“War Is the Basis of Accumulation” - Ali Kadri on Genocide, Waste, Imperialism, and the Commodification of Death

Jay: Welcome to Millennials are Killing Capitalism. This is Jay. In this episode, we interview Ali Qadri. Ali Qadri is the author of Arab Development Denied, Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, The Making of Arab Socialism, Anthem Frontiers of Global Political Economy and Development, and The Cordon Sanitaire, A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World. In our recent interview with Max Isle, he recommended that everyone needs to be reading Dr. Kadri's work in these times. And so we reached out to have a conversation with him. In this discussion, we talked to Ali Kadri about his theory of waste. and how we make sense of war and genocide within our analysis of how capitalism functions on a global scale. Dr. Kadri gets into these dynamics in relation to the struggle of Palestinians and the genocide in Gaza. And we talk about imperialism and the class dynamics at play in the current struggle. I found this to be a super illuminating discussion in the current moment. We did record this episode a week ago and fast tracked this release because of how quickly events are unfolding. Remember to check out all of our recent live streams we've been hosting. We've been hosting several every week, and we currently have 16 of them that you can catch over on our YouTube channel tonight, November 16th at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. We will be hosting a screening of the film The Lobby USA. and we will host a panel afterwards. This is a documentary film that goes into the aims, strategies, and tactics of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. with regards to crushing Palestinian solidarity organizing among students, and I highly recommend it. If you're listening to this after November 16th, you can still catch the replay at any time at the same link, which will be in the show notes. If you want to support our work, you can do so by becoming a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year at patreon.com slash millennials are killing capitalism or become a member of our YouTube channel as well. Both of those links are in the show notes. Now, here's our interview with Ali Qadri. So, yeah, I'll say to our audience, I mean, I got connected to your work recently through Max Isle. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about kind of your work around war and the theory of value. And specifically, you look at this issue of waste and in that you're looking at genocide, genocide against man or humans and nature as well. And you're thinking about imperialism as well. And so, you know, obviously we're having this conversation on November 8th. thinking about genocide in the context of Gaza right now. And that is obviously also the part of the world that you've done a lot of your research and thinking. So yeah, I'll just let you kind of start there.

