"Its necessity for war proves that Power has come to rest, not on an economic system that works on its own, but upon the accumulated violence this economic system has delivered to its protagonists."

The subordination of all other human activities and goals to waged work, for economic ends is ceasing to be either necessary or meaningful. [1]

I have long been aware of the artificiality of the post-war capitalist system, which while supposedly pursuing a trajectory of unrestrained growth worldwide, seems to have been based on a policy of restricting or even reversing development, rather than allowing things to take their own course. It appears that the economy is no longer king, whatever may have been said about the "power of the market" since the 1960s. As I write this, I am aware of a contradiction - in supposing that the economy can be allowed to take its own course - because the system we live in is more than the economy, and always has been. It therefore becomes meaningless to say that things might "take their own course" - they always will. However, if we restrict ourselves to saying that the "developing" countries be left to take their own course, for instance, this is not meaningless - restrictions and reversals of their development have come largely from external forces. Calling on those forces to "lay off" is perfectly justifiable. Moreover, Power is never absolute - by its nature it breeds conflict.

Finally, although what was possible yesterday may not be possible today (the freeing of North America from British control, the Russian Revolution, etc.), what was not possible yesterday may be possible today (worldwide knowledge of U.S. intelligence secrets via the Internet, instant communication between individuals and groups, for example)...

Capitalism in the 19th century seems to have been, dare I say it, a more spontaneous affair, as with more historical integrity it fought for power amid the remnants of an aristocracy that continued to dominate the States of Europe and beyond. Capital was, then, not merely able but willing - to a certain extent - to permit abundance to flow spontaneously, demonstrating capitalism's superiority over tradition, [2] always bearing in mind that its particular application of science suited its capitalist ends and was contested fiercely at every stage. [3] But, today, the spontaneous flow of abundance and the development of science are perceived more as a threat than an opportunity by Capital. Spontaneity is preserved increasingly for the Power that Capital has accumulated. I ask myself here such questions as: Do crises limit spontaneous capitalism? What limits Power?

But was it really any different in capitalism's heyday? Certainly, although the State was able to intervene, the economic resources at its disposal were not as great as they became later: capitalism was still finding its feet and the economic system had its own crisis-ridden logic. [4] How did this change? The move into massive State interventionism can be traced back to the First World War, which became the well-spring of State capitalism. [5] War ensured the continued flow of profit into the hands of the powerful, demanding the predominating power for the wealthiest. And war increased State revenue, by imposing much higher tax rates and increasing the tax base. Although these impositions on society were eased considerably in the aftermath of war, they never fell back to their original levels. Thus, in the 20th century, abundance has left billions of people in absolute poverty and has fed the growth of the State.

State intervention in the economy is therefore predicated by war, engendering the rise of economic interventionist theories and (after World War II) policies. John Maynard Keynes was clearly aware that the economy (the market) was not self-sustaining and favoured the State stepping in to remedy the problem. Isn't this a clear admission that the system was lacking in authenticity, and had to be helped along? While Neo-Keynesian State economic intervention helped the system to function during the post-war years, using its enormous revenues as a basis for deficit finance (i.e. State credit), this by-then conventional wisdom was challenged by the monetarists and others, who saw that opportunities were being distributed away from Power (I shall develop on this further below). Thus since the 1970s, Capital has followed a sort of revanchist path. Neo-Keynesian policy had set the tone for massive re-allocations of resources via the State, favouring social welfare. The neo-liberal trend has shown that massive re-allocations can move in the other direction, redistributing income and wealth - and Power - towards the plutocracy.

This change has been accompanied by a fragmentation of the economy, the growth of informality [6] and, within this, varying degrees of respect for and defiance of the law (the Constitution, ethical practice, and so on). Indeed, the State itself has changed - has become a more hollow instrument of corporate Power, [7] often obscure, clandestine, and unconstitutional - indeed criminal. [8] The United States has been privatizing its armed forces, its prisons and its intelligence operations for quite some time. Dyncorp, which occupies land, ostensibly set aside for Raytheon Corp., on Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, engages in clandestine military activities in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. [9]

The most powerful States seek to undermine scientific developments outside their own domains. The very gradual displacement of oil as the preferred energy source is evidence of this. They also spy on each other (can spying really be considered as "competition"?) and on the peripheral regions, carry out clandestine operations for predatory reasons in other, less powerful, States. [10] The growth of informality and criminality within the formal corporate sector in America (and surely everywhere else) has undoubtedly grown worse since Edwin Sutherland made his analysis in 1949 (see note 6). Some idea of the extent of criminality within the business sector in America is given by the following extract from a report on corporate crime:

