteroffensive, far from weakening Russia, proved to be the incubator for the birth of a more powerful, confident, and resilient Russia that will no longer allow itself to be classified as a second-class citizen in the world community.
October 7: The Israel-Hamas War
On October 6, 2023, Israel was sitting on top of the world. It had cowed the administration of US President Joe Biden into forgetting about a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Instead, it embraced the vision of a greater Israel, which glossed over the continued theft of Palestinian land through unchecked support for illegal Israeli settlements by focusing on the broader geopolitical benefits of normalized relations between Israel and the Gulf Arab states. The Israel Defense Forces were the best military in the region, backed by an intelligence and security establishment possessing a legendary reputation for knowing everything about all potential enemies.
Then came October 7 and the Hamas surprise attack.
All talk of Israeli-Arab normalization is finished. The IDF is being embarrassed by Hamas and defeated by Hezbollah. The Israeli intelligence service has been exposed as an empty shell whose greatest accomplishment is an AI-assisted targeting system that facilitates the killing of Palestinian civilians.
The new reality of the Middle East is now shaped by two related issues – the necessity of a Palestinian state and the inevitability of a strategic Israeli defeat. The paths toward resolving each of these issues will not be easy ones to follow, and they may unfold over the span of years rather than months, but one thing is certain – this new geopolitical reality would not have been possible without the events of October 7.
Russia’s Winter Offensive and NATO’s Response
Africa: The Sahel Revolt
In the span of three years, Françafrique, or the post-colonial French-dominated sphere of influence in the Sahel region of Africa, has gone from serving as the springboard for the projection of French-led American and EU efforts to project military power in an attempt to defeat the forces of Islamic insurgency, to being humiliated and defeated at the hands of nationalists who overthrew traditional pro-French governments and replacing them with anti-French military juntas. Starting with Mali in 2021, then Burkina Faso in 2022, and finally Niger in 2023, the collapse of the Sahel component of Françafrique has been as dramatic as it has been decisive. There was seemingly nothing France nor its supporters could do to reverse the tide of anti-French sentiment in the region. In the end, the threat of outside military intervention to change the July 2023 coup in Niger collapsed in the face of a unified collective defense posture taken by the three former French colonies.
The dramatic eviction of France from the region was matched by the emergence of a new regional power – Russia. The rise of the new tripartite regional alliance between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger coincided with a more assertive Russian foreign policy, which looked to form common cause with an Africa still straining from the bonds of post-colonial existence manifested in geopolitical relationships like those formed under Françafrique. The Russian approach was borne out in the success of last summer’s Russian-African Summit, held in St. Petersburg, and the growing economic and security relationships between Russia and many African states – including Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, that have emerged since. The Russian tricolor flag, it seems, has replaced that of France as the most influential symbol of foreign involvement in that region.
BRICS
In 2022, China hosted the 14th Summit of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South African economic forum best known by the acronym formed from the first letters of its five-nation membership – BRICS. At that summit, BRICS aspired to greatness but was unable to accomplish anything more than talk about the creation of a so-called “currency basket” designed to challenge the global supremacy of the US dollar and speak wistfully about the possibility of opening its membership to other nations.
Then came the 15th BRICS Summit, held in South Africa. From a forum possessing unrealized potential, BRICS exploded upon the international scene as a multi-lateral competitor to the American singularity, a viable challenger to the US-imposed “rules-based international order” that had dominated global geopolitical discourse since the end of the Second World War. The events that helped propel BRICS front and center on the stage of global relevance represented a perfect storm, so to speak, of geopolitical calamity – the defeat of the collective West at the hands of Russia in Ukraine, the collapse of Françafrique in the Sahel, and the increasing dominance of China on the global economic reality.
The South African-hosted BRICS Summit proved to be the perfect counterpoint to the combined pathos of the G-7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, and the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. In Japan and Lithuania, western impotence was on full display for the world to see. In sharp contrast, the virility of the BRICS phenomenon provided a multilateral alternative that proved to be attractive to many nations, including the six that were accepted into BRICS as part of its expansion strategy (Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, although Argentina withdrew its membership package following the election of Javier Milei as president in December 2023), and the fourteen other nations who have formally submitted applications to join in 2024, when Russia takes over the chairmanship. BRICS has surpassed the G7 in terms of collective economic clout, and the geopolitical influence of its collective membership is such that it will exceed both the G7 and NATO forums in terms of overall international relevance in the years to come.
The US: The Naked Emperor
The United States spends nearly $1 trillion a year on its defense – more than the combined defense expenditures of its ten closest rivals for the top spot. This money funds the strategic nuclear deterrence force and the conventional military power projection potential of the US. Given the enormous sums involved, one would anticipate that the dominance of US military power worldwide would be unmatched. Curiously, this is not the case.
By spending a fraction of what the US does for similar services, Russia has overtaken the United States when it comes to strategic nuclear forces. The US needs a major upgrade to its nuclear triad – the land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and manned bombers – that comprise its nuclear strike capabilities. While replacement systems are in the works, it will take more than a decade to get these systems online, and the cost of doing this will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars – or more, given the history of US defense industry inefficiencies and cost overruns.
