This essay is based on the lecture delivered by Ali Kadri for the second Unit of the People’s Academy curriculum. You can receive the full program — including the recorded lecture — by signing up for The People’s Academy.

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Introduction

Let us begin with the obvious, with what we can experience and see. Throughout five hundred years of capitalist development, we have accumulated many things, a heap of commodities: cars, computers, televisions, pens. We produced these things for sale, and they represent the wealth that we have generated. But alongside this wealth, we have produced a lot of social and natural waste. We have prematurely extinguished the lives of many people in the process of production, and we have prematurely extinguished nature. The situation is cataclysmic. Within fifty years, the physical basis for supporting life as we know it may be eroded beyond recovery. And there is a risk that this devolvement might not follow an arithmetic scale — one, two, three. It could enter into a disequilibrium stage, a tipping point at which the quantitative degradation of nature triggers a qualitative collapse.

When we look at the commodities we produce — the pens, the TVs, the cars — we know that social labour has gone into their making. It takes labour to make things. Even the neoclassical economists agree, though they quickly redirect attention to questions of consumer preference. Nobody denies that people produce things. People produce the machines, and people produce the things we consume. But if we acknowledge that people produce things, then we must also acknowledge what else they produce in the same process: wasted lives and wasted nature. These are not accidental by-products. They are essential products of production, as integral to the system as the commodities themselves.

Premature Death as a Commodity

Time is qualitative. We have developed so many things that we can no longer compare this period with the period before. We cannot say that in the year 100 AD people lived only to thirty years of age, and therefore our own shortened lives are acceptable. The reasons then were natural disasters, diseases, famines, crises of underproduction — the results of a lack of technological development. Our time is rooted in the social and material conditions of the day in which we live. At this time, we are supposed to live a much longer life. But we obviously die sooner than the historically-determined potential that other, more technologically-advanced societies in the imperialist world experience — Japan, France, and so forth. In Yemen, life expectancy is around fifty or fifty-five. In Afghanistan, it has at times fallen below fifty, around forty-five. We are looking at a crisis of premature death.

And of course, man is also nature. We are not only killing the trees and the oceans. We are killing people as well. This process of destroying things is not haphazard. It did not come from nowhere. It is an essential product of production. Just as we produced the pen, we also produced the waste, the wasted lives and the wasted nature that are side products of the pen. These are products of socially necessary labour time. Labour was involved in their production, and therefore they are commodities. Capital commodifies everything, totalises everything. Some prices are visible; others are hidden, embedded, or negative. Consider a pen purchased for ten dollars, whose merchant paid only five. The five-dollar profit is not a mystery of market magic. It is the measure of how successfully the merchant — and the system he represents — beat down the direct producers, the people who own the land upon which raw materials rest and the labour that transforms them. The profit is the difference between what labour and nature are worth and what capital actually pays. It is the product of a process where a people were beaten into submission, denied subjectivity, denied sovereignty over their land, and denied mastery over themselves. They have been stripped of their negotiating power, and so conditions can be imposed on them.

Exploitation requires oppression, and oppression requires doses violence — both actual and ideological. Populations must be convinced of their own defeatism, made to believe they cannot win against the capitalist. The less they can negotiate, the higher the profit. This is the production side of profit, and it is the more important side. The real cost of that ten-dollar pen includes the wars waged to secure cheap cobalt, the structural adjustment programmes that shattered public health systems, the pollution that shortens lives along every node of the supply chain. Society pays these costs.

We live in a world where the facts are such that what we see, what we experience, the obvious, is this: there is much more wasted life and nature than there are things actually of use to society being produced. Why so? Because if the planet is going to go haywire in fifty years' time, that means there is so much environmental death and destruction at the moment that it far exceeds anything good we have produced. And that environmental death and destruction is also a commodity that has been produced. It is a product of labour. Death itself is a product of labour. Capital commodifies everything. These are all commodities, and they have a price.

Prices are not always visible, but the price system is an interrelated structure where the price of everything depends on the price of everything. Sometimes the price of environmental and human waste is a negative price — a price that society pays. If I have trash at home and I pay ten dollars for somebody to take it out, that is negative ten dollars on my account. The incomes of society get reduced by the amount of waste that capital produces. The profits of capital, meanwhile, are driven by the amount of waste for which capital does not pay. They pollute the environment, they extinguish the lives of people way before their time, but capital does not pay for these things. Society ends up paying. These were costs of production that capital was supposed to pay for but did not. Therefore, the profits of capital depend pretty much on how much it wastes, on how much it makes society pay for the costs of production.

And the production here involved is not only the fact that I have a labourer who is going to be reproduced, who gets ten dollars in wages and buys bread and butter for his family. That is the side of the story that political economy, even in the traditional sense, talks about — the wage offsets the consumption bundle. What we have here is a process where society ends up paying way more: in taxes, in shorter lives because of pollution, in shorter lives because of the wars visited upon the masses of the developing world in order to cut the costs of production and strip people of their sovereignty. All of these are negative prices. Society ends up paying for production costs, and the more society pays for the costs of production, the more profits there are for capital, and the more waste capital produces.