While the 1990s was a decade of booming markets and booming profits, it was also a decade of rampant corporate criminality. There is an emerging consensus among corporate criminologists. And that emerging consensus is this: corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined. The FBI estimates, for example, that burglary and robbery - street crimes - costs the nation $3.8 billion a year. Compare this to the hundreds of billions of dollars stolen from Americans as a result of corporate and white-collar fraud. Health care fraud alone costs Americans $100 billion to $400 billion a year. The savings and loan fraud - which former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called "the biggest white collar swindle in history" - cost us anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion. And then you have your lesser frauds: auto repair fraud, $40 billion a year, securities fraud, $15 billion a year - and on down the list. Recite this list of corporate frauds and people will immediately say to you: but you can't compare street crime and corporate crime - corporate crime is not violent crime. Unfortunately, corporate crime is often violent crime. The FBI estimates that, 19,000 Americans are murdered every year. Compare this to the 56,000 Americans who die every year on the job or from occupational diseases such as black lung and asbestosis and the tens of thousands of other Americans who fall victim to the silent violence of pollution, contaminated foods, hazardous consumer products, and hospital malpractice. These deaths are often the result of criminal recklessness. They are sometimes prosecuted as homicides or as criminal violations of federal laws. And environmental crimes often result in death, disease and injury. In 1998, for example, a Tampa, Florida company and the company's plant manager were found guilty of violating a federal hazardous waste law. Those illegal acts resulted in the deaths of two nine-year-old boys who were playing in a dumpster at the company's facility. [11]

However, it is becoming more difficult to trace these crimes because charges brought against the powerful corporations and banks disappear from the courts more easily and are settled using so-called "deferred" and "non-prosecution" agreements. [12] Thus the meaning of the term "criminal court" changes - the truth gets intentionally buried away from the public - and it becomes more difficult for us to know the true and concrete scale of things.

Parallel then with an increased polarization of society (see below), which appears to have been deliberately pursued by the most powerful groups, has been the refuge of the informal sector - and the State has had to bend to this situation. And within this growing informality has been a growing criminality - not simply within it, just as informality is not simply outside the formal sector, but intertwined with the formal sector. Typically, the State has, in fact, fought tax evasion and criminalization, but it has also been influenced by what undermined it - has the typical State in the post-War period been as corrupt as it appears to be today?

Capital's dilemma is unleashed by its own success: abundance - and the sorcerer's apprentice has become the axis of the system - America! We might say, sarcastically of course, that this little genius "discovered" that as long as waste piles up at least as fast as wealth, no crises need occur, because sales turnover would keep up with mass production. But even this was not enough!

Obsolescence seems as old as capitalism itself, but became institutionalized in the 20th century, especially as the deliberate manufacture of commodities that had a limited life-span to speed up the buying process: destruction, destruction, destruction, renewal, renewal, renewal. [13] Other methods have since grown up that have the same high sales turnover effect. Fast food (so highly developed by McDonalds) is one of them, in which unless the food is delivered fast it is thrown away, and customers end up paying for food to be wasted as well [14] - invisible to them, but real enough, as other people starve.

But perhaps the biggest contribution to the high turnover system has been made by the growth of technology itself - bearing in mind that science and technology are subjects of Power's privilege. This is seen most clearly in the "hi-tech" or "state-of-the-art" technology arena, where the development of new models makes whatever you bought a year ago (be it a car or a computer printer), or even less, obsolete, and spares and inputs (such as engine accessories and ink containers) become hard or impossible to find. In perpetuating waste - and destroying the environment - capitalism perpetuates its existence.

The cult of obsolescence extends to the means of production - thus, enormous levels of factory over-capacity and the scrapping of machinery (etc.) mark the present system of production. This is because excessive investments have been made in competition with others doing the same thing - overproduction of the means of production. Once again, we have a waste of resources - resources that have been drawn from the work of others. [15]

Obsolescence - whether built-in or not - is just one of the ways that Capital has been able to maintain its predominance - it is clear that such methods depend on economic power (always allied with political power), because if a single small company competing against others were to try it, people would turn to its competitors and buy their longer-lasting products instead. [16] Various forms and degrees of monopoly are involved then, and economic monopoly is an instrument of Power. Its most obvious service to Power is as a generator of high (monopoly) profits. Monopolies (including cartels, trusts, trading agreements, rings and so forth) do this by manipulating the supplies of their products to the market and maintaining the best possible prices that will keep profits high, among other practices.

