#140 Accumulation of Waste - Dr. Ali Kadri

Speaker 1: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. between you and me, us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

Speaker 2: welcome back to another episode of the malcolm effect it has been a while after a hiatus a brief hiatus we are back bringing you so many amazing guests god willing and Today, it is a pleasure and honor to have our guest speaking to me. And it's a debut on the Malcolm Effect, someone I consider a teacher and a comrade and a mentor to so many of my comrades as well, whose work I find indispensable, particularly in this moment. And we will be diving into it. Welcome to the Malcolm Effect, Dr. Ali Qadri. How are you?

Dr. Ali Kadri: Very well, thank you. Thank you for the invite.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. Let's just go straight into it. And I think in this moment, given the utter destruction that we're seeing waged by imperialist forces, your work on accumulation of waste and how to understand the relationship between war and capital is indispensable. So my first question is that you argue that the global system doesn't just exploit the global South. It actively destroys it. What do you mean by your concept of accumulation of waste, by waste?

Dr. Ali Kadri: Right. I think, you know, the book should have been called The Accumulation of Capital because capital is a wasteful relationship. It's a, you know, the generic, the more abstract relation that around which history is organized is called capital. Why? Because we've entered into a stage in history where we make things to sell it. And if we make things to sell, we don't care what we do to cut the costs and what's the content of the things we're making, whether they're going to be harmful or not to the general populace. We intend to make profits and making profits requires that in a competitive world that we reduce costs. And so there is into the reduction of life. Because if we are going to go to Africa or to the Arab world to extract some things, some raw materials, these raw materials are found, you know, there are peoples always that inhabit the earth and live over the raw materials. So we end up, in order to get what we're going to get on the cheap if we're capitalists, we end up massacring the because you need to extract life before you extract petroleum. And that is something that has been veiled over. It's not really talked about much. We talk about extractive industries as if we're going to get the copper or the aluminum or the bauxite, whatever, from countries, you know, which are going to give us their resources, you know, on a silver platter without arguing with us because we're pale-colored people or whatever. Now, that sort of thing is not there. I mean, you know, they're going to basically, they want the resources the cheapest possible. They're competing in the upper markets. So how do they get the resources for the cheapest possible? They need to basically destroy the people who live above the land. And so the first, and the destruction of the people who live above the land is... is in itself an industrial project, right? It involves hiring an army with machines, which are weapons, and the product of the war itself is the death toll that arises from the industry of death, the industry of war. And these are evidently commodified and priced and realized and consumed. So we consume the war process itself on a holistic scale, it is consumed by the aggressors. And there are profits to be made because the war was financed by financiers who are going to earn rents on the, for instance, the treasury bills that go to finance the wars. So if we think about the United States, sometimes people think that war spending is just the war spending, for instance, in one aspect of things, it is the expenditure on the bonds that were created to finance all the previous wars of the United States. And war spending is on all the production of knowledge that supports war on the universities, on the media, and all of these things that are now saying, for instance, in the present moment, Tehran is a terrible place and therefore it should be bombed. And so on. So this is also an industrial scale killing. It's not only the sword that kills, it is the word that also kills. So when we think about capital, this primary relationship by which we think this organizes life, when we make things to sell, which is the primary production relations in the age of capitalism. When we think of capital, what are we thinking of? We're thinking of the private appropriation of socially produced wealth. And that socially produced wealth does not come only from people who work in BMW factories. In fact, that's the last stage of the process of production. It comes literally from the people who have died downstream in the earliest phases of the production. genocides and slavery are all primary industrial processes of capitalism and they are what made capitalism possible. They did not end with primitive accumulation as often said. You know primitive accumulation actually increases in the intensity and the scale of killing relative to the historically determined averages. So now people are supposed to live to 100 but they live to And therefore, it is not a natural thing. It is a social thing. And if it's a social thing, that means it's a social murder. And therefore, we have not ceased under capitalism since slavery and genocides of the native Indians and so forth. If the rate of exploitation is understood as the consumption of labor hours in production that were, you know, that were shortchanged, that we paid for so little for labor power and so on. And if we consider that society is what works, it's not the abstract individual, then what we have is a society that is living lesser, a living labor that is not living, a living labor that is dying prematurely. to make it very clear, and if I'm going to take it from you, I'm going to have to basically destroy you. Either cripple you to spend money for the rest of your life on medication, or kill the population abruptly and all of a sudden. So the rate of accumulation depends on the rate of genocide, structural and direct genocide. That's something that is not being said. Actually, that's a point of fact. It's not a point of opinion. And, you know, then I argue that, of course, the empiricism, you know, people's schools and, you know, capital does not work to produce things. injects into people's minds so that they go into a phase of auto-destruction and these ideas you know they're the ideas that basically cause the planet you know to when they become capital incarnate the population, the masses become capital incarnate then you know the world goes into an act of self-destruction as we see now you know the planet is on a course of auto-destruction And so these are facts, these are things that we observe, and these are the reality that is going to dawn upon us. And it has already, it is here, it didn't dawn upon us. Because if we say that the planet is withering in 50, 100 years, that means we've accumulated so much pollution and so much death so far that it is impossible to overlook the situation.

