c) The Control of Science

As documented since the 19th century, revolutionary scientific developments which have the potential to free humankind from monotonous work and the clutches of the corporate-financial monopoly are bought up and shelved.

15 In “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,“ (1917) V. I. Lenin refers to the Owens’ patent that was bought up by German bottle-making cartel to prevent competition. Rumors persist that U.S. General Electric developed an ever-lasting light bulb during the 1930s. It is also said that light bulbs (production controlled by General Electric’s Phoebus Cartel) lasted longer up until 1932, after which their life-span was reduced in order to increase sales, though life-spans have recently been increased again. A light bulb that has been on for about 100 years continuously is also advertised on the Internet, at a fire station in Livermore, California. During World War II, Dunlop Rubber is said to have invented a very durable tire (for use by military vehicles) which was suppressed after the War. (See also note 51 on free energy)

Lenin

This is essentially why Hero of Alexandria’s steam engine was prevented from being applied to production by the Ancient Greek rulers –i.e. for fear that it would lead to the freeing of the slaves.

16 Aristotle: “Masters will have no slaves when every machine can work by itself or with intelligent anticipation.” There is some confusion about the reaction of the Greek elite towards scientific developments. One interpretation (serious or in jest?) is that they did not want to take work away from their workers/slaves, for how would the latter provide for themselves? This seems like an apology for their real motivation: What would the slaves do (to us) if they were released from their toils? See Paul Lafargue (note 53)

Nonetheless, there is still a problem. Output goes on growing beyond the monopolists’ desires:

d) The production of Rubbish

Scrap cars pile up…...

.......wasted food produce

Waste has become an increasingly important part of the post-World War II system of production and consumption. On the one hand, we have built-in obsolescence, whereby cars (for instance –but the same can be said for consumer durables generally, and perhaps for producer goods, too) wear out more rapidly than in the past, and therefore have to be replaced more quickly.

17 The term seems to have originated with Vance Packard in his work, “The Waste Makers” (1960), Packard described the United States as “a force-fed society with a vested interest in prodigality and with no end in sight to the need for ever-greater and (more) wasteful consumption.”

N.B. Built-in obsolescence appears to be as old as capitalism (if not older). “At Lyons, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the ‘Age of adulteration’ just as the first epochs of humanity received the names of ‘The Age of Stone’, ‘The Age of Bronze’, from the character of their production.” See: Lafargue, Chapter 3, “The Right to Idleness”, 1880, 1883.

Of course, this is not the sole reason why goods have to be replaced quickly. It is complemented by another artificial cause for replacement: the development of new models that utilize different parts, such that, as old inventories are reduced, they are replaced by new ones, and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the old models. This is especially evident in the hi-tech area, e.g. computers (but it has also given rise to independent, informal and piratical practices). Moreover, the computer software industry has surely benefited from the development of viruses which force users to equip themselves continuously with anti-virus kits.

Thorstein Veblen

A further aspect to this is that goods have increasingly been produced to appeal to consumers –via packaging, styling, coloring, advertising, and so forth. This led Thorstein Veblen to comment (as early as 1924, “Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times”) that the “distinction between workmanship and salesmanship has been blurred” so that “the shop-cost of many articles produced for the market is mainly chargeable to the production of saleable appearances, ordinarily meretricious.” Marketing and marketability have added to costs, although it has become hard to distinguish these costs from the straight-forward costs of production. The Marxist Economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy addressed this issue in their work, “Monopoly Capital” (1966). Using a study of the automobile industry (carried out in 1960), they concluded that the cost of car model changes came to well over 25% of the purchase price.