The flow of abundance all this has permitted - despite its attempts to hold things back - reminds Capital that unless it continually finds ways to dominate the growing production process (through monopolistic practices of various kinds) its privileges will be swamped - by the wealth of others - and it will sink among them, no more privileged than the "human hordes" it has fed upon until now. It has seen this wealth grow and move beyond its own orbit - at home (the displacement of oil at the top of America's largest companies, but also the growth of foreign corporations within the United States) and abroad (the German and Japanese post-War miracles, the Asian "Tigers", China, India, etc., etc.). Its will, its own class consciousness tell it that this logical process has to be stopped - Power, as never before, has had to go against the grain. It has continually intervened artificially to preserve its preponderant position over the rest of humanity - to maintain itself.

The "discovery" of increased turnover was highly controversial. People used to ask: how can abundance exist if people all around the world are living in poverty? How come people live in poverty if millions of tons of food and other means to life are being destroyed every day - even in the so-called "developing countries"? And if people in the heartlands of Capital have seen their real incomes collapse, how come they are consuming so much food and buying new cars and living in new homes? These are all facts and their side-by-side existence points to the anomalous nature of the system. [17]

The contradiction between abundance and poverty has a very long history. Scarcity is real enough but - particularly in our own times - has had to be deliberately created, has not only arisen in a periodic way through spontaneous business cycles, but has had to be forced into existence literally all the time. [18] People occasionally catch sight over the walls of Capital of the abundance they often know to be enjoyed by the few, and others who enjoy some of the prosperity also see with their own innocent eyes what is going on outside the beltway. Despite a certain crowding together in mega-cities and elsewhere, though, generally speaking the old walls of class erected over centuries have continued to do their job. People are still living in balloons, even as identities of interest are bringing down the walls that separate civility from barbarity. Humanity is being moulded (a key role is played here for Power by the educational system and culture) - and while effective, the certainty of success is far from being absolute.

Meanwhile, even in the 1920s, [19] it was evident that the US economy was restructuring itself around services, including finance. Stuart Chase, [20] an accountant with an insider's view of the American economy, stated of manufactured goods even in the early 1930s that:

[the] price to the consumer is three hundred times the factory cost [thanks to the services provided by] jobbers, wholesalers, speculators, commission men, salesmen, canvassers, mail order campaigns, calendars, illustrated brochures, sales engineers, fancy containers, traveling allowances, cross-hauling, captive balloons, retainers to college professors, telegrams, conferences, trips to Washington, cigars, presents to purchasing agents, accountants, long-distance telephone calls, radio programs, liquor, lawyers... (my emphasis) [21]

His comments on the role of services, including finance, in the pricing of commodities reflect the growing spread and complexity of the market, away from the local economy, towards one in which the commanding centres would be distant and remote financial groups. But to incorporate all these elements into the prices of commodities suggests a certain power arising out of the markets - the power of services in the circulation of goods, the power of distant markets, and so forth. It also implies a growing population of "unproductive workers" (to use Marx's term, a dubious one I think - whether applied to physical output or to "value") who operate basically in the circulation sector. [22]

By the 1950s, this restructuring was clear for most of the economies of the advanced capitalist countries - the services or tertiary sector (a hodge-podge of physical services such as the utilities and transportation, plus financial services, business, personal and community services, including advertising, the postal service, education and hairdressing, etc.) was now larger in value terms than the industrial sector (manufacturing and construction). [23] A very rough definition would be that labour must be performed in space and time, but when it is applied to services it leaves no material object behind to represent its flow - no humble commodity is left for sale.

Consumer credit, first in the capitalist metropoli, then almost everywhere else has grown basically since the 1960s to represent a very high proportion of consumer spending. [24] America did not, of course, invent credit, but its banks (led by the newer banks such as the Bank of America [25]) back in the 1920s did begin to exploit consumer credit more than any other had before.

In the post-1960s period, America (and elsewhere) is marked by the growing polarization of wealth and income, [26] and in particular the concentration of wealth and income in the financial sector, in part due to the effects of inflation and the weakening of the unions. [27] Increasing productivity created the potential of a better life for all - Capital rightly feared that if this were allowed to take its own course, it would simultaneously see its power dwindle away. In the context of explaining the neoliberal process, Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy state:

Globalization and the liberalization of capital exchanges and movements are indeed its fundamental components. But they should not be considered independently from the reassertion of power by capital holders, which constituted the main aspect of the change. (Chapter 1)