The Negative Dialectic

This is an autodestructive process. Of course it is a negative dialectic. It is something that goes from bad to worse all the time, because in order to make more profits exponentially, you will need to destroy more and more and make society pay for the destruction.

War acts as a major pollutant. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Iraq — in Korea, nearly a quarter of the population was lost. In Vietnam, ten to fifteen percent. In Algeria, huge numbers. In the war on terror, in Iraq, millions. That reduces the population absolutely and relatively, because it reduces life expectancy. Pollutants are slow-motion war. They reduce populations and make society pay — madness to hospitals, tax bills that capital should pay because it is capital that polluted in order to pay less for the pen or the desk. But society ends up paying.

There is a relationship between the death of nature and the death of man. When we make nature sick, it makes man sick, and if it makes man sick it reduces the life expectancy of man — while capital actually gains from the sickness it has created, because there will be pharmaceuticals and all these things that society pays for. It is dying, and it pays for the costs of its death from what capital has created. There is a war on the masses taking place all the time, whether it is open war like the major wars of the second half of the twentieth century and this century, or a protracted, slow-motion war to reduce the social costs of the reproduction of people. You need to pay a lot less to sustain people at a certain living standard, and if you make new sicknesses, you create new areas to be commodified, into which money is pumped. You monetise new areas of production.

At this moment, there are something like seventy wars occurring around the world. If we think about the premature death rate due to austerity and pollution, there is a structural genocide, a slow-motion genocide, occurring all the time. There is also direct genocide, such as that in Gaza, which says: we can eliminate people at will, without concern for the heritage, the gains the working class made over the last two centuries since the rise of Marxism, the rise of unions, the rise of progressive forces. There is a legacy, a history of human rights, of gains for labour, and we are now at a position in history where we are going to write this all off, forget about it, and do what is necessary for profit, which is kill outright. And by the demonstration effect, if any peoples around the world are going to oppose us, that is what is expected of capital. It is in its element. It makes the most profits when it genocides more and more, either structurally or directly.

In the end, the rate of surplus value is the rate of exploitation. And the rate of exploitation is the rate at which we economise with the life of labour. That is from Volume Three. How do you economise somebody's life? You make them live a more miserable and shorter life. You basically kill them. So the rate of killing is the rate of profit. That is what capital is, and no one says this in these obvious terms.

Is Capitalism Still Progressive?

When production relations changed from pre-capitalist to capitalist, roughly five hundred years ago, the emergence of wage labour was a visible phenomenon. We saw wage labourers, and we said: this is capitalism, it has specific visible phenomena. And capitalism was said to be progressive. We should not romanticise feudalism, we were told. Capitalism ushered in liberal thought and free wage labour. It is a progressive stage in history.

But that assessment rested on a balance of power between capital and labour, a balance structured by imperialism. Today, that assessment no longer holds. In first principles, a civilisation is judged by what it accumulates — in wealth, in spiritual production, in actual production. What we have produced is more pollution and death of society and nature. The structure of thought associated with this production of death is a superstructure attuned to the reproduction of death. As a civilisation, this civilisation of capital — and I say capital, not Western civilisation or Eastern civilisation, because the real lines are class lines, not national lines, not identity lines — as a civilisation, it is disastrous.

We do not need to predict the end. The law of development is clear. If the balance of forces remains the same, if capital is in control of the reproduction of social life, then necessarily — not exclusively, but necessarily — the laws of profit and value will devolve into conditions of poverty, premature death, immiseration, and now the death of the planet. Is capitalism progressive? Relative to the times, relative to the productive potential we have achieved, relative to how cheap medicine and food have become, how abundant things could be — this civilisation is disastrous. We have never seen anything like it. In the year 1000, people lived to twenty-five not because of political choices but because of natural limits. Now, we have seen China improve life expectancy from around thirty-three in 1949 to nearly eighty, higher than the United States. A society that manages its resources at the behest of the working class arrives at better conditions. Relative to the times, this civilisation is disastrous.

If labour continues in the shambles it is now, capital will drive the planet to complete dissolution. The production of waste, the wasting of life and nature, is necessary for profits. Profits have to grow all the time. We need to waste people and nature more aggressively, all along. We consume the waste. It is a process of auto-waste.

War as Industry

Much of the global working class is now employed by rents — rents to stabilise the political order, rents that feed on war as a domain of accumulation, on militarism as a domain of accumulation. We have always needed violence and ideological aggression to destroy people and nature, to make them accept the conditions at which they sell their lives and resources. But war itself is also a production sphere. War involves waged soldiers, labour, using machines to take down lives. The product is death — premature death of man. And there is money being made, because war is funded by treasury bills that earn rents. War is an industry in itself, and an industry which is the basis of all industries. It is a feeder industry. If you are going to cut costs, you go and make war somewhere and visit war upon other peoples. The imperialists do that.