18 “In the case of the automobile industry, and doubtless there are many others that are similar in this respect, by far the greater part of the sales effort is carried out not by obviously unproductive workers such as salesmen and advertising copy writers but by seemingly productive workers: tool and die makers, draftsmen, mechanics, assembly line workers.” From: P. Baran and P. Sweezy, “Monopoly Capital”, 1966.
A Digression on Marx and “productive labor”
Baran and Sweezy are using the term “unproductive workers” in one Marxist sense, referring to those who supply “socially-necessary labor” to the production process, roughly equivalent to those who engage in “material” as opposed to “non-material” production. Thus are the world’s material resources used up. However, here they clearly exposed a problem in Marxist value theory. In another Marxist sense “productive” workers are defined as those who create value and surplus value, while “unproductive” workers are defined as those who create no value (or surplus value). This depends not at all on whether workers are in the material or non-material sector of the economy, but whether they are employed by capitalists.

N.B. Two interlocking approaches can be found in Marx’s Capital for what he called “productive” and “unproductive” labor. The first refers to “productive workers” as workers who engage in “materially” productive activities (in opposing not only Mercantilism, which located the production of wealth in trade, but also the Physiocrats, who located it in agriculture, Adam Smith emphasized the role of industry, whose workers were therefore “productive”). Hence, workers who work within the sphere of circulation are “unproductive” representing merely the faux frais of capital. (See Capital, Volume II, Chapter VI, “The Costs of Circulation”, I :”The Time of Purchase and Sale”, where he writes: ”...[We] shall assume that this buying and selling agent is a man who sells his labor…he makes his living that way, just as another does by spinning or by making pills. He performs a necessary function …He works as well as the next man, but intrinsically his labor creates neither value nor product. He belongs himself to the faux frais of production…). The second definition is that “productive” workers are those who produce value and surplus value, i.e. are employed by Capital for profit This definition is to be found in “Results of the Immediate Process of Production”, (written between 1863 and 1866) included as an Appendix to post-war editions of Volume I of Capital (e.g. Penguin edition, 1976), and originally intended as a part 7 of that volume. Marx writes there:
...A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her song for money, she is to that extent a wage-laborer or merchant. But if the same singer is engaged by an entrepreneur who makes her sing to make money, then she becomes a productive-worker, since she produces capital directly…
However, Marx, in Volume III (written between 1863 and 1867) defines bank workers (etc.) as “unproductive” workers, as they do not produce value, even though they are employed by capital to make money. We are left with a paradox, since Marx leaves open the possibility that bank workers are, in fact, “productive” (given the above definition). But taking the Volume III definition to its logical conclusion we find today that most workers are “unproductive” as they represent the faux frais of capital, including those mentioned above by Baran and Sweezy. As machines replace “productive” workers more and more, the remaining workers become increasingly “unproductive”.
If a capitalist sets up, say, a security company (and no one can argue that such a service has no use-value to other capitalists) then he makes some of the faux frais of other capitalists into his own capital. This example is not to be sniffed at –given the disorder arising from capitalist relations, security firms have sprouted and at one time were among the most profitable companies in existence. Numerous other examples of companies that capitalize the faux frais of others can be cited (so-called “outsourcing”, for example, and, as we shall see –note 32 –the service sector has grown thanks to the productivity that has developed under capitalism), but then the question arises: what about the faux frais of the faux frais? Clearly, there can be no end to this and perhaps it would be better to apply Marx’s definition of “productive” and “unproductive” workers in the example of the singer to bank clerks as well, i.e. all those employed by capital are “productive workers” per se.

See also the Marxist Ernest Mandel’s book “Late Capitalism”, 1972, chapter XII for an extended discussion on this problem.

A globally-known brand

The War Against Food and Health

Meanwhile, fast-food restaurants, which claim to provide their customers with nourishing food, in fact feed them in such a way that they will later become high-paying customers to the medical and health-care industries.