Once finance was back in power in the 1980s, its first concern was to regain this [price] stability. It accomplished this, on a national level, by quickly establishing itself within the Keynesian institutions. With great efficiency, it diverted their tools and methods to its advantage. Despite all the talk, the American state, the Federal Reserve, and monetary policies are more powerful than ever. (Chapter 18) [28]

So while Capital appropriated an increasing share of wealth and income, consumer demand had to be boosted via credit - or bank ownership of personal spending. This went in waves - as recessions pointed to the dangers, so the banks tightened their grip - until the so-called "sub-prime" mortgage crisis broke out in 2008. These securities boosted the building industry (from the 1990s), just as no-interest loans boosted the car industry (especially after 2001), but the people to whom the loans were increasingly being extended did not have the means of paying it back. The financial institutions did not seem to care about this, hiring people to convince the poor that everything would be OK. [29]

Built-in obsolescence and then consumer credit helped to produce today's resurgent capitalism. But the new freedoms created by the thriving financial sector moved out of control. The old rules could be broken, and the distinctions between normal and abnormal practice, between what might be deemed ethical and what might not, [30] the temptation to take risks in an atmosphere of privilege without responsibility sent messages to something that had never been far off in America: organized crime. [31] But what happens when authority breaks its own laws? As a very well-known writer stated: 'Thieves for their robbery have authority when judges steal themselves.' [32]

Power becomes increasingly arbitrary - what is right and what is wrong depends... Meaning itself becomes nebulous as community breaks down. And as food production grows beyond what the market demands, farm capital far too often moves into profitable but risky illicit drugs - always of a selective type (also subject to crises of overproduction, of course, because they help to reproduce inequality [33]). And while addictive substances are dubbed illegal, addiction becomes the key to capitalism (and to its State - note how State budgets raise extra revenue from tobacco, beer and spirits; note how laws against substances raise the risk and the price of these substances; note how some countries' balance of payments depend on illegal drug sales, etc.). Drug addiction helps move the capitalist circulation process faster. Money is money, no matter through what hands it has passed. [34]

In war, they say, the first casualty is the truth - does this mean we have always been at war? War has been Capital's great lever of change - the change it demands is made for new forms of domination. Thus, more generally, the logic that flows out of Shakespeare's statement is a logic based on might. And, increasingly, might must have its way. This reflects the fragility of the present system, its need for protection, espionage, double-dealing, and terror.

Relations between the U.S. Pentagon and America's intelligence community, on the one hand, and organized crime, on the other, [35] however well they may have been justified for the pragmatic purposes of State security, reveal a certain identity of interests. The perverse State of today not only provides profitable outlets for what it defines itself as crime, but a raison d'être for war against organized crime. But this is a war in which true identities are blurred, where good and bad always seem "subject to change". [36] Likewise, States have fomented war against terrorism to justify foreign conquest.

Its necessity for war proves that Power has come to rest, not on an economic system that works on its own, but upon the accumulated violence this economic system has delivered to its protagonists. It is a system dying in the midst of plenitude - it keeps itself alive by constantly reversing the sense of its circumstances which grow independent of its will, using society's imagination perversely. Capital's stock of wealth continues to grow, and becomes the instrument of fear that enables it to stay in power.

It will surely be said by Capital's hawks that if you don't accept the way things are you will have to lump it [37] - if you don't want to work for a system held together as it is then don't work, live somehow without work - be a scrounger if you can. And without a job - unless you have some "independent means" - you will starve, adding your name to the Malthusian death-cart against over-population. And so we return to the statement with which we began, and with André Gorz and others we ask why waged work must dominate in a world where there is far more to do, and where humanity might start by heeding the words of André Malraux:

The 21st century will be a spiritual one or there will be no 21st century... [38]

Rod Allison is an independent researcher. Born in London in 1946, in 1985 he emigrated to Mexico, to live in Mexico City. He is currently a translator from Spanish to English, specializing in economics and finance since 1993. He has worked for several institutions in Mexico and was head of financial reporting for the "English Wire" at the State-run news agency Notimex from 1992 to 1993.

Endnotes

1. André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason: Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists, Chapter 3 (1923-2007), undated, Global Solidarity Dialogue. At the beginning of this study, Gorz also notes: "Work for economic ends has not always been the dominant activity of mankind. It has only been dominant across the whole of society since the advent of industrial capitalism, about two hundred years ago. Before capitalism, people in pre-modern societies, in the Middle Ages and the Ancient World, worked far less than they do nowadays, as they do in the pre-capitalist societies that still exist today. In fact, the difference was such that the first industrialists, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had great difficulty getting their workforce to do a full day's work, week in week out. The first factory bosses went bankrupt precisely for this reason."