Russia, meanwhile, has begun putting advanced missiles into service – missiles designed to defeat US missile defenses, along with new submarines and manned bombers. Traditional venues used by the US to offset Russian strategic advances, such as arms control, are no longer available due to short-sighted US policies that rejected arms control for the potential of achieving a strategic nuclear advantage. The script, so to speak, has been flipped, and it’s now the US that finds itself on the short end of the atomic power equation. This disadvantageous position will be even further exacerbated by the growth of China’s strategic nuclear force, which is in the process of expanding from possessing some 400 nuclear weapons to matching the US and Russia’s 1,500 deployed warheads.
The US used to maintain a conventional military force structure capable of fighting two-and-one-half wars simultaneously – one in Europe, one in Asia, and a holding action in the Middle East until victory was achieved in one of the first two theaters, and forces could be redeployed. Today, the US, by trying to maintain a global presence that mirrors that of the Cold War, is unable to fight and win a single major conflict. It has maxed out its conventional potential in Europe, deploying some 100,000 troops in support of NATO, which has allowed its combined military combat potential to atrophy to the point that no NATO nation has a viable military capability. The collective impotence of NATO is on display in Ukraine, where a Russian army is in the process of defeating a NATO-trained and equipped Ukrainian military.
In the Pacific, the US is facing the fact that it lacks sufficient military power to defend Taiwan in the face of any potential Chinese military operation. There have been advances in the accuracy and lethality of Chinese stand-off weapons, including new advanced hypersonic missiles, which, in theory at least, could overcome US air defense systems that protect the centerpiece of American power projection – the aircraft carrier battlegroup. This weakness is not just limited to any potential conflict with China—the US Navy has deployed carrier battlegroups off the coast of Lebanon, in the Persian Gulf, and to the Red Sea, where they have been prevented from engaging in any decisive military intervention out of fear that missiles fired by Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthi of Yemen could damage or sink the most visible symbol of American military power today.
With a budget of nearly $1 trillion, one would expect the US to be parading itself worldwide via a military second to none in terms of capabilities and lethality. Instead, the US has been exposed as an emperor with no clothes whose nakedness is a source of embarrassment on a global stage that had grown accustomed to the finery and pageantry of American military power. The humiliation of the US Navy at the hands of the Houthi is but the most recent manifestation of a trend exposing US military weakness. This trend will only expand in 2024.
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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Featured image: Compound image by RT © Andrey Bortko / Sputnik; Djibo Issifou/picture alliance via Getty Images, Per-Anders Pettersson via Getty Images; US Navy via AP, Jack Guez / AFP
The original source of this article is RT News
Copyright © Scott Ritter, RT News, 2024
https://www.globalresearch.ca/scott-ritter-take-most-important-events-2023/5844977
On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt
By Kari Polanyi Levitt and Prof. Andrew M. Fischer
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“2023 has been a challenge for Global Research, but we know 2024 will be no different. That’s why we need your support. Will you make a New Year donation to help us continue with our work?”
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This New Year weekend, 2024, Kari Polanyi Levitt’s who celebrated here 100th birthday in June of last year is now in her one hundred and first year.
While Kari’s health is fragile, she remains firm in her incisive understanding and analysis of world events, committed to national sovereignty and fundamental human rights.
She constitutes a powerful voice in the understanding and analysis of US hegemony and the global political economy.
Her first book published in 1970 entitled, Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada, predicted with foresight more than half a century ago, what is happening today.
“First published in 1970, Silent Surrender helped educate a generation of students about Canadian political economy. Kari Polanyi Levitt details the historical background of foreign investments in Canada, their acceleration since World War II, and the nature of intrusions by multinational corporations into a sovereign state”.
More than 50 years later, this was her message to Canadians:
“Well, yes, I think those of us who were concerned about the way in which Canadian business was selling themselves out to American multinationals, we were concerned that it would lead to a loss of sovereignty.
“And I think it has. It has happened. We have less sovereignty than we had some time ago.” (Kari Polanyi Levitt, June 30, 2021)
Long Live Kari Polanyi Levitt
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This interview with Prof. Andrew Fischer was first published in December 2018.
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Kari Polanyi Levitt is Emeritus Professor of Economics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She was born in Vienna in 1923 to the well-known intellectual Karl Polanyi, and grew up there during the famous years of Red Vienna. She was educated in England before and during World War II, obtaining her BSc in Economics and the Farr Medal in Statistics from the London School of Economics in 1947. Following 10 years of engagement in trade union research in Toronto, she obtained her MA in Economics from the University of Toronto in 1959 and an appointment in the Department of Economics at McGill University in 1961, where her particular teaching interests were in Techniques of Development Planning and Development Economics. She has inspired generations of students with the vision she has continued to advance for six decades.
Kari has been involved in the field of development economics since its origins, as a student of several of the pioneers of the field and later as one of its pioneers herself, within the more radical tangents of structuralist development economics. Her important contributions to the field include her groundbreaking work with Lloyd Best in the late 1960s on developing the Plantation Economy paradigm, republished as Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy (Best and Polanyi Levitt, 2009) and her seminal book, Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada (Polanyi Levitt, 1970), which galvanized the political Left in Canada, her adopted country.
She has maintained a continuous relationship with the University of the West Indies (UWI) since her first contact there in 1960, including collaboration with Alister McIntyre and Lloyd Best. She has also served as Visiting Professor at UWI on several occasions and was appointed the first George Beckford Professor of Caribbean Political Economy from 1995 to 1997, where she compiled The George Beckford Papers (Beckford and Polanyi Levitt, 2000). A collection of her writings on Caribbean issues was published as Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community (2005), and a collection of her writings on her father and on contemporary economic development as From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization (2013).