Speaker 1: And so capital...

Dr. Ali Kadri: its time in order to basically make, you know, things, make things to sell for those who could afford it and so on. So really it's not, it is until, you know, if things are said in this way, then the laws of development have to be rethought as well. The laws of development, the laws of accumulation of capital, the absolute law, you know, the questions of degree matter. We no longer, you know, immiserate. It has to be said differently because the wording and the meaning of wording has got to drive the message through. We don't just make people poor. We kill people. Capital kills people and destroys people.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that elaborate response. I think that truly does ground the conversation. I guess, so I have two follow-up questions then. Could you give the listeners perhaps a concrete example of accumulation of waste, perhaps from the Arab-Iranian region, where much of your research focuses? And secondly, I think when you talk about rethinking the laws of development, I think what you put forward might... sound counterintuitive to some people because we understand that capital or classically is the reproduces the work at the lowest level right so for example when a country is bombed sanctioned or or destabilized how does that destruction actually benefit global capital the first thing is is uh now if we look what is out there and what is being sold

Dr. Ali Kadri: And the things, the way and the pollution that we are accumulating is also being sold, right? So even when we make, for instance, the example of the lipstick, the lipstick is a general commodity. A philosopher makes the example of a lipstick. 90% of the lipstick is waste. Only 10% is useful to make a certain purpose. 90% of it as the cycle of capital. The cycle of society is the cycle of the social reproduction of society. Whereas capital cycle is meant to adhere to the symbolism of capital, to the accounts, to the booking, to its national accounts, its book accounting, its price system, its units of measure, all of these things capital imposes. So it has quarterly profits and it has GDP and so on and so forth. But whereas from where we stand, I mean, where society stands, over a generation or so, we would like to see ourselves becoming better over time. That's our, you know, to live better relative to the advances of the time, always relative to the things in relative terms we are mistaken time for chronological time whereas time is real time and the foundations of real time are the real material foundations of society so time is qualitative it's not one two three four it is something else it is related to the event to the quality of life at the Whereas if you stayed in the desert in Arabia, you could have lived to 30 under the feudal age. But we are no longer in the feudal age when we are integrated with capital. And the fact of the matter that the progress of society is ongoing and that people everywhere could live to be 100 given the absolute presence of crisis of overproduction, which imposes upon an underutilization of resources. and chauvinist talk that you know if you had if we didn't come to colonize you would be living a shorter life in fact we are living a much shorter life relative to what we could live because in the past the reason everybody lived shorter lives was because of natural causes but now we live shorter lives because of social causes that means somebody is killing us and they're doing it on purpose because they're doing it on purpose because our shortness of life is itself The rate of the shortness of life is the rate of capital accumulation. And that's what it means to economize in the life of labor. Economize in the life of labor is to basically make people die earlier than they could live. We couldn't live longer lives in the past. Everybody, in fact, Africa... projection. We've got problems of projections are always there, but still, I mean, we know that, you know, this wasn't the case. So we now know that every capital totalizes, it commodifies everything. If it commodifies everything, if it makes everything for sale, that means everything has a price. The price could appear at this very moment, you know, the realization that we see, that we see it, but everything in the past has been realized. We suffer from illnesses as a result of the pollution that the Shell Corporation has left in our gulfs. But that pollution itself, we're paying for medical bills, we're paying for everything. So everything is priced. Nothing is without a price. And the price system is a very complex... If we say everything, every social relation is about commodification, then every social, everything has a price. Some prices we see, some prices we don't see. Some prices are negative. Like... Any price which is negative is like the price of trash, for instance. We pay somebody to take the