19 “McDonald’s promote their food as ‘nutritious’, but the reality is that it is junk food –high in fat, sugar and salt, and low in fibre and vitamins. A diet of this type is linked with a greater risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other diseases. Their food also contains many chemical additives, some of which may cause ill-health, and hyperactivity in children. ...In 1991 McDonald’s were responsible for an outbreak of food poisoning in the UK, in which people suffered serious kidney failure. With modern intensive farming methods, other diseases –linked to chemical residues or unnatural practices –have become a danger to people too (such as BSE).” See: “What’s Wrong with McDonalds” at the McSpotlight Site
Meanwhile, back in March/April 1958, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a “careful comparative examination of the diets and health of beggars in India and apparently healthy young American teenagers (which) revealed that in India the average daily calorie intake of the typical beggar amounted to less than half that of the typical American. Yet only 6.25% of the beggars showed any signs of nutritional deficiency, while a staggering 75% of the American teenagers showed signs of severe malnutrition. Only 1.25% of the Indian beggars suffered dental cavities, compared with over 90% of the young Americans”. See: Daniel Reid, “The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity”, Chapter 1, 1989.

Customers, at such places, pay for speed in cash, while humanity pays by way of general ill-health and destroyed food.

20 July 2, 1997: Associated Press, Washington – “More than one-fourth of the food produced in the United States spoils, is tossed out unused or goes uneaten on the plate, the government said yesterday.” By recovering a fraction of this food, we could get food to those in need, instead of tossing it into the dumpster,” said Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman. The Agriculture Department study estimated that food lost in retail stores, restaurants and people’s homes in 1995 amounted to more than 96 billion pounds – one quarter of the total U.S. food supply of 356 billion pounds.”

Hence, the importance of captive markets (the other side of monopolistic production). In effect, consumers pay for the production inputs and finished products that are thrown away. By eating at places like MacDonalds we accept that payment for speed justifies the destruction of the Earth’s resources.

21 Forests throughout the world – vital for all life – are being destroyed at an appalling rate by multinational companies (‘Forests In Trouble’ by Nigel Dudley, 1992). McDonald’s have at last been forced to admit to using beef reared on ex-rainforest land (McDonald’s identified current beef supply sources in Brazil include areas of recently cleared ex-rainforest land, World Wildlife Fund report), preventing its regeneration. Also, the use of farmland by multinationals and their suppliers forces local people to move on to other areas and cut down further trees. (From the McSpotlight web site)

On the one hand we are fed rubbish, while the potential food for mankind is destroyed by the minute; on the other, the majority of the world’s people live in utter starvation, i.e. in a food war.

22 One estimate of world starvation (from ITDG -Practical answers to poverty): “The world today produces one and a half times as much grain again as it needs to meet the nutritional requirements of its population. Yet 800 million people (15% of world population) still endure chronic malnourishment…”.
“A third of the world’s 800 million hungry live in India. How grim is the poverty scenario is clearly evident from a recent World Bank poverty update: in absolute terms, the number of those below the poverty line who cannot manage two-square meals a day shows a significant increase in the post-reform era (after 1991)...(in) the rural areas, from 224 million in the early 1990’s to 250 million in the mid 1990’s. This corresponds to an almost constant increase in the incidence of rural poverty and a slow decline in the incidence of urban poverty, the report states. Eradicating hunger from India, therefore, would alleviate much of the problem at the global level…(Yet) year after year, (Indian) governments have managed a sizeable buffer stock essentially by depriving the poor of their basic human right -food. India is once again faced with an unmanageable food glut. From a food-grain surplus of ten million tonnes in 1999, the stocks have multiplied to 42 million tonnes of wheat and rice this year, some 18 million tonnes more than the annual buffer requirement of about 24 million tonnes.” Nevertheless, the author notes that the government is “toying with the idea” of exporting its surpluses or releasing them on to the open market at subsidized prices. “In 1999, India had produced a bumper harvest of wheat, some six million tonnes more than what it produced a year before. It already had a carryover stock of four million tonnes. In effect, the country was saddled with a surplus wheat stock of ten million tonnes, above the buffer requirements…Although the country is ‘self-sufficient’ in food-grain production, reports of hunger and starvation pour in regularly from the infamous Kalahandi region of Orissa…” (From: BIOWATCH: “Biotech: Not the Answer to Hunger”, by Devinder Sharma, From: Business Line; July 21, 2000 )

See also: “The Globalization of Poverty, Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms”, TWN, Penang and Zed Books, London, 1997. by Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa, 1998.

while their livelihoods are destroyed by the development of monopolistic biotechnology.