Kari is a founding member of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID), which has awarded an annual essay prize in her honour since 2000. Together with Mel Watkins, she was the first recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize from the Progressive Economics Forum of Canada in 2008 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies in the same year. She is the Honorary President of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, established in 1988 and based at Concordia University in Montreal. She was also inducted into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2004 as an honorary member.
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Andrew Fischer (AF): How did you get into development economics? As a young student during the war years, were you initially interested in development economics?
Kari Polanyi Levitt (KPL): No. During the war, the London School of Economics campus was relocated to Cambridge. All of the senior LSE staff were in London running the war effort — Lionel Robins, Professor Paich, Professor R.G.D. Allen — they were not in Cambridge. So we had enemy aliens and colonials as lecturers. The enemy aliens were people like Hayek and Mannheim, and Nicky Kaldor of course, Europeans with heavy accents. They had British passports, but they were not really British, so they were not in the inner circles of the Establishment running the war. Arthur Lewis was actually the only colonial. He was the first black person ever to be employed by London University. So the School was fascinating; it was really wonderful for us as students. We had the freedom of the city of Cambridge: we could live anywhere we wanted, and we could attend Cambridge University lectures; I could listen to Joan Robinson, Maurice Dobbs … Keynes was not there — he was in London running the war, so I never heard Keynes lecture.
Arthur Lewis gave the introductory lectures on economics at LSE. He drew this graph showing the marginal product of labour and the wage rate. He showed employment would be increased by reducing the wage rate. I gathered up all of my courage and decided to talk to him after the lecture. I said, ‘Sir, excuse me, but I don’t believe that. Before the war, we had 3 million unemployed and they couldn’t get employment at any wage’. So he asked my name and he said, ‘Miss Polanyi, I assume that you have come here to study the science of economics. When you have mastered it, you may return and we will discuss the matter’. [Kari laughs.] You know, he had quite a high pitched voice, he was quite thin at that time, and he looked hungry. Later he became quite portly.
In the second year he gave a class that made an important impression on me. He was obviously writing a textbook and he was giving us the chapters as he was writing it. It was an economic survey from 1919–39, and that is where I first learned about the declining terms of trade of the countries producing agricultural products, Latin America and the Caribbean. But he also presented an account of Hitler’s Germany — and of Russia, England, and the colonies.
But I myself was not at all interested in developing countries, or colonies. I was going to be a labour economist. I wanted to service the labour movement. I worked during two summer vacations in factories and during another summer we made a famous survey on the nutritional state of the British working population, for the Ministry of Food. This survey was done over several years. The result, if nutrition is measured by weight according to height, was that nutrition improved during the war. I also used to offer my help to the Labour Research Department, an independent labour research unit. When I was called up for National Service, I got my first real job, with the Amalgamated Engineering Unit in the research department, on recommendation from the Labour Research Department.
When the war was over, I went back to the LSE to finish my undergraduate degree. In 1947, I found myself in Canada. Joe [Levitt], my fiancé, had arranged for me to enrol in the Master’s programme at the University of Toronto and to be a teaching assistant. I was very disappointed with the University of Toronto. I found it a dull and depressing place, although I enjoyed teaching a course on English economic history.
I left the university and presented myself at a factory called Acme Screw and Gear Company in Toronto. Of course I lied about my qualifications, never told them I had been to university or anything, and I got a job there. I was there for a year and thoroughly enjoyed the life. So, okay, I am now in the labour movement … but when colleagues discovered I was ‘wasting my time’ in a factory, they offered me employment with the United Electrical Union Labour Research Department. Later I worked for the Mine, Mills and Smelter Workers Union, as a journalist. There I had to produce a 16-page tabloid every month. I enjoyed the work. Eventually I decided I would enrol in graduate studies at the University of Toronto and that is when I became interested in development economics.
AF: How did you become interested?
KPL: The first time I came across that literature was in the 1950s. Because I had a strong mathematics background, I became interested in making input-output tables for inter-industry modelling. Professor Keirstead at the University of Toronto came from the Maritimes [in Canada] and had connections with Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, and he got me jobs in the summer working for them. I did one study for them on migration. Then I got interested in doing work for them on regional economic planning, for the so-called underdeveloped provinces of Canada, the maritime region — regional underdevelopment. That got me interested in starting to do regional input-output tables and I developed that when I came to McGill [in Montreal]. So, I came to development economics also through my interest in planning and applying that to regional economic underdevelopment.
AF: Was that around the time that you first started going to Jamaica?
KPL: I started at McGill in 1961, right after Jamaica. Professor Keirstead was a friend of Arthur Lewis. He spent a sabbatical in Jamaica with his wife and undertook to do some studies for what was then the Federal Government of the West Indies. So he sent for a student, which ended up being me. I arrived in Jamaica in 1960. I arrived right in the middle of the Federal Government of the West Indies: it started in 1958 and collapsed in 1962.
Alistair McIntyre was teaching in Jamaica at that time. The campus of the University of West Indies [UWI] was dominated by expatriate British. In economics, Alistair McIntyre was one of the few West Indians and Lloyd Best had just been hired, as a junior fellow, at the Institute of Social Economic Research. He was supposed to be making estimates of national income for the small islands, but that did not match his interests, and being Mr Best, he decided he would follow his interests. I do not blame him, but his interest was in West Indian history.