trash out. You know, that's a way to illustrate negative prices. And there are prices which are implicit, which have been imputed in the process of production in the past to basically gel in the current price that we see now as a phenomenon. So all of the price system is just a system of social relations that lie underneath the production process, which are not seen. or low, you know, whatever. And so we have, we price everything. For society over the long term, everything has a price. For society over the long term, what we produce, we consume. If we produced a lot of dirt and a lot of pollution and a lot of death, we are going to consume this death. It's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. And so the point of the matter is, In the social reproduction cycle, we, you know, Sesla or something like Sesla holds, that is, you know, there's a price for everything. And we consume everything we produce. So if we're producing in the lipstick a lot of waste, a lot of plastic, and we're going to throw that plastic away, we're going to consume that plastic, we're going to pay medical bills and what have you. So the production process doesn't stop. The idea to stop things and to analyze things into smithereens is not really reality. Reality is a continuous process. It's a process that we have to take seriously. In any case, when we speak of waste, every bit of waste we are producing, every life we are wasting, We are going to consume that and we are going to pay for that. And the more we pay for the costs of production with our lives and our monies, the more capital makes in profit. So that's why the rate of premature death is the rate of profit, the premature death of social nature, nature and society. Arab region, which has been subjected to wars that have caused the death of millions, right? And their death has been a disempowerment of the masses, their incapability of saying, look, we need to retain what we produce, we need to retain our wealth in order to circulate, so we need to protect our environment. All of this has been related to the death of imperialist wars. And all of this is telling us that if we calculate the growth rates of the Western Hemisphere, which are positive growth rates, right? That means positive growth rates under equal distribution, income distribution arrangements, mean that we have positive profits. So the profits of the Western Hemisphere has been, and profits are not made because I go to the store with the store owner. Profits are made because I can shoot the store owner and take all his stuff without paying for it. That's how profits are made. And so the fact of the matter is, this region has been shot. The masses of this region are the store owners and they have been shot. And that's the reason why we have this positive attitude profit rate, right? So we have this, and it is related to the death of this region. It is not related to the technology of the West, because the technology, science is always developing, and technology is going to go, if I batter and aggress all the planet, where are the scientists and the technology and the leisure time to produce is going to go? To the North. It's not going to stay in the South. So the real reason why there is technology the battering and the killing of the South. So the idea of killing the South is a multifarious process that produces higher profits, it centralizes power, it concentrates power and wealth in the North. And foremost, as I just said, the reason for technological advancement is not the fact that we have better individuals in the North because of the color of the They're smarter than other people, which is the sole chauvinist undertone of every social science in the West. The reason for that, the historical causation, the reason why we have that, is because you cannot, for instance, in Lebanon or Iran or anywhere else, make valuable scientific development because you've been destroyed for the last 500 years. In Africa, you've been destroyed for the last... 500 years. So the historical cause, the real cause, that is the cause that gelled into the present condition where development occurs. It's not because of the genius of the white man. It is because of the criminality of the white man in a sense. And let's put it in those plot terms. So it's not, you know, if you're powerful, everything is going to go to you. It's the risk-free money. It's the risk-free environment. For instance, next door to you, you can have your neighbors being bombed all the time. All the resources are going to flee to the north. All the knowledge is going to flee to the north.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I think that leads on to my next question. Given that millions of people from the global south are displaced through war and economic destruction, do you see migration itself as a part of the accumulation process? You know, the displacement...