Ali Kadri: So in the mainstream literature, and possibly in the left literature as well, the not so mainstream literature, what we have When we consider war, when war is considered, it is considered as something that is adjacent but not relevant to the economy. It's almost a negative. It has a negative outcome. It doesn't make money. It's a burden on the economy. But that's a view of war that is one-sided. War is continuous. War is the basis of accumulation. War is not only the war that we see now in Gaza or in Ukraine or in the Sudan or in the Congo. War is also war on human beings in their daily lives, the structure of genocide. Because wars, what they do is they shorten the life of people, the average life expectancy of people by so much. but also the decisions that neoliberalism takes in cutting schools and cutting hospitals and cutting so forth, all the welfare cuts. These also play out as a war against the life of people, but they do so in a much slower way than the instantaneous wars that we see. Now, the war as war that we see is also in the logical scheme of things. They are not just a statistical outlier that's, you know, going to happen and disappear. Wars always regenerate a power structure from which, you know, first of all, on war, we do spend a lot. I mean, you know, we have the industrial military complex and all this, right? But that's really a small part of the story. The bigger part of the story is is in the repercussions of war on reformulating the power structure of global society. So what war does, the impact of war does, it shifts some classes above some other classes, or it shifts them down in case they lose. So far, the wars have been since the long 16th century, 1500 onwards, the wars have been vital to accumulation. They have been sort of a first step in any industrial process. When you make something, you need people, you need resources, you need material and things like that. And so what you have to do is go out and make war to get cheap people, cheap material, cheap resources, and so on. And because growth, economic growth and accumulation is exponential, you need more and more of cheap things. So you need more cheap resources. You need to cheapen nature. And to cheapen nature, you need to cheapen the people that reside upon this nature. Because, you know, the trees don't speak for themselves. You're not going to go to a place in the Congo or in the Amazons or something like that and say to the trees, oh, I want you for $10, but, you know, they'll say, no, we want $15. And they can't strike a bargain. You have to eliminate the negotiating power of the population that resides over these resources. The subject in nature, which is man, together, so should nature. That's something I need to say. But you see, war is always an ongoing process for accumulation. It's a sort of pedestal for all industries because it shifts those power structures. And if it shifts those power structures, it brings down the costs everywhere. And because we live in a lopsided world where you have a class that consumes, which is mainly centered in the structure of the developed world, and the class that is consumed, consumed early, whose life is basically cut short earlier than its potential. But then the potential is not something I'm dreaming of. The potential is something we see everywhere. For instance, the life expectancy in France is 1995 or something like that, while the life expectancy in Yemen is 50 or 40 years. And because you have so much that you can improve life expectancy and living conditions everywhere, The potential I'm speaking about is not some spiritual potential. It's something that is exercised elsewhere, and given the abundance of resources, it could be exercised everywhere. I say the abundance of resources. Because we know we live in a world that overproduces everything, you know, relative to what is demanded. You know, the real crisis, the real economic crisis anywhere at any time is caused by the fact that so much has been produced. There is no scarcity in anything. Scarcity is constructed scarcity. I make things scarce so that I make more money out of it because the price rises. You know, I monopolize something because the price rises. So what happens is that war, as I said, you know, there is the industrial military complex side of things. Oh, we're spending too much and we're paying in taxes and what, you know, and so on. That's, well, that's true. You know, I'm not saying that's not true. But what I'm saying is that is not a decisive condition, a decisive thing for war. Because in the end, if you look, at the spending on the industrial military complex. It turns out an investment in future returns rather than a burden for that class in society which benefits from it. So we say, oh, we're paying taxes, and oh, you know, we should have paid the way we're losing the hospital. But in the end, this class that is paying the taxes for the industrial military complex and has been paying the taxes for it, has had exponential growth, because you can tell it's exponential from the high growth rates since the beginning of the 20th century, at least we have records of growth rates. So these growth rates, you know, we've gone from 1 billion people to 8 billion people, and the growth rate of the economy is something like 3-4%, which on average means that the levels of income, of global income, the levels of profits, because the growth in income is almost entirely the level of profits when inequality stays the same. So you have the situation where we have now much higher income, much higher profits for a certain class of people relative to a class from the global society. I'm speaking of the global society. Because the idea that to limit a discussion to the national borders to say that American society's growth is different than the developing world growth is really a partial truth. And a partial truth is always a lie because we know that labor flows to America, money flows to America, goods flows to America, and America, what does it send to the third world? It sends a lot of army, has bases all over the world. So why the labor from the Third World flows to the United States? There's a lot of labor from America that flows down to the South. And this labor that no one speaks of is, you know, the NGOs and the soldiers and the IMF personnel and the World Bank personnel and all these paraphernalia of things that America sends to the South. The most important of which is It is debilitating. You know, they're cruising all the seas around the world. And so you cannot say that the world is unintegrated. You cannot say that we are speaking of American growth separate from world growth. We cannot speak of an American economy separate from the world economy. And that is not a statistical issue. We're not saying that because, well, you know, they're 5% and America is 95%. Because these statistics are made by the power that creates the numbers and the prices as symbols of things. So I'm powerful enough. I could basically delude you into thinking that I am very rich. And you would, you know, concede to my wealth and so on. That is, you know, so your ignorance, sorry to say that, but you know, your ignorance is the source of my wealth in a sense, right? And that's the ignorance of the world, is the source of wealth. And what these power structures, the military ideological power apparatus, what they do is together in synergy, they produce the ignorance of the masses themselves. throughout the world in order for us to say that we have a $20 trillion income, that recognition of that income. So the substance of that power is not really that $20 trillion. The substance of that power is the fact that I can beat the world into ignorance. And so the point is, we cannot say that the American economy is separate. So we were speaking of the American economy, we're speaking of the global economy together. And we need to say that these incomes of the United States, this growth from that unit has carried with it much cost cutting measures in the developing world, which involve the cutting of life. You needed war and you needed austerity to basically bring them down to say, look, we'll give you everything we have for cheap prices, but please leave us alone, don't beat us anymore, or else we'll believe in whatever you tell us. That's the axis, that's the pivot of the global accumulation process. You need to have a two-tier system, one system which consumes and one system which is consumed. You know, Franz Fanon, a very nice person, he says, you know, we call this cannibalism, class cannibalism. You know, so there's a cannibalistic part of the story. So when I'm eating, you know, my caviar and champagne somewhere, and, you know, the examples are usually ludicrous of this nature, but that's just, you know, for the sake of illustration. That means somebody else, you know, has to not eat elsewhere. But to not eat is to live a shorter, more miserable life relative to the potential they could access. Always remember, it has to be relative to the potential. Because when people think in formulaic terms, they'll say, well, you know, the Yemenis are living to 50, but they were dying at 30 in the 16th century. So what capitalism has done for the Yemenis is great. so this idea that you know time is you know a non-dynamic social process is just a number and you can just take a formula and that projected onto reality and make this formal truth a historical truth forgets the fact that since the 16th century or 14th century and so forth the Yemen has been beaten so much so as not to develop relative to the availability of resources and technology and good living standards of the time and it is in fact When somebody says that, you know, when somebody from Europe or the United States says, well, OK, you know, we're eradicating a huge part of the population because of the policies. But look, they are better off than they were before. Well, that, you know. The connotation of this, of course, we understand how this language is, you know, it's quite a racist language because that person forgets to see that the world, you know, since the 16th century has been integrated into a single economy through war. And war meant that you need to subjugate the other in order to take more of them. Because, you know, your profit rates, it's a rate. It's not a level. Your profit rates and your income rates, well, they're pretty synonymous when inequality, as I said, stands still. These things have to grow all the time, which means that exponential growth means that the levels of things we have to use of material resources and humans we have to use to produce things has to increase over time. So we have to exponentially repress people, cut life shorts and so on, right? And so we live in a world where war is the predicate, is the cornerstone. It's not because war is good. The industrial military complex is only 6% or 10% of the economy. It's not about percentages. It's without the industrial military complex and without the war, we won't be able to make any profit anywhere. And that's war in general. And as I said, war has a specific angle, which is, you know, let's say the war on the Palestinians, which is ongoing since, you know, I don't well because 75 exactly part of the european onslaught onto the region right which is now taking an intense facet at this very moment you know because zionism is part of the european cultural heritage and the european cultural export and so what you have is a situation where You know, there is this type of life-shortening process in order to make profits. And there is the structural genocide. You know, the invisible genocide every day where, for instance, we know in the United States that minorities... live a shorter and more miserable life because of the structural genocide that's exercised against them, including the prison system, which is part of the slavery and the continuation of the slavery and the genocide. So, capital is by definition an ongoing war. It's the war of each against all and the war of all against all. And, you know, the epitaph that it drips in blood from head to toe or something like this, right? So I think that sort of summarizes. I hope I didn't move too fast.