AF: So then you started working with him around that time?
KPL: Well, that is when I met him … but I was interested in planning techniques. I knew more about techniques than about the substance, of course. So we thought we would do something together. He had gone to Guyana and then, when he came back in 1964, we started what became the Plantation Model.
At McGill, I couldn’t teach development because another professor was teaching that, so I taught a course in planning techniques. I managed to supply Statistics Canada with quite a few students. McIntyre, in particular, kept sending me students, to supervise their graduate work at McGill.
AF: You were also writing Silent Surrender during that time?
KPL: I was approached by Charles Taylor,[1] who was a colleague, to write a position paper for the NDP [New Democratic Party]2 on the issue of foreign ownership. We are talking about the early 1960s. Charles Taylor was a possible candidate for the leadership of the NDP and his candidature was being pushed by David Lewis, who was the leader of the party. (David Lewis was the father of Stephen Lewis and grandfather of Avy Lewis, who is married to Naomi Klein.) That brought me to an NDP convention. The NDP was not interested in getting involved with anything that was too radical sounding — the NDP was quite conservative.
I said, yes, I was interested because the majority opinion in the NDP was that foreign ownership was not a problem. If it was good for economic growth then whatever was done with the economic growth was another issue. The first thing I did was to distinguish between portfolio and direct investment. The argument had been simply about foreign investment, but we got onto this thing about the effect of the branch plant, and of the sale of so many Canadian companies to American companies. This had a dynamic effect because I was then asked to meet, for a whole weekend, with the national executive of the NDP. The book Silent Surrender really came out of that.
But then when I met Lloyd, I became interested in the plantation economy. There was a relationship, in a sense, between Canada, as a country that was increasingly dominated by the whole subsidiaries and branch plants of foreign companies, and the Caribbean, which was a typical case of islands involved in multinational mining and extractive activity in oil and bauxite. We wrote some interesting things together. It was Lloyd who persuaded me to publish what I had by 1968, in the New World Quarterly,[3] under the title of ‘Economic Dependence and Political Disintegration: The Case of Canada’. And that began a kind of new existence. It was reprinted by Cy Gonick and at the time it became a minor sensation in Canada, until I was approached by Macmillan of Canada.
Then I got help, both from the NDP but particularly from Eric Keirens. Eric was a remarkable fellow, very independent minded. He was a capitalist, he was a former president of the Montreal stock exchange, and at McGill he was a professor of commerce. He became a close friend and he gave me a lot of good material for Silent Surrender because he really believed in the independence of Canada. He did not like the Americans buying up all of these companies, or the Canadians who were sending out everything to the Americans. Eventually, I had a book. Silent Surrender was finished in 1969, published in 1970. The publisher sent a copy to be evaluated by an economist at University of Toronto, who rejected it; he said this was political and not economics, it was ideological, it was whatever. But the publisher liked it and so the publisher asked if I knew someone else who I could send it to, and I said, send it to Mel Watkins. So they sent it to Mel and the rest is history. He just loved it and wrote the introduction for it.
Meanwhile, Lloyd had been at McGill from 1966 to 1968. We got some money from UNIDO for a project called ‘Export-propelled growth and industrialization in the Caribbean’. He left to go back home in 1968 and in 1969 there was a possibility I could go to Trinidad to continue work with him on the completion of this plantation economy model. Actually, CIDA [the Canadian International Development Agency, which was going to fund her] tried to block me, by getting UWI to say that they no longer wanted someone working in social sciences. However, by that time, my good friend William Demas, who had been long-time economic advisor to Dr William [Eric William, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944)], knowing that I had wanted to come to Trinidad and was preparing to do so, said, well, would you consider coming to develop the data base for the next 5-year plan? So, I agreed. For that he got support from the IMF. I finally went there in 1969 with money from the IMF, technical assistance. The IMF didn’t have any problem with me — all of the problems I had originated in Ottawa. I guess they went back to the issues of Sir George Williams,[4] the black writers’ conference, and a whole lot of West Indian politics here in Montreal.
From 1969 to 1973 I was going back and forth and we really did amazing work. We worked with a team of young graduates from UWI and with statisticians from the Central Statistical Office. We developed a very innovative Trinidad and Tobago system of national accounts, based on what was then the new UN system of national accounts, but modified to make it conform to the structure of a petroleum economy. In 1973 that was terminated abruptly, because of the political situation there.
AF: Can you elaborate on the Plantation Economy?
KPL: I think it is important because most of my work has been done with regard to the Caribbean or with regard to world history. The Caribbean has been so important in terms of what we call the international framework, within which the plantation economy existed and continues to exist. There are four aspects of the world, of the external environment, in which the plantations were organized. To my mind, the four points continue to be very useful for understanding the structure of international trade and investment, and the shifting political spheres of influence.
The four aspects are: the division of the world by the Pope between Spain and Portugal, one east, one west; the navigation acts, the lines of communication; of course, the division of labour between primary commodities and manufactures; and finally the importance of what we call the metropolitan exchange standard. The fourth in particular remains important to this day, with the whole debate about the continuing importance of the American dollar as reserve currency in spite of the relative decline of the United States.