Dr. Ali Kadri: of labor. First of all, we said that capital by definition is this relationship that I take from you, you know, what you produce socially and I make it into profits. But I can only do that if labor is divided. I can only do that if labor is pitted, you know, people, the working people of the South are pitted against each other. And the South is not a geographic, it's a class link, it's not a geographic link. So what we have is, you know, the capital has dual use for labour. First, you know, there's a lot of labour. It still needs some labour that is mannable, that is going to basically destroy the country from which they originated and then take them to the north to become, you know, to be thankful that they have been, you know, hired by the north and stayed alive. who have perished in the South, you know. So labor makes use of that. I mean, you know, it's going, just like knowledge and money and everything goes to the North, also labor edges to go to the North, you know, because that's where, you know, because you have a structure of power that produces symbols of power. The prices and monies are symbols of power. And, you know, when you're powerful, you can, you know, On a piece of tissue, you can say this piece of tissue is worth 100 factories or is worth 100 buildings. You know, you can write a number on it and say, this is $100,000. And this $100,000 could buy you a field of lemons and a field of sulfur and so on. So you can symbolize, you can symbolize. kowtow unless of course they are imbued with revolutionary consciousness and begin to see that the whole process feeds on their death and dislocation and so migration of course is you know when you think about migration you know in the factories of the North, you've invested in Africa's invested care, a lot of unpaid labor, which actually is not unpaid. As I said, nothing is unpaid. Everything is priced because these are negative prices. These are societies that are going to tally in the social cost of the reproduction of society. They're going to cut into the life of society, reducing the social cost of reproduction. What you outlays on the social cost of reproduction is reducing life. And logically, that's what capital intends to do. It wants to do that. It wants to pay people less and so on. So the idea that immigrants are good for the economy and they... economy, is impossible under capitalism. Why? Because capital needs to always destroy part of labor and take part of labor to employ for the cheapest cost of reproduction possible. That means it's going to take somebody from Senegal. They didn't pay for their upbringing and for schooling and so on. They're going to take them and pay them very little wages, which are going to appear very But it's poorer symbolically because of the dollar symbol. It's not poorer in real terms. And that's what we have. We have a world which is structured on a path of auto-destruction. Some people call that the autophagic society. But it's from a consumption side. We don't need to look at the consumption side because production holds primacy. And it's the production side that's going to tell us things, that's going to give us a better consumption in some

Speaker 2: Thank you so much. And I just have some final two questions now. I'll ask the first one. If accumulation by waste is built into the global system, what does that mean for countries trying to pursue sovereignty and development?