Jay: No, no, I think that was good. The one thing I would love for you to say a little bit more about is just your theorization of waste and how you use that term in your work and how you think about waste.

Ali Kadri: Well, I mean, you know, waste is not trash. waste is you know it's the waste of human life and nature human life and nature together are called social nature because man is nature and man is the subject in nature as i said earlier you know when you go to you know to pick trees from the fall you know the forest away and then talk to the trees you have to talk to man and there is that you know element man is subject in nature man is the man with He lives through the symbols. He lives in a symbolic world and he goes next through power platforms. And the whole purpose of capital is to take more out of social net. in order to make progress, which you always say, you know, you need to basically cut life short, cut nature short, cut every, you know, social nature short altogether, because you're going to use humans, and you're going to use the things that humans have, like their water, their air, society has all these things which are the commons of the working class, right? So you're going to take all of that, and, you know, to take all of this, you have to take out man's power to negotiate first. And how do you do that? Again, you need a combination of ideological, all the media, other ideological things, right? And you need the guns too. Without the guns, you can't do anything. The guns take precedence over everything. Because the world has been beaten into submission. It has been beaten into the situation it's in. because of the power of mainstream universities and media to convince people, look, this is, you know, the best world of all the possible worlds that we have because the alternatives are Stalin-like, you know, or, you know, you cannot organize man and nature would be inefficient. The market does a perfect job at the price system when it's, you know. And all of this, of course, the price system is a symbol of power. And the powerful set the price is. You know, even in simple and mainstream economics, when you say, why are prices high? You're saying because of monopolies, for instance, right? So monopoly power, market power. Monopoly is market power. So there is always the term power here. And power, of course, is not just some... you know, absolutist term or something like that, it is related to class power. It's not power over, you know, class power is the social historical process. Class is something very nice and very simple to define, which is, you know, the way people organize to reproduce themselves, to make their lives from day to day. What are the forms of organization? What do they do? if they own or don't own, and how do they live from day to day. Some people have to eat and live out of the trash cans, and some people don't have to eat and live out of the trash cans. The process of eating and living out of the trash cans defines the way these people are going to think, organize, and build ideas to change their lives or to continue living with their lives. So what you do is, you know, the most important thing here is The most, well, everything is so important, but let's say the most pivotal thing is to make sure that you beat them first before you convince them with your schools and your media and universities that what you have in mind is the right thing for them, although they are dying early and they are living miserably. So you have to beat them first. That's why we have a huge presence of military, you know, studying around the world and all that. You need that. That's a predicate, that's a, you know, sort of a step, a pedestal, a stepping stone, without which the whole structure comes falling down. You move that stone, and that's like the knot that holds everything together in the ark. And so that's war. So what you are doing to make your profit go up is you're wasting nature, and you're wasting man, and you're together, you're wasting social nature as a design, because people are also, we are natural. But we are natural. We thought. We think. We have mental faculties. Trees don't have mental faculties. So we are the subject in this nature. And so you must destroy social nature. You must destroy the subject in social nature. Human beings. Because human beings think. They negotiate. And you must always convince them that they should present their own lives as a price for the world to accumulate. So the waste I speak of is the waste of human life, the premature death of people. There's premature death in war, which is quite premature, you know, but there's also premature death in the fact that I could have really avoided the death of 30,000 people from hunger every day or that one child under 10 died. passes every four or five seconds unnecessarily because of anger or something like that, when we produce food in some estimates for, you know, 12 billion people rather than 8 billion people. You see, that's sort of an image. So when you think about it, when we say waste, let us look at the condition of the planet, right, altogether environmentally and socially. People thought, you know, people say, oh, we're growing, the quarterly profit rates are doing well, my stocks are doing well, maybe, and the economy, and I'm going to get a job at McDonald's or what have you, right? And it's for cheap wages, you know, there's all this talk. But the social and natural conditions of the planet are already... and they're set on a course where, you know, all these, you know, people know the environment. They say, you know, 50 years, you don't have whatever, three, four degrees. The other more disconcerting thing is that you might have a slip in the natural order as a result of the disequilibrium that, you know, the social activity upon nature could inflict. Worst yet, you know, there is an inner drive in the logic of the dominant social relationship, which we call capital, which, you know, capital is the appropriation of what is socially produced by private interests. So this social relationship has so far led the planet to waste. It's in command of the planet, you know, it's in command of the planet through its dominant ideals. These dominant ideas is representation in reality. And the principal dominant idea, where do you see the rich? You don't see the rich only in the fact that they have palaces and private jets or something like that. There's just income inequality. That's a manifestation of the wealth, of richness. That's an offshoot of that. You see the wealth in how defeated working people are. And how ignorant they have been forced to become by following the recipes of the dominant cultural discourses around, you know, the Netflix and the Hollywoods and the WhatsApps and what have you, right? So that's really, you know, the barometer. of how wealthy