You know, it was a dramatic way of emphasizing that what we have in the English-speaking Caribbean — well, in all of the islands, even in the small ones — does not approximate an economy as described in textbooks of economics. The representative firm, as [Alfred] Marshall called it, is not the family-owned enterprise, but the subsidiary of a foreign company with extractive activity. We had in mind the petroleum industry of Trinidad, the bauxite of Jamaica, for example. So then, in looking at this and the historical path, it led to the plantation, which was set up by foreign capital with the express purpose of utilizing African labour to produce a commodity of high value for international markets. Then we explored the internal organizations of the plantations, the relation between planter and merchant. That is, the relationship between the organization of the production and the organization of the distribution, the finance, the access to markets, etc. — what in Marxist language would be the sphere of circulation, and the predominance of the sphere of circulation over the process of production.
AF: Which is the inverse of the basic Marxist understanding of capitalist development.
KPL: It is also the inverse of economics in general, because very much of classical economics is about the real economy. In fact, Keynes’s principal quarrel with what he called the classics was because they ignored money. So they ignored the sphere of circulation.
AF: Much of modern economics continues to ignore money in that sense.
KPL: Indeed. I mean, this nonsense about the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics is an effort to ignore money. Of course, people have to be confronted with the fact that, in historic terms, the great divide — between North and South, or between West and East, or however you wish to put it — really began with the industrial revolution in Britain and did not begin to take off until the early 19th century. However, this was not only due to huge spurts of growth in Europe and its offshoots, as [Angus] Maddison calls them, being the United States, Canada, Australia. It was also due to the negative reduction in growth in India, and particularly in China in the 19th century, which the Chinese now regard as their great humiliation.
Moreover, the three centuries that preceded the industrial revolution were enormously important because the really existing capitalism happened in the relatively small nations on the Atlantic periphery of the Eurasian continent: Spain, Portugal, France, The Netherlands and England. It did not happen in the more ancient civilization of China, or of India, or of the whole Hellenic Mediterranean region. It’s a big historical question. It could have, but it did not happen in the great empires. It happened in these rather small and rather recent nation states. This really existing capitalism from Western Europe came together with the voyages of discovery, the conquest of the Americas. If we consider these three centuries, 1500 to 1800, that mercantilist era was characterized by what I call commerce and conquest, trade and war. The war was almost entirely maritime. Historians talk about perpetual trade and war in the Caribbean.
What happened with the Renaissance — with the voyages of Vasco da Gama and then Columbus — is that these European states extended their territory to embrace all of the Americas. If Western Europe had not been able to expand to embrace all of the Americas, they would not have been the power that they became. An interesting example is The Netherlands. The Dutch were so successful, they built the first great commercial empire that went from the Baltic to the spice islands of Indonesia, and they established Amsterdam as the premier financial centre of Europe, but with the small population they had, they couldn’t carry it any further.
Trade and war were there in the traditions of these countries of Western Europe that became the predominant metropolitan powers, from the beginning. From the beginning, there was expansion and conquest. And so, the relationship of trade and warfare, commerce and conquest, and the element of centres and peripheries, were all there from the get-go in the Western capitalist countries, before industrial capitalism. One could talk not about two globalizations but about three, to think of the expansion from the beginning.
It then continued with the better-known free trade imperialism, and the empires, in the latter part of the 19th century, the conquest of Africa and Asia, etc. As our friend Eric Hobsbawm writes, quite correctly, without the previous mercantile colonial system, the revolution in the spinning industry in Britain, British textiles, would not have had markets to sell their rather poor cotton products. They could be sold only in the colonial trade, they could not be sold otherwise. So the old mercantilist order that was dissolved somewhat with the coming of free trade in England and in Europe had served the purpose of providing the original markets, including India of course, where British cotton goods were sold by the East India company, and Britain put enormous tariffs against the importation of Indian cotton — a well-known story.
AF: And you derived these insights from your work on the Plantation Economy?
KPL: I think there is also something to be learnt from the structure of the early chartered companies, in terms of what I call the symbiotic relationship between the political authority, the monarch, and the merchant in the accumulation of territory and wealth, and the way the chartered companies were made into almost autonomous entities. The sovereign granted monopoly rights to merchant companies to establish exclusivist relations with foreign rulers in Asia and Africa. They were given the power to build ports and forts, dispense justice, and so forth. I make the comparison with the multinational corporations, which I call the new mercantilism.
That line of thinking leads us to another important similarity, and that is the emphasis on the importance of who controls communication. In the work that we did on the Plantation Economy, the merchant had superior power over the planter. The chartered companies were large and powerful business enterprises compared with the multitude of producers whose access to metropolitan markets they controlled. The merchant had control of the market overseas, in the metropole, the source of much of the capital, the actual control over the means of transportation. The producers — the planters — were in a subsidiary position. The merchant sold the goods and also supplied the inputs and could take his cut.
Today, with the information revolution, we are seeing enormous structures of power accrue to those who control channels of communication. But even before we had the phenomenon of the Amazons, the Googles, etc., in the production chains, which we are very familiar with, it was very very clear that the control and the profit accrue principally to the platform that organizes the chain. The producers, the capitalists as much as the workers who produce the various inputs that are assembled, etc., are in a subordinate position to those who are controlling this whole process. The deindustrialization that has happened in the Western countries has created big problems but it has not impoverished these countries in terms of GDP (for lack of a better measure). They have gained in various kinds of fees and profits and interest, and other kinds of incomes, and have moved towards the top of the income distribution. We know about the unfavourable distribution. But the control of channels of communication, what used to be the navigation acts in the mercantilist system, is something that has carried right through to the present: communication gives control. Information technology today has been greeted positively, obviously with some good reason, but it has some very big issues regarding power.