People in Sudan

23 The so-called Terminator Gene, which “can genetically switch off plants’ ability to reproduce pass more control of global crops to US companies and force farmers to buy new seeds each year, could have far-reaching economic and cultural effects in poor countries where the technology is aimed, say critics of the technology. ‘The goal is to increase the value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open new markets in second and third world countries,’ said US Dept of Agriculture (USDA) spokesman Willard Phelps. ‘Our mission is to protect American technology and to make us competitive in the face of foreign competition,’ said USDA molecular biologist and primary inventor of the technology Melvin J Oliver.” The Guardian (Britain), Wednesday April 15, 1998.

Soy bean harvest, Brazil

The Financial Networks

(V) Clear-cut power elite diagrams from the first half of the 20th century have fallen into obscurity

24. See, for example, John Moody, The Truth about the Trusts (1904), a pro-monopolist study, Anna Rochester, Rulers of America (1936), a Marxist study, or Ferdinand Lundberg America’s Sixty Families, 1937), in all of which we see maps of Morgan-Rockefeller power, with a number of other families revolving around them, based on the control of banks and key corporate empires.

Whether this is a reflection of a real decline of the most powerful dynasties of the 1930s or merely reflects further deliberate encryption and, hence, concealment of the financial power behind the scenes is debatable. Undoubtedly, though, both processes have taken place. The old dynasties may still be behind a lot of what happens, but so are other forces. Among various things, it would be necessary to understand how property is passed on from generation to generation and the problems that arise during this process, due to family expansion etc., to be able to understand what has happened. And this is no simple question.

25. William Rockefeller, who died in 1922, left US$ 200 million to his children and directing that after their deaths the principal be divided equally among their children. “There is irony in the fact that, despite this ‘dynastic transmission’ and its lack of charitable bequests, the William Rockefeller branch (of the Rockefeller dynasty) has, generally speaking, been able to hold on to its wealth with considerably less success than the main Rockefeller line…The William Rockefeller branch has not only been less successful with its money but has also been broken up by a host of divorces…” (From: Who Killed Society, by Cleveland Amory, Cardinal, 1962)

Another, more recent, U.S. commentary on estate tax states that families have a hard time keeping their fortunes intact over generations.

26. “Whatever the reason, it is clear that very few great fortunes last more than two generations. Even the Rockefeller fortune, perhaps the greatest of all time, has been broken into so many pieces and been so depleted by charity and bad investments that little of it remains.”
However, the commentary notes anyway that: “One study found that among the top 5 percent of households ranked by wealth, inheritances accounted for less than 8 percent of assets. A recent study of U.S. millionaires found that 80 percent acquired their wealth in a single generation, without the benefit of inheritances. U.S. Trust Corporation surveyed the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and found that inheritances were a significant source of wealth for only 10 percent of respondents.” (NCPA -Policy Report No. 235, Wealth, Mobility, Inheritance And The Estate Tax: Wealth, Mobility, Inheritance And The Estate Tax, Policy Report No. 235, July 2000, Executive Summary by Bruce Bartlett)
One is tempted to ask, though, which 10%? How much did it represent?
Contrast this, however, with the use of tax avoidance by the most powerful financial dynasties. By creating obstacles to the transmission of wealth across generations, the State encourages the wealthy either to break the law or to move within that sphere of legal crime where the law can be broken legally for a price. *The term seems to have been invented by the poet Percy Shelley about 1815: See his poem, “Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte”

The Crime Nexus

Without a doubt, though, somewhere within the world of property lurk the dark forces of what has been termed “deep politics” or “clandestine power”: the State’s covert operations, powerful secret societies and the Mafia, and their seemingly ubiquitous connections.