are the wealthy, because they're wealthy because they're powerful. And the substance of their power is our ignorance. Our ignorance, or the consent that we give, you know, I'm only rich if you recognize me as rich. That recognition, right? So that's the point. And for that to happen all the time, you know, we know that there's a lot of waste that has been done. In some instances, we know that nature has been dead, you know, made dead so far. So the problem is, you know, somewhat irreparable, right? It's irreversible, the damage. Now, if you look at how many people have died since the rise of capitalism, let's say in the 16th century or something like that, right? And through the genocides, the ten big exocides. So in some instances, they say 440 million people altogether between 1600 and 1900 were killed as a result of colonial expansion, right? And now, if you look at the 20th century and ongoing, right, some say half a billion people died unnecessarily because of wars and the effects of war and the resonances and repercussions of war. So you have almost a billion people wasted in the process of, in the social process of accumulation About the accumulation, it's not about me going to the store and finding something cheap for a dollar that I buy. Accumulation is a historical, and every historical is a social process, right? So what you need to accumulate is not, you know, the fact that you go to the store and find something cheap, that means somebody has been beaten to make that something cheap. And in the end, you see, the waste is such that when we go to the store and buy something for a dollar, like a Coke can or something like that, I mean, if we think about it, we're paying a dollar now, but when we throw that coke can away, we are going to pollute, and we're going to pay, society is going to pay for the damage. We're probably paying $10 in extra health bills because of the pollution that we caused. And if you think about it before, you know, we had to put people in sugarcane plantations to make the sugar for the coke and depot to make the paint for that. And we need to take tin from the Congo to make war in the Congo. And all these costs to global societies. What do they do? They waste human blood. They primarily waste human blood. And this reality is not seen. This reality of a system that is degenerative, we call that a negative dialect. Things go from bad to worse. Because of that social relationship, which is essential, the key node in all of this is war. You need imperialist war to generate a process in which there is a society in the North that is happily consuming the lives of the society in the South. that is what is happening you know you haven't really theorized yet that's just what people don't see and what you know so the whole process worst yet we sell you what we waste you know if you waste the environment if you make droughts somewhere it acts like a you know a primitive accumulation there's a primitive accumulation is ongoing right but It acts like, well, I have no, you know, no water to grow my crops. I'm going to go to the city. It socializes labor. It kills the wealth, the private property of the laborer, makes the laborer, private laborer, do social labor. So that's, you know, so when these capitalists, they hurt the environment, they can get more cheap labor. It's like a gun tool for them. So the dead environment is a gun for them as well, right? And that's something, you know, they don't say. And of course, when you make the future so difficult to work with, you know, I need water in the future or I need, you know, so other. And the future is dismal. It's very difficult. You know, people will probably have to wear, you know, masks in order to breathe or something like that. You know, you give that image of the future. Then the price is in the future, right? So all investments. All financials take into account the lockdown because prices, you know, are not just the price now. Prices are spot prices, future prices. And if you think of spot and future prices, they do different prices in time. You can think of price as a gelatinous and liquid condition that is actually embedded in everything we eat and do. You know, so mothers, when they're at home, And they are feeding children and things like that. They're paying the negative price for that by the capitalist state because they're going to suffer 10 years of their life and then shorter lives as a result of the effort they put in into reproducing human beings for society. Human beings who now, under the conditions of overproduction and so much unemployment, Something like 5 billion people are, or I don't know, billions of people are, you know, not necessarily involved in any productive work. So what you're going to have is a system that actually monetizes the early disappearance of people from the planet Earth. That's a system of waste. That's a system of complete waste. We know it, X-TOS factor. We know it, X-TOS. Look at the world. Look at the world as it is. I mean, you know, unless you say, of course, well, you know, that's all we could do because otherwise we're going to have Stalin. So that's, you know, that's the ideological power, of course. That's the power of ideology. So, you know, the whole class struggle centers around one word, which is Stalin. Don't do that because you're going to get a Stalin. You know, that idea, the promotion of that idea has been horrendous, you know, to the fact that, you know, you reduce a whole historical experiment, which, you know, has the highest growth rates and defeated Nazism and all of that, to some story concocted about the Soviet Union. You say, you know, the Soviet Union failed. You say, well, it failed. You know, but history is not a football game. You know, we want to play a match of football. The point is, there's something that many, many say. Many say that sometimes the class trouble is just used to one word. If I could go over one. If you have, you know, like the war in Gaza now, right? The war in Gaza, obviously, it's a genocide. I mean, the genocide was continuous. Gaza in a state of genocide. I mean, if Gaza is, you know, the life expectancy in Gaza is minimal relative to anywhere else because, you know, the water is dirty, there are no jobs there, you know, the diet is poor. All of the poverty conditions that have been actually instilled by the power of the gun and ideology And the divisions, primarily the divisions within the working class. You know, if you say, what is capital? You know, I said, it's our ignorance of, you know, that we've been beaten into ignorance. Another way of saying it, it's because we fight each other. We're working people that fight each other, right? So you say, how strong is capitalism? How much do working people hate each other? That's how strong capital is, right? So you can say that. And so if you look at