Hence, from the very origins of European hegemony, we see the predominance of metropolitan finance over production in the peripheries, in contrast with the predominance of production over finance in the centre. Viewed from the periphery, merchants remained central. They distributed and sold the products of the emerging English industrial system in colonial markets, and the sugar and other commodities of the slave plantations in international markets. Merchants controlled the channels of international commerce, including finance, insurance and shipping.
These aspects supported the establishment of European hegemony throughout these centuries. The evolution of capitalism needs to be understood in light of these 300 years of mercantilist conquest and unequal trade, which transformed the peripheries and integrated them into the production networks of the centre in various differentiated ways before the advent of industrial capitalism. There was no radical break between mercantilism and English capitalism from the perspective of the periphery. US capitalism also shows a similar continuity, although the major innovation of US corporations was to merge production with distribution.
AF: So the Plantation Economy helped you understand economic development more generally?
KPL: Yes, but you see, the Plantation Economy was also something special, in a sense unique to the Caribbean. Of course, plantations have been set up in other countries. Interestingly, a colleague of mine has been doing research on the fact that when the planters were compensated for the loss of their slaves, at the time of emancipation, many of them, with connections within the British empire, established plantations in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and so forth. But those were not based on slave labour.
When we developed this idea, in the 1960s, those were very different times, they were times of radical social political movements. We had in Trinidad, in 1970, what was called a black power revolution, an uprising. So the political idea that in some ways not very much has changed since the days of the slave plantation was something that people could sense.
AF: You have argued that modern capitalism is returning to its mercantilist origins and you have drawn parallels to the Plantation Economy. Can you explain?
KPL: This is what some people have called extractive imperialism. In my book Silent Surrender, there is a chapter called ‘From the Old Mercantilism to the New’. In the old mercantilism, again, the representative firm was a joint stock corporation, the chartered companies; they received their monopolies from the sovereign; there were many shareholders; they were adventurers, etc. I saw similarities with the gigantic multinational corporations, also similarities in the sense that the centre, the head office, is in control of a variety of locations, and again how control over communication is so central to the organization of both of the old chartered companies and the modern multinational corporations.
AF: And you were writing this already in the late 1960s …
KPL: Yes. And it is still relevant today — more so than ever I think. I was working on Silent Surrender, which was on the effects of the multinational corporations on host countries in the developed world, the US–Canada relationship, at the same time as I was working on plantation economies with Lloyd Best, so I have always seen the connections. People have found it strange that I would see any similarities between American companies buying up Canadian industries and what is going on in the islands of the Caribbean.
And we are now seeing a certain regression of capitalism to these mercantilist origins in the capitalist heartlands in the US, the UK and even in continental Europe. This regression is commonly referred to as ‘financialization’, meaning the growing dominance of finance and commerce over production. This is best seen in terms of the concentration of power in multinational corporations, which increasingly do not directly produce anything but, instead, organize production and distribution. Hence, production has become increasingly subservient and subordinated to commerce through subcontracting and outsourcing in various ways, and through proprietary arrangements and monopsonistic structures of buyers vis-à-vis producers. This is a very different reality from that of industrial capitalism in its heyday and from the descriptions of firms in typical microeconomics textbooks. It can be seen as a certain type of degeneration of capitalism in comparison to the age when industrial capitalism was based on innovation in production rather than innovation in financial and proprietary arrangements, which is why we call it a predatory form of capitalism.
However, the mercantilist origins of this predatory capitalism are best viewed from the peripheries. This is in contrast to the common approach that views such predatory capitalism as somehow a perversion from the idealized classical forms of capitalism that emerged in Europe on the basis of the primacy of productive innovation over commerce. The early mercantilist origin of capitalism in the peripheries sheds light on the continuity of commerce over production, especially but not only in these peripheries, from slavery to the emergence of transnational corporations as a form of ‘new mercantilism’ controlling commerce in the peripheries. At both ends of the historical spectrum, the imbalance of power relations in international trade is rooted in this imbalance of commerce over production, whereby production in peripheries is subservient to commerce controlled by mercantilist or new mercantilist corporations. It is for this reason that Marxist models of capitalists exploiting labour are not very appropriate for understanding the economic dependency and exploitation of countries that are incorporated as peripheries into the international capitalist system.
Rather, it is quite tenable to suggest that the future of the capitalist centres can be seen in the history of the peripheries. For instance, those of us working on the Caribbean used to think that the short view was a peculiarity of the Plantation Economy, whereas now a similar short view has become generalized to the economies of the centres, such as in the US and the UK. This short view is the view of commerce: when prospects look good for your export crop, you borrow and expand; when times turn bad, you have no resources to diversify, so you stay in the same staple crop and you borrow to try to maintain your standard of living; when borrowing is no longer possible, you mortgage your land; when that is no longer possible, you consume capital. In the days of slavery, consuming capital meant overworking and starving your slaves. In contemporary times, it means laying off public servants and reducing public expenditures on education and health, which is equivalent to consuming the human capital of a population.
AF: If I recall correctly, you have said that the first application of scientific methods of organizing labour was on the slave plantations. Do you think this influenced Adam Smith?