Dr. Ali Kadri: You people must own and control the resources. As I said, people are the shop owners and capitalists. If you own, if you are a master of yourself, imperialism is a question of control and ownership. Control is ownership. If I control the government, the comprador, any country, because it lodges its wealth in my treasury bills, so I control their lifeline. I control them. I don't need to actually shoot them or anything like that. They are under my thumb because they hold... I hold their monies in my bank. So, and they, of course, they end up, because their money grows by the rate of imperialist aggression, the comprador sometimes is much, much more gung-ho than the imperialists themselves. You know, you've got comprador Arabs who want to destroy Iran more than, and comprador Iranians for that matter, more than the United States. They're hell-bent on They're not stupid. They're doing it for money reasons, and that's what capitalism is, so far as stupidity means. Stupidity means the shrewdness to make money. Now, so popular sovereignty is the model. You know, what you do, what you come and control, you destroy the symbols of capital. You say you are wealthy, and you control everything. Your resources, you control your labor. And you create a cycle. You retain your resources. You don't allow your resources to go up, nor fortune. these resources. Socialism is about the redeployment of resources within those countries under social efficiency criteria. It's not a private efficiency criteria. I'm not working my people to make a profit that is in a competitive market somewhere. I'm working my people because I'm going to build the human and I'm going to recuperate nature such that the future is mine. Not the short term future but the far future. without controlling your own fate. If the people who control our fate in the North make their wealth out of our own destruction, then there is no development under comprador systems. It is impossible. And these are points of facts. They're not opinions, you know. They're points of facts. That's how they make their money. I'm not even scientizing things. I'm not talking... about what is the meaning of the abstract, and what is the law of development on all of these things, and, you know, how laws are actually the abstract. I'm not saying things like that. All I'm saying is that people, the facts are, if you develop, and we have, you must be in control of your resources, of human and natural resources, and you must deploy all of the resources, because when you have a private efficiency criteria, a profit efficiency criteria, then you are competing. And you are competing, you are producing too much for the market. So the crisis of overproduction is always not impressive. If you are doing that under a crisis of overproduction, then your deployment of resources is less than socially efficient because you're going to have unemployment and you're going to have factories that don't run and you're going to have land that's not planted. It is impossible to produce for profits and use all the resources. But when you produce for people, then you deploy. When we follow this criteria, we see that they achieved huge growth rates. Growth rates that are under redistributional arrangements that reinvest in the economy and reinvest in the people. So if we look at China as an example, look at China as an example, and the Soviet Union was an example, many social states were an example. were an example of socialist development. They worked then, and that's something that Michael Perentia says. They worked then, and we know that they work all the time because you are putting everybody and everything you have to work to serve society, and that's And what is socialism? It's putting back into society what you've taken out of society. If you've taken $10 and 10 trees, you put back the $10 and 10 trees. That's what socialism is.

Speaker 2: Thank you. You actually answered my next question, actually, but I can ask you if you want to add any final thoughts. I said, like, if the current world order generates wealth through destruction, what would a global system that prioritizes human life over accumulation actually look like? And I guess you're saying socialism then.

Dr. Ali Kadri: Right. You know, that's right. We know that. We know that society's were the poorest, like China. They had a life expectancy of 30 years, something around 30 years in 1950. And now they have a higher life expectancy than the United States and a standard of living that is much higher. We know that society that exercise control over the resources, they have a popular sovereignty and they redeploy the resources. They work better. We know that. And as well and because if we stick to the same system we don't you know you can't okay the possibility of war and war is around the possibility of a nuclear conflagration is always there so a minute or two to midnight or something like that that's not the issue the issue is the course and the trajectory by which we are consuming nature only we are not consuming man is going to take the planet to a Such a spot where literally the physical social reproduction of life itself is going to become much more honest if not impossible. So it is not, the system suffers from, you know, it's like they're all headed towards the abyss and nobody sees. And that's because of the power of ideology, the imprisonment of people in modes of thought, ways of thinking. That's very important. And symbols of power that act like prison bars before their eyes. They can't see that it is possible, that all this is unnecessary because we live in a world that produces food for 12 billion people. And we have starving people. We have many people. And that's one aspect of the system. idea that everybody could be wealthy and could be better off, given the development of the productive forces that we have, is not fiction. It's not utopian. We throw away many things. And if we make our money, if the death rate is the basis of the profit rate, then the death rate of the planet of society is forthcoming, unless, of course, people see reality for what it is. Break from the prison bars of capitalist ideology and see reality for what it really is. And that's the role of the intellectual. That is the role of the revolutionary vanguard. And this is what is missing. We have a crisis of socialist ideology. Because capital has known that buying the intellectual, co-opting them, making them work for the capitalists, Talking about reforms and sort of, what's it called, the thing that, band-aid like remedies for the problems of society, this is not going to work anymore. We are not at a point where compromises can be made. The state of the world is not at a point, you know, everything that comes socially and environmentally, everything that comes out, we know of is... And so the idea is for the vanguard to reclaim the role of the vanguard, to basically denudate the capacity of Capric to produce the false knowledge that's taken us to the destruction of the planet.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Professor Ali Qadri. This has been a truly insightful conversation. I will encourage all my listeners to please check in with Dr. Ali Qadri's invaluable work in this time. And until next time, peace out.