this war, which is a continuous genocide against the Palestinian people, I mean, it didn't start in 1948. It started, you know, probably contrasted back to the Napoleonic War against Acre and the introduction of a whole system of new lives, you know, and new rules to live by for the peasants of the masjid of the area of Syria and Iran. and parts of Turkey. So all of that is, you know, it's a continuation on the line. And so Gaza in particular is, again, if we're looking for a counterbalancing to the ideological, it's, you know, they can always say, because the game and the institutions and the language and, you know, human rights and criminalization and all of that, this is all the creation of a certain power, which is actually, you know, if you think about it, it's the very power that is responsible. for the plight of the planet as it stands, you know, society as we are throughout recent history, right? So they made all these things. They didn't make all these things to recriminate themselves. They made these things to, you know, get themselves caught free from, you know, the whole thing, you see. So when we say there's a genocide in Gaza, it's pretty likely that they'll say that, you know, a resisting population is confounded with Hamas, which they call a terrorist organization, you know, and And it's put on the Hamas that's fighting there. It's the Jihad, it's the patriarchy, it's, you know, the Marxist-Leninists who are on the ground fighting alongside. Because this is a national liberation war. These are refugees who, you know, have been expelled. And it's not surprising that, you know, that humans... I mean, Zivotinsky said, you know, in the paper he wrote in South Africa, in an article he says... Even Papuans, of course, he considered Papuans less than humans because that was South Africa. Even Papuans would fight so we should be ready to fight the Arabs because the Arabs would always want to go back. So we need superior power and we need to beat them up all the time. So that should be at the core of that. So if you need to beat up the Arabs and the Muslims and practically the developing world, to basically maintain a certain state of existence, that's a guesible state of existence. And so the point is that genocide is just a more pronounced form of waste, of wasting humankind. in the process of accumulation. So what we're seeing now is not just, you know, the humanitarian issue, because the humanitarian issue, they can come around it. They can say, our criminal court is not going to say we're criminals. It is our criminal court. And these are, you know, our media and our things, right? And, you know, the whole of mainstream ideology is centered around eliminating history. You know, people forgetting how they got to where they've gotten. You remove this, all of social science, mainstream social science is very historical. And if it's very historical, it doesn't exist in real time. If it doesn't exist in real time, it doesn't exist at all. There isn't anything to, you know, everything is a fiction. It's something that's shown on TV or, you know, something like that, right? So what we have ongoing is a war to reverse history. This global order everywhere, there must be a coalition of forces to reverse that global order so that just the criminal court does not say, you know, the people who are committing the crimes against the planet and society and all of this, which Zionism is a central part of. Because it extends everywhere. You know, in Azerbaijan, for instance, Nagorno-Karabakh, just the recent thing where there is evidence of Israel involved in the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. And the record, of course, goes on from their collaboration with the apartheid regime in South Africa. to the, you know, Beirut, and then so on and so forth, right? So if you add the situation, which is not really limited to Palestine, it's an international situation, which requires the international working class to assist the Palestinians in this symbolic war of liberation and to set new rules, new criminal courts that are courts of the people, that try, you know, the people The system should be trying for the real conditions of the planet. They are the responsible parties. The system is the responsible party for the conditions of the planet. Where is the criminal court? I mean, the criminal court should be really busy day and night trying to indict the universities that produce such literature, such mainstream literature. Because the war of ideas is the most important war. Well, again, most important. It is the most important. Well, that's the only thing I can say most important and be sure of. So you see what I mean? It is the war of ideas. The world is a single society, and in that world, which is a single society, the international working class must aim at the most inflamed power points of the struggle against imperialism. And the Middle East is the most inflamed point in the struggle. It is a nodal conjunction. And we should, you know, the international interest should aim at eroding the power of the international order that stands by colonial and settler expansion. And when you think about it, the whole of the capitalist world, the whole of the Western world is a settler expansion. You know, it's based on settler expansionism and colonial settler expansionism, right? So it's, how do you defeat the international settler colonial system? You cannot, you know, turn it over by demonstrations from within. Because a lot of, you know, the talk in the universities, our conscience hurts. You know, and we are crying, and I don't know what. That is not going on. That's always. And these people are well-meaning, but, you know, that's a non-response activity. That's an ineffective activity that doesn't do anything. In fact, what it does is the opposite of what is intended, because it shows the system to be democratic insofar as it lets the insignificant others speak. So, you know, you have this guy, I think, who says, in America, you can say anything so long as it doesn't make any difference. And this, you know, all this is not going to make any difference. It didn't make any difference in the past. There were more than a million people demonstrating against the Iraq War in London and everywhere. It doesn't stop. Because in those classes, you have this, again, this two-tier system. You have part of the working class which is integrated in Capit and whose potential is the potential of Capit. It's not the potential of the working class elsewhere in the developing world. It lives off and reproduces through the wars of capital. So when it pays to the industrial military complex, it invests in its future. And that structural chaos is very difficult to overcome with these things. And in fact, these non-action direct, non-civil disobedient types of demonstrations that we see,