KPL: What I said is that a plantation with 3,000 slaves implied an industrial organization that makes Adam Smith’s pin factory look miniscule in terms of the division of labour. It was mind blowing, when I was taken in Jamaica, somewhere not too far from Antigua Bay, to the Good Hope Plantation, which had 3,000 slaves. I mean, how do you organize something like that? You are going to have people who will be rebellious, run away to the hills, and the organization and the accounting, and all the different aspects of that operation … We are talking about the late 18th century, and what you had in Britain at the time was largely artisanal industry, nothing was organized on a big scale. Possibly on a physical scale, such as the sheep pasture, but not in terms of labour.
What I said, which my colleague Lloyd Best did not like to hear, did not agree with, is that I thought that the production of sugar on slave plantations was in every sense a capitalist operation, organized with European capital, with the exception of the labour regime, which was not wage labour but slave labour. But the labour power embodied in these human machines was valued, the amount of work that could be extracted from them, according to their size and age and health, was estimated, and so on. So it seems to me to be obvious that this preceded the more scientific management of production in English agriculture.
Marxist definitions tend to define capitalism as private ownership of property and wage labour. But if you look at capitalism in terms of the production of something for the sheer purpose of selling it at a profit, then the plantations have major attributes of tropical agrarian-style capitalism. They also constituted the first major investment of capital in an overseas location for this purpose.
In the case of the English colonies, as I have noted, there are also remarkable similarities between these particular characteristics and the English agricultural revolution and the role played by English oligarchic landed classes, the same landed classes whose younger sons were sent to the colonies and became part of the planter classes. The plantocracy and the English landed oligarchy are largely the same families, the same people.
This long view highlights how the Caribbean slave plantations were, in many respects, at the genesis of capitalism and the plantations were entirely capitalist enterprises; the sole difference with the modern factory system lay in the fact that the labour was unfree. Indeed, the slave trade only derived its profitability from the profitability of the slave plantations. Sugar was the largest single import of Britain, constituting close to one-quarter of the value of all British imports in the 18th century. At the same time, the capitalist agriculture that was evolving in Britain was often developed by the same families that were involved in the Caribbean slave plantations. This synergy of mercantilism remains a hugely underemphasized, if not ignored, aspect in the Eurocentric debates on the origins of capitalism in Northwest Europe, which usually focus on internal causes such as agrarian transformations in the English countryside rather than the more global commercial origins of these transformations.
AF: How does this relate to a similar emphasis of production in early development economics?
KPL: The fact that really existing capitalism happened in the relatively small nations on the Atlantic periphery of the Eurasian continent accounts for the fact that GDP per capita in Western Europe — in all the statistics, the Maddison estimates — was significantly higher than in Eastern Europe, and remains so to this day. Now, what is Western Europe? It borders the Atlantic, it has special relationships with different areas of the world.
So, when we come to the [early] development economists and the importance of people like Gerschenkron, Rosenstein Rodan, they were living in regions of the world that were backward in relation to Western Europe. Gerschenkron was of course Russian (born in the Ukraine) and much of his work was done on the rise of Tsarist Russia.
AF: ‘Backward’ is not a very popular term these days … can you clarify?
KPL: Well, backward, absolutely, backward. Economically underdeveloped. Economically backward. At the time of the Russian revolution in 1917, this is a country hugely dominated by a peasantry, with some cities, with some industrial establishments, actually mostly with foreign capital, and some modern technology. This is part of the story of the Russian revolution and the Soviet Communist Party, which considered itself to be a vanguard party based on the working class, but the working class was extremely small, in relationship to a vast peasantry, and they came into conflict, of course. The whole history of the early decades of the Soviet revolution was really about conflicts between the peasantry and the prevailing regime that was based on urban and industrial regions.
Gerschenkron and others understood the problems of economic underdevelopment because they could understand it in terms of their own countries in relation to Western Europe. Thinkers like Arthur Lewis came from the colonies and so also had this perspective, but what is not so obvious and perhaps not so well understood is the relationship within Europe, of East Europe to the West. Europe is deeply divided in that way.
Click here to read the full interview.
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Andrew M. Fischer (fischer@iss.nl) is Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, and member of the editorial board of Development and Change. His most recent book, Poverty as Ideology (Zed, 2018), was awarded the International Studies in Poverty Prize by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and by Zed Books. He received his BA and MA in Economics from McGill University in Canada, and his PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. He has been involved in development studies or developing countries for over 30 years.
The original source of this article is Wiley Online Library
Copyright © Kari Polanyi Levitt and Prof. Andrew M. Fischer, Wiley Online Library, 2024
The EU Is Willing to Go to War Over Lithium?
By Phil Butler
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The riddle of unhinged EU support for the Zelensky regime in Kyiv is now solved. Anyone inclined can unravel why the Germans, in particular, backstabbed Russia in the Minsk peace boondoggle. Lithium.
Energy Monitor’s parent company, GlobalData, recently released a report showing that Europe’s biggest lithium reserves lie in the Donbass region of Russia. The former Ukrainian Shevchenkivske field in the Donetsk region and the Kruta Balka block in the Zaporizhzhia region are now part of Russia. These reserves add tremendously to Russia’s humongous Lithium deposits (now 1.5M metric tons) and solidify the country’s top ten position globally. If we consider other BRICS nations’ reserves, including China (2M metric tons), EU industry is at a leverage point.