When we in the developing world import technology from the West, we import labour-saving technology, and there is little wealth to stabilise society by employment in arts and culture and services. So rents come in the form of aid, NGOs, from the imperial centres, and they increase divisions. If it is not the imperialists waging war directly, they send rents to create a militia proletariat in the developing world, engaged in the act of self-destruction — killing itself on the basis of ethnicities, border lines, sectarianism, tribalism. They have created the scarcity, drawn the resources, left nothing, and now they come in with a few dollars and a few guns and say: your job is to produce the death of the other, and the other's job is to produce your death. These powder kegs are ablaze all over the developing world. It is a huge industrial project. Death is a commodity realised like pollution, realised across the planet.

If we say hypothetically that consumption leads production — which it does not, but let us assume — then what we are consuming globally is a huge amount of pollutants and premature human death. That is the major item of consumption. The price of it does not show, but it is embedded in the entire price system, filtering into profit rates. The biggest industry on the planet is the industry of death — the death of nature and the death of man. The creation of sick nature is like the creation of a machine that kills. If you throw pollutants in the river and people drink the water, that kills. The machine of death that capital has created is acting out what capital wants. It is destroying people's lives. There are too many people for capital, too many people who are not useful unless they engage in an act of self-destruction — either through protracted, structural genocide or through direct war and direct genocide.

The Value Relation

All of this is the basis of the profit rate. When we say value, we are not just saying there are certain hours of socially necessary labour time objectified in the commodity. We are saying there is a contradiction between capital and labour. Value is use value and exchange value. Exchange value is what capital gains. Use value is what society gains. If capital is stronger, exchange value is way stronger than use value, and death is far more beneficial to capital because it erodes the very bases that create autonomy for the working class.

The rents, the foreign aid, the NGOs, the ideological production of capitalism, the human rights of capitalism — all this language is meant to destroy man and nature in order to ensure profits. That is capital in action.

Think of the real cost of the pen. If the people throughout the stages of production had been powerful enough to argue for higher wages, less pollution, better living conditions, that price would not have been ten dollars. It could have been much more, but at least the price would have reflected the social benefits, not the social costs that accrued to other societies. As it stands, the ten dollars I hand over symbolises all the reduction in the social cost of reproducing labour, all the death and disease and war compressed into the final product. It has equated ten dollars with the total value that emerged throughout the process of production — a value that includes the lives of nature and man cut short.

We are in a process of complete waste: wasting lives, wasting nature, consuming the waste. It is auto-waste. I am being descriptive. I have only scratched the surface of theory. The value relation is a relationship between capital and labour, between use value and exchange value. Capital wants to appropriate the money. It does not produce commodities because they benefit society. It produces them because they are meant for sale.

In a global order based on selling at any cost — where the more damage I cause to nature and man, the more I sell; where I do not only sell the pen but the death related to the making of the pen; where the trees I destroyed are also making me profits because they are an industry in their own right; where the war I make to cut costs is an industry in its own right — the subject of the value relation is capital. If capital is stronger, exchange value dominates use value, and death becomes far more beneficial to capital because it destroys the very bases that create autonomy for the working class.

Internationalism and the Task Ahead

Some will ask whether Marx predicted this. Marx hated predictions. When he spoke of the rise of socialism, he spoke as a man of revolutionary practice, for ideological reasons. But Marx the theoretician knew otherwise. What we have is a situation where, if the balance of forces between capital and labour remains the same, capitalism as a civilisation will necessarily drive the planet to complete dissolution. The logic of capital is to destroy everything. Producers do not know how much money is out there to buy, how much they should produce. There is no central planning. They get the messages post facto, they overproduce, and we have a permanent crisis of overproduction. When capital is in control, we will have death galore. There will be more premature death of man and more premature death of nature. That is the logic. There is not much to predict. Tell me how strong capital is, how weak labour is, how divided the international working class is, whether it has revolutionary consciousness, whether it understands that in its solidarity against capital it will gain more years of life and better years of life. Class is a question of existence — what to eat, what to sleep, what to enjoy. If workers are not organised, if they have absorbed defeatism, interjected defeatism, the ideology of capital, then necessarily the system will devolve into poverty, premature death, immiseration, and the death of the planet.

The task, especially when organising in the global North, is not merely to ensure higher wages or shorter working weeks for your workers. It is to make sure that those higher wages and shorter working weeks in the North do not mean shorter lives in the South. When a liberal newspaper calculates that an iPhone manufactured entirely in the United States would cost six thousand dollars rather than one thousand, it acknowledges exploitation: the child in the Congo mining cobalt for two dollars a day. What it rarely acknowledges is the prior violence — the assassination of Lumumba, the extermination of liberation movements, the disabling of mass politics through NGO dependency, the imposition of debt and structural adjustment, the proxy warfare that sustains catastrophic conditions. Exploitation is not a natural state. It is reproduced through continuous aggression.

We have no other option. We are all part of the promise and the struggle for a world free of imperialism. To all of us, imperialism is piracy transplanted from the seas to dry land — piracy reorganised, consolidated, and adapted to the aim of plundering the natural and human resources of our peoples, and of other peoples of the world. To all of us, imperialism is capital in action.

Ali Kadri is a professor at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, and the author of The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Genocide and Imperialism.