Jay: result in a betterment of you know of the image of the master that is actually has driven the world to the condition it is that's i really appreciate you saying that and um it gets into my next question you know which is so then i mean what i hear you saying then is that you know as the saying goes direct action gets the goods or whatever right but like So what are your thoughts in terms of people within the imperial core and the types of actions that they should be at least considering or building towards to try to stop something like this?

Ali Kadri: Well, again, you know, I mean, the liberal left and the Western Marxist left is enclosed in the ideal, in the dominant. It does it. I mean, you find a hundred thousand professors in Western universities that claim to be Marxist. And you don't have a Marxist-Leninist party or a Marxist party that has more than 3,000 membership. Right? So insofar as organization and effectiveness insofar as turning the system upside down, that's nothing. These become sort of ornaments for the system better, you know. Now, why are they so? They are so because theoretically they're engrossed in their own theory. They think that capitalism is progressive. Right. You know, they say capitalism is a progressive stage in history, and that's where we're going to, you know, they have this theological one stage after another, those sort of things, in which you reach an end, which, you know, that's going to bring us salvation, like the eschatologists and all these type of language. You know, you see it engrossed in the literature, in the mind, and that's so for a reason. It's not because they're ignorant. You know, they belong to a certain, they belong to that tier, upper tier, which actually reproduces capital by being an organic part of capital and whose potential is the potential of capital. So they don't liberate themselves from paying themselves to capital. In fact, they grow from day to day. The member class is what I do, what society does to grow from day to day. They grow from day to day by actually making sure that the system which is completely defunct, which is driven the planet to where it is, looks good, looks progressive, looks nice. And the other is not capable of doing things because the other is not liberal enough to be like us. And we have to basically, through, you know, inculcation, you know, some catechism of some Western Marxism, you know, infiltrate their thoughts and make them like us. Otherwise, we have, you know, these national liberation movements around the world, their class forms, their ideological class forms is religious. It's not, you know, Marxist-Leninist. There is a lack of understanding of what a social class is, and what a social activity is, and so on. So there's a theoretical, they lack a theoretical core, and that core they lack is the fact that in the theory of value, what we call the theory of value, it is a theory of waste. Value, as was defined by classical economists, is the substance of labor. You work at the summer, but Of course, everything requires labor to be produced, but that doesn't tell us much. Value is a process, is a social relation, you know, in which you create to create value, you need to basically dispossess people, expropriate the working class more and more. And how do you expropriate the working class? You have to beat it up. You have to basically war against it, mentally and physically. And so what do I do when I'm bored against something? Is there something, any good in such a thing? You know, there's no good in history, of course. The only good is the resistance against. Exist, exist. Right? That's in so far as somebody said. Right? So the point is, you can't apply these personal criteria of good and bad upon an impersonalistic. The point is, Here you have a lack of understanding. These people have a lack of understanding, which is not because of ignorance, which is based on their class interest again. Their potential is to live off the system, and they make up ideas to live off the system as they are. And when it is obvious that the value they speak of is of no value at all to anyone, if we consider how much damage has been done and the fact that the social planet now is going to oblivion, then this stage in history is far worse than the slave stage in history. Because relative to what we can accomplish, we are putting the fear of destroying everything. Right? So what stage in history are we at? Do they realize that phenomenal stuff? They don't see that phenomenon. That's because they're ideologically within the camp of capital. And the potential is the potential of capital. When you theorize correctly, and you theorize correctly from the experience that you incur, from the day-to-day life experience that you incur, I theorize correctly when I am under a bomb. When I experience the bomb. I know who the bomber is, and I want That's the praxis that I want to organize against. And my theory is to stop the war because that war is part of the process of capital that makes profits. Right? But if I am experiencing, you know, some sort of life and leisure which is based on the system that reproduces by war, then I'm going to protect us. And I'm going to say, look, that's the only possible system within all the possible systems. That falls down like a... approach to things, right? So you have a situation where for action to be guided by practice, by revolutionary practice, it must come from the revolutionary class within the capitalist system. And this revolutionary class is already, it is structurally margined. You know, because what you have is a situation where, you know, if you, again, let's build capital and redefine capital, right? We said it's the representation of ignorance. It is how we hate each other. And another way of saying capital is it's the way it can always be. It's partnering working class in the North to become part of it, to become an organic part of it. And it knows this. It has history, because capital is history, is the totality of social relations and a process of ongoing and evolving with a hierarchical structure, order and dominance, all these definitions and so on. But it knows it has to do this. It knows because it knows that it is money is the result of politics. So there's the primacy of politics. Okay, I'm going to pay a little higher wages for this class in the north because I know they're going to become my guns when I occupy the sub. That relationship has been there since the 16th century. And so that's not anymore, you know. So what you have is where you're going to draw The lines of resistance. The one child, if you ask John Ziegler, who was the reporter on food in the world, the one child under 10 or under 5 dies every few seconds, you know, less than five seconds in the world as we speak. So the massacre, the structure of genocide is there at hold under this system. We know the result of it, and we know that intellect and the apparatuses of that intellect, the Nobel Prizes and what have you, they are the guns that produce the very system, the ideological and real guns that produce the system that drives us to this condition. We go back to basics in defining what terms we should conduct the struggle in the North and in the South by the sentiments of the working classes, whose potential is to free themselves from the want that capital imposes on them by the want and the shorter lives. Because want involves shorter lives, you know. You know the high expectancy of people in the poorer South are much lower than the people in the higher South, irrespective of all the, you know, the colors, ethnicities, I don't know what sort of identity one can got to divide the human race, right? So what you have is a situation where the North must take its cue from the marginalized section of the working class. They're the ones that should dictate the action, and the action dealer, and the civil disobedience, not from the crybabies of the universities. you know, you don't get anything from them. I mean, you know, I'm not speaking generally, I mean, but there are exceptions, of course.

Jay: Appreciate it. So one of the things I did want to ask you about as well, because you, you know, you've written about the region, you've written about, you know, as we said, the unmaking of Arab socialism. And obviously, as you laid out, you know, you have resistance forces in the Middle East. A lot of them They express themselves as Islamic forces, right? And so there is a thing, I think, in the global north where people have been ideologically indoctrinated into, oh, Muslim bad, right? Terrorism, et cetera, right? Over a long span of history, but I think exacerbated with 9-11 and recent events as well. And so, you know, obviously there's a number of very important resistance forces at this time. in Gaza, obviously, but also Hezbollah and, you know, the Yemen, the Houthis, the unrecognized, well, it's a government, but it's not recognized by the United States, of course. And, you know, other military forces in like Iraq and Syria. And so, you know, I'm interested in the regional dynamics that you're paying attention to in these times and the things you're thinking about in terms of resistance in the region as this is going on.