What’s most significant about this is that the EU, and Germany in particular, desperately need the rare mineral to manufacture green energy technologies such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, and a wide variety of electronic devices. This text from the Critical Minerals Thematic Intelligence Report overview is telling:
“Green” Values: What Is the West Really Fighting for in Ukraine
“Critical minerals are key to transitioning to a low-carbon world. There are over 70 countries globally that have set net-zero targets and pledged to lower their emissions. However, these widespread measures for a greener future are straining natural resources, especially the minerals required to produce energy transition technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) and solar panels…”
The report goes on to reveal how these rare minerals are monopolized by just a few regions and how supply chain problems affect their recovery and distribution. In short, if Europe does not procure more Lithium, the energy transition EU President Ursula von der Leyen toots her horn about every other day will either be delayed or made unfeasible because of demand shortages.
While the United States, Australia, and a few Latin American countries hold the lion’s share of Lithium reserves, EU access to these supplies will be expensive. In addition, the U.S. and these emerging nations will surely use the biggest part of their reserves for domestic needs.
The demand (need) for European Lithium supply is so intense, German CDU MP Roderich Kiesewetter came right out and admitted the Russia-Ukraine conflict is all about the 500,000 tons or more of the mineral under the ground of the Donbass region. Kiesewetter said, “The European Union supports Ukraine because of lithium deposits in the Donbass.” The politician also took note of the Donbass being part of Russia now, means Berlin’s dependence on Moscow.
Kiesewetter, a retired colonel, is also suggesting that Germany provide Zelensky’s regime with the highly accurate Taurus cruise missiles, which have a 500km range. The Swedish/German air-launched missile carries a 1,100-pound warhead and is essentially a bunker-buster type weapon. The missiles would be far more useful for Zelensky’s remaining Nazi battalions than a few rusty old Leopard tanks. What the MP’s statements mean, however, is that Germany and the EU intend on taking Ukraine’s vast resources by force now. The Euromaidan Coup only got the Western elites’ feet in the door, and now the singular order has few options left since the failed Ukraine offensive.
The EU commissars are in the process of slitting their own throats. Just the other day, the commission passed another round of sanctions aimed at Russia’s luxury diamond exports to the bloc. This will not affect the average EU citizen, but the upper-middle class and the wealthy will have to fork over more Euros to get pretty round diamonds. The Americans (or British) blowing up the gas pipelines, the potential for grain shortages in the EU, and other key minerals Russia and nations friendly to her export begin to take their toll on an already shaky confederation of member states.
Consider what EU member states manufacture and export to elevate their GNP. In the lists here, you’ll click on two vital exports. Cars and/or refined petroleum are vital to every country. Cars are, by far, the biggest import and export commodities. So, when these autos finally go electric, just imagine how desperate EU industry and consumers will be for Lithium! The Europeans will flounder if forced to import quantities of this strategic mineral from distant sources that have their own batteries to make. If there is a WWIII over the Russia/Ukraine situation, I am sure we’ll be able to name it “The Great Lithium War.”
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Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Featured image is from NEO
The original source of this article is New Eastern Outlook
Copyright © Phil Butler, New Eastern Outlook, 2024
https://www.globalresearch.ca/eu-willing-go-war-lithium/5845000
Blinken Again Bypasses US Congress to Send Weapons to Israel
The US Secretary of State approved the emergency sale of 155 mm artillery shells as Israel wages the most devastating war on civilians this century
By The Cradle
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken used emergency authority to approve the sale of $147.5 million of 155 mm artillery shells to Israel on 30 December, bypassing the standard congressional review for arms sales for the second time since the start of the war on Gaza.
A State Department spokesman said on Friday that
Middle East: Arsonists Shout “Fire”
“given the urgency of Israel’s defensive needs, the secretary notified Congress that he had exercised his delegated authority to determine an emergency existed necessitating the immediate approval of the transfer.”
Earlier this month, Blinken used the same emergency process to approve the sale of 14,000 tank shells, worth more than $106 million, to Israel.
The emergency sale of artillery shells comes as Israel’s military intensifies its bombing campaign in Gaza.
Earlier this week, on Christmas Eve, Israeli forces bombed the Meghazi camp, killing 86 Palestinians in one strike.
Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy excused the death toll by telling Sky News the army had used an “incorrect munition.”
But he refused to apologize for the loss of life and did not say what type of munition was used, despite being pressed several times by Sky News presenter Niall Paterson.
Israel has regularly used 2,000 lb US-made bombs to target residential neighborhoods in Gaza.
Continued instances of this sort cast doubt on the sincerity of the White House’s rhetoric calling for Israel to refrain from killing Palestinian civilians in such huge numbers.
Josh Paul, a former State Department arms expert who resigned in protest in October, told The Washington Post that Blinken’s decision to rush these unguided munitions enables Israel to continue the type of operations in Gaza that have “led to so many Palestinian civilian deaths.”
“This is shameful, craven, and should frankly turn the stomach of any decent human being,” he said.
A Washington Post analysis found that Israel’s war against Gaza has been more devastating than any other 21st-century conflict.
International outrage continues in response to the Israeli bombing campaign, with South Africa invoking the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice the same day Blinken approved the additional weapons sale.
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Featured image: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Oct. 12, 2023. – Secretary Antony Blinken on X
The original source of this article is The Cradle
Copyright © The Cradle, The Cradle, 2024
https://www.globalresearch.ca/blinken-again-bypasses-us-congress-send-munitions-israel/5844964
Der Friedensstifter 