27. “U.S. opposition to networks of ex-Nazis like Barbie and Ricord appeared to be unrelenting in the period of 1970-72, when Nixon, with important help from the CIA, pressured and eventually destroyed the Ricord network of French Corsican drug traffickers in Latin America. But even the Ricord crackdown, so often recounted …as proof of U.S. determination and success in the war against drugs, has been seen in other countries as an effort to gain control over the drug traffic, not to eliminate it …Le Monde has charged bluntly that the arrest of Ricord and his Corsican network, which had become highly competitive with the U.S. Mafia, was due to a ‘close Mafia-police-Narcotics-Bureau collaboration’, in the United States, the result of which is to shatter Corsican influence in the worldwide narcotics traffic, and create a virtual monopoly for the U.S. Italian Mafia connections (whose key figures were Santos Trafficante in America and Luciano Liggio in Europe).” (From: Peter Dale Scott, Transnational Repression: Parafascism and the U.S., 1977. See also Le Monde, June 17-18, 1973) Peter Dale Scott invented the term Deep Politics. See his book by the same name. See also Cocaine Politics (with Jonathon Marshall), 1991, among many others.

Today’s world is riddled by a massive complex of clandestine economic and political power, in which pro- and anti-State Mafiosi have forged a global power infrastructure. It can, indeed, quite reasonably be asserted that the world is now in the hands of the Mafia.

Crime has undoubtedly grown, not because poverty has grown (indeed, it is rather the other way around), but because productivity has increased human potential while legal constraints on production made by the rich to prevent competition have sought to crush this potential on a worldwide scale. Crime is therefore a reflection of economic abundance, or of the stifling of potential abundance, not a reflection of scarcity. Something of this kind was perceived more than 100 years ago by the anarchist Ravachol:

...like the Hayem family or the woman Souhain, who killed their children so they would no longer suffer, and all the women, who, in fear of not being able to feed a child do not hesitate to compromise their health and their lives by aborting the fruits of their love. And all these things are happening within a situation of abundance of every type of product. It would be understandable that this took place in a country where there was a scarcity of products, or where there is a famine. But in France, where abundance reigns, where the butchers’ shops are full of goods, where the bakeries are full of bread, where garments and footwear pile up in stores, where there are unoccupied lodgings. How can it be accepted that all is well in society, when the opposite is seen so clearly? (From Ravachol’s Francois Koeningstein’s Statement after his Trial in 1892, when he was sentenced to death.)

Ravachol

(VI) The Opium War –legal crime

Of course, this is a thoroughly paradoxical state of affairs, although we would come to similar conclusions if we looked at the methods used by the main participants of the industrial revolution in Europe and America. The “robber barons”, the ancestors of the Rockefellers and Morgans, and the origins of all the other powerful financial groups, e.g. the Opium Wars and the Samuels/Rothschilds’ illegal trade as the fastest generator of profits.

28. “The First Opium War (1839.1842) was fought just at the time when Lancashire was ready to flood China with cheap cottons as it has already flooded India. Hence, the war, ostensibly fought to force the Chinese to buy Indian opium against their will, had also the more general object of breaking down the barriers which prevented the free export of British goods to China. After the war, Hong Kong was annexed and five ‘treaty ports’ opened to British traders. A second war (1856-1858) opened the way for the penetration of the Yangtse basin.” (A.L. Morton, A People’s History of England, Chapter XV, 1938)

Frank Pearce (in Crimes of the Powerful, 1976) notes that Russell Sage, who made his money through criminal scams, afterwards created a foundation to sponsor studies of crime in the poor districts of New York and Pittsburgh. Crime has clearly paid, but how do we square this with the power exercised by the State, which is supposedly based on legality? A truly candid historical account of the rise of capitalism tells us that even the crassest forms of crime are permitted to those who attain power, that campaigns to fight organized crime always have had limited objectives. Meanwhile,

Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’re it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanised automaton.
(_Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Queen Mab”, 1813_)