Ali Kadri: We find those uproars, yes. Well, again, it is impossible to quell struggle, the struggle of humanity, especially when it's a question of denying the right to life and the right to existence and the right to, you know, because people in the developing world, you know, they perish prematurely. way too prematurely relative to the existing potential and resources that an organized humanity and organized man and nature way of accumulation can give us. And the only way that can oppose the other key of accumulation is the organization of accumulation, which turns out to be planning. You know, you need to plan things because you have too many and there shouldn't be any other key and no one should destroy the very basis of our social production. And that's what's been happening so far. So you have all human beings are, by nature, they're going to fight. And that fight is going to be a class one. But a class is not something that exists in the abstract. It exists within the symbols and the cultural forms of societies in which the working class exists. So they draw on the history of the heroism. on the culture of the resistance. Remember when Fanon was talking about how the Algerian storyteller changed the rhetoric of submission and the stories from a rhetoric of submission to a rhetoric of resistance when the height of the war of national liberation started to take root, as people started to feel the pain of colonialism and the pain of living under the colonial yoke. right so you have the same situation you have that sort of social transpiration of the class into it is symbols and cultural forms in order to put up a fight with capital with vital imperialism is the intense place of capital exercise in this right you need that now what cultural forms what are the cultural identity what is the cultural form this is the islamic world i mean if you think about the islamic world You know, the Islamic world is the world before, you know, Europe was the only part Christianized, but from basically all the South Asia and even China, parts of China to India, was the Islamic world. That's the whole world. That's much of the third world now, as we speak of. So the Islamic world ties the old mentioned world all together. And of course, it's quite diverse. There's no such thing as an Islamic monolith. or something like this, it's as diverse as the living conditions or the social conditions that prevail. And it takes different identities. There isn't a single Islam. With Islam and some syncretic forms of religion, Islam between a village and another village in Palestine could be different from each other because they have different saints and different practices to those saints and so forth. So what you have is a situation. where people are going to fight in order to preserve themselves. Fighting to preserve themselves is class practice. It is, I need to make a living. I need to stay alive. That sort of thing, right? That's class. Class is something real. You know, you see every day. You see how people are organized, what social forms they like to organize in order to produce themselves. How society produces itself. We have the Lush book, right? So they're going to have these social forms. We cannot deny this. And of course, the class struggle mends into the national struggle. In much of the developing world, everybody says, you know, you have the national struggle. So you have the national liberation war. This also becomes a class war. And it takes all the symbols and the memories and, you know, the stock, the cultural stock of the class and the identities it holds in order to practice for survival in order to, you know, to fend off against the enemy which is going to come take your resources and live shorter lives. And that's what US imperialism does, right? Now, Marxist-Leninists don't understand the concept of dialectical inversion because all these divisive identities that we have instilled upon the human race, they're the product of the ideological and military power It would come to a country, occupy it, draw the borders, create a constitution that actually creates divisions onto the future on the basis of ethnic and cultural divisions. So dialectical inversion means if you weaken capital, you weaken the divisions that capitalism poses. So the introverted, the inert, nature of the ideological forms with which we fight imperialism will be dissipated if we win against it. And that's there. It is not by analysis that we arrive at a resolution of conditions of this nature, of problems of this nature. It is through the processional things that we observe, the practice of things that we observe, the conditions of the struggle, And the conditions of the struggle must be made better for us by the defeat of imperialism and by the coalescing of old forces in the national liberation wars, which amount to a class war. And that's it.

Jay: Awesome. Well, Ali Qadri, I mean, the only other question I was going to ask you, and I feel like you've already answered this, but I'll ask it anyway and see if you have any other thoughts, but You know, there's some folks who would say it would seem profoundly irrational that the U.S. and NATO and Israel would want to escalate, continue to escalate this situation, right? Because you could say, well, you know, the U.S. hasn't really achieved its objectives, whatever those were in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan, aside from... proving its ability to destroy large swaths of humanity. Hearing you talk about waste and the rationale for war, I can already predict that you would reject this framing. I guess what I'm saying is within the irrationality of our imperialist system as it is, what is the rationale for them to try to escalate a war here? You know, why would the U.S. continue to be sending all of these bombs to Israel right now, knowing that it's evoking these responses?

Ali Kadri: Brilliant. Then, you know, there is, well, history, as I said, which is a totality of social relations, you know, structured, hierarchically structured in dominance something taken from a textbook you know so that sort of process is unfolding before us you know and it does it does unfold you know because as I said you know the way prophets are made when we look at something in the magazine you know in the store or something like that and you know, for one dollar, we think, well, you know, if it costs 50 cents and the guy made 50 cents, he sold it for a dollar, then he made 50 cents and that's profit. Whereas the arithmetic way of looking at profit, which has nothing to do with profits, the profits are made, how much did I beat up the guy to get him to work for nothing so that I can make profit? And so I have to beat him up more and more to make a profit all the time. So the idea of war is intrinsic to the system. It is how accumulation proceeds from the very beginning I said, right? No. And the idea of war is necessary because capital knows that there's a plexi of politics. It knows that, for instance, it has to be always believed to be the only relationship and the most powerful relationship and the inevitable relationship and the thing that cannot be escaped. And for that, If it needs to pay higher wages here and make a loss of economic loss here, it will do that to look good and to look powerful. That's the primacy of politics. It looks at profits, but it knows that power is more important. That's why imperialism sometimes is used to a definition as a power gate. So you need to go abroad and everywhere where you draw your resources from and you send your immigrants, you know, the American soldier. He's an immigrant that visits abroad. And he sends more immigrants to the north for cheap. So it's not our immigrants that are going to the north. Remember, there are immigrants from the north who are coming to the south, but they're coming with guns. So, you know, when you look at immigration theory, you have to take that into account. You know, don't come to us and we will not come to you. You know, that's the point. I mean, but anyways, you know, the thing is, it's a power game. And it knows in the conditions of the globe at the moment. You know, there's the China, the inaugural rise of China, the unstoppable rise of China. Which is not saying, China is not saying much, but it is there for everybody to see. So the demonstration effect is there. Right? And people are, you know, saying, look, there's a model of sovereignty and reinvestments of resources into people that make living conditions better. China has a better life expectancy than the United States now. And so this is an example that, again, is reminiscent of the Soviet example of taking Russia from dismal condition and making it into an industrial and prosperous society, except it was demolished by two wars. to big wars. First is the aggression against the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, and then there is the Second World War, from which the Soviet Union never really recuperated because it lost more than a quarter of the population. Most of them are able-bodied young people. So it's impossible to structurally readjust a system that has underwent so much of a loss in order to defeat the Nazis. which are actually the epitome of the capitalist system. They aren't the elemental state of the system. They are not different from the capitalist system. They are capital par excellence. So it is... So what you see is a situation where now we need to, we have China, we have Russia, not losing in Ukraine, but by some accounts possibly winning. I think it is winning from what I read recently. So they have a global order which is escaping and you need to reestablish the power frame. And Israel, Taiwan are two hot poachers. Military hot dogs took U.S. imperialism abroad. One has been for China, one has been for the Islamic world, and for the rest of the third world. And so, you know, you need, and you can't lose in that. You can't afford to lose, especially that music. not the strategic commodity, which is oil. Oil is responsible for the reproduction of humanity from one billion to a billion. Without that energy chip, energy source, we wouldn't be able to survive. So that's why it is a strategic commodity. Even the fall of oil and the theme being discontinued or something like that, even slightly, that would throw the world into a state of chaos. So the point is, The point is, you know, it's a power game. You need to situate yourself in power. And to do that, that's, you know, you need to exercise, exercise, exercise, you know, naturally you need to do the genocide for basically in a waste system, in a waste system, the genocide serves a dual purpose as well. You know, it's the same sense of dual function. First of all, the very death of man becomes a commodity. But you said, So, you know, capitalism has been shedding death for a long time. The first, the early capitalists were seafarers working for a wage that actually slaughtered people and take the loot and share it as a wage. So that's still there. You're going to take a loot from the war. And the loot is based on the number of deaths that you have. It's relating to the death that you create. Not numbers, but predicates. logical, historical, and historical predicates that you create from death. So the death becomes a commodity. The death of man becomes a commodity in a sense. That's the first step. The second step has more to do with sort of like relative surplus. Because you require power, you can lessen the wages everywhere as a result of cheapening the humans through the demonstration effect and through the actual of destroying And they realize that they can no longer, you know, the world, they need to instigate and foment and instill it. violence and wars everywhere in a system that is closely integrated. It's properly integrated. It's honest for everybody to see that it's closely integrated because the dollar is the dominant world currency as a result of the US engine money. So it does hold the money, which is symbolic of people's wealth and people's values and people's whatever, you know, the things that they make living with, right? The natural value. All of it flows to the United States. So the world is an integrated circle of money flows that flows to empire only. So you can't argue against imperialism and say there isn't an imperialism. You are arguing against the objective fact and the phenomenon. You see? So the point is you need to resituate the power and they need to resituate their powers and they're going to go crazy to resituate the power. The problem is Crazy, it's not the person that's going to go crazy. History is impersonal. So it's not a person who's crazy. It's not somebody who's going to sit there and push a button to make a bomb or destroy a bomb or something. That's not it. That's not how history is. History is impersonal. It has its ideology, its structure, its forms of representation and social forms of representation. Institutions, ideas, all of these things organized to make it live from day to day, which is historical stock. of power that it has accumulated throughout the ages to organize its life and how it reproduces by killing more people. So every instrument and every institution it has, its basic function is to make sure that some people are not going to And they're not going to live as a process. They are going to be commodified. Then debt is going to be sold as a commodity. And they're going to basically have repercussions on lowering the prices of all other commodities elsewhere. So they act as relative surplus value in that sense as well. You see? in that power structure and given the primacy of politics, that history, these institutions, these ideas are going to hyperspeed in order to basically regain the position, the power position. Remember, primacy of politics, I don't care how much money I'm going to appear to be losing at the moment. If I have power, I will remake that money in the future. There's not. Money did not go away. But they're going to appear as if they're paying for war now and losing. But there's such an investment in the future because if I am powerful, I can take everything from everybody without doing nothing. Doing nothing is not, you know, just my son's way of saying. Right? So it really happens. It actually happens. So the scary part is that this fisting, that this impersonalist thing, knowing that it has to exercise of prime shift politics, It is me creating the persons affiliated with it who push buttons. That's the scary part. That's how you should read this.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that is it for my questions. I really appreciate your time. this evening for me, this morning for you. But it's been great to talk to you, and I hope we could do it again another time. I don't know if there's anything else that you wanted to say or share in closing, but I'll just say we appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today.

Ali Kadri: Well, thank you so much, too. It's not so enjoyable. It's a visible topic, and it's a serious question. One has to do what one has to do.

Jay: No, I appreciate the analysis and all of the work that you do. And, you know, I definitely think I look forward to sharing it with our listeners.

Ali Kadri: Thank you so much for being here.

Jay: All right. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Jay: So,

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Jay: you Thank you.