2. American capitalism took this process much further than European capitalism seems to have been able, and the American system (Americanization) was quite rapidly embraced in other places. See, for example, W.T. Stead's proposals for a world governed by a partnership of Britain and the United States in his 1902 book The Americanization of the World.

3. The Luddite textile workers at the beginning of the 19th century understood that the new machines - for all their efficiency - would be used to undermine their independence and force them into the hands of exploiters.

4. Capitalist abundance had long before spilled over into the international sphere - trade and foreign investment. Imperialism has been characterized as the expression of over-accumulation and over-production, but it grew directly out of the European Powers' colonial movement. In Britain's case (the leading imperialist power by the mid-19th century), as in Spain's and others', colonialism was one of the bases for royal power, aided and abetted by merchant capital. Monopoly capitalism did not change all this.

5. Among the many who lost their lives in the First World War, England's aristocracy contributed a significant number of its young men. Vanity Fair noted in 1919: "For not even in the Great Rebellion against Charles I did the nobility lose so many of its members as the list of casualties of the present war displays. In the first sixteen months of operations no less than eight hundred men of title were killed in action, or died of their wounds, and over a thousand more were serving with the land or sea forces." (my emphasis) In the years leading up to 1914, Lloyd George headed the attack on aristocratic privilege. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1909, he had presented a "People's Budget" lashing out against the landlords, with increased income tax and death duties plus a new tax on unearned increases in land values to pay for a politically smart combination of items: old age pensions and dreadnoughts! This led to a confrontation with the House of Lords, Lloyd George's opponents being led by a Conservative aristocrat, Arthur Balfour. Although the latter played an important role behind the scenes in running the First World War, I still ask myself: Was the aristocratic war-toll more than mere coincidence?

On the other hand, the First World War, undoubtedly fought for imperialist ends, surely had another side to it. Can we really believe that workers and middle class people enlisted to fight simply as a result of Lloyd George's propaganda? There is no question that Germany had expansionist aims in Europe, explained clearly by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his letter to Gustave Steffen in the fall of 1914: "I consider that the duty of everyone who cherishes the idea of human progress altogether, and especially those that were inscribed by the European proletarians on the banner of the International Workingmen's Association, is to do everything in one's power, according to one's capacities, to crush down the invasion of the Germans into Western Europe." In this sense, the people's involvement in fighting two world wars had much in common. But what about the German people? While they were exhorted by their own conservatives and socialists (some who had been or still called themselves Marxists) to fight for Germany, one would expect to find significant opposition there to the war effort, and against war as such. And so one did, though it was not enough... (I note, of course, that one group of anarchists severely criticized Kropotkin for supporting the First World War against Germany, but I digress too much.)

6. I use this term to refer to economic activity that falls outside the regulations of the State: economic units that are not registered as such, do not pay taxes - or pay only some taxes - and do not necessarily abide by labour laws, etc. We enter the world of ambiguity here - as is evident from one of the first studies of the subject, Edwin Sutherland's White-collar Crime (1949), there is no Chinese Wall separating the formal from the informal sector.

7. On this, Naomi Klein has much to say in her book The Shock Doctrine (2007, see Chapters 14 and 15) –although I think this hollowing-out process of the State dates back rather earlier than Donald Rumsfeld's office at the Department of Defence (2001-2006).

8. Where does corporate crime end and organized crime begin? Extending what was shown over 60 years ago by Edwin Sutherland (White Collar Crime), we should appreciate that there is no Chinese Wall between the two.

9. See: Jason Vest, 'State Outsources Secret War', The Nation, 2001.

10. "In 1994, NSA intercepted phone calls between Thomson-CSF and Brazil concerning SIVAM, a $1.3 billion surveillance system for the Amazon rain forest. The company was alleged to have bribed members of the Brazilian government selection panel. The contract was awarded to the US Raytheon Corporation - who announced afterwards that 'the Department of Commerce worked very hard in support of U.S. industry on this project'. Raytheon also provide maintenance and engineering services to NSA's ECHELON satellite interception station at Sugar Grove." (Duncan Campbell, Report to the Director General for Research of the European Parliament: Interception Capabilities 2000, 7 May 1999) Meanwhile, "A seven-month investigation by the French parliament concludes that Echelon is routinely used to gather economic information and warns that it is open to abuse. The report says that the system may well be used by the nations that operate it to gain political and economic advantage over other nations." ('Echelon, the French Fight Back', ZDNet UK News, June 29, 2000.) Multinationals are also building their own Echelons, or satellite systems to spy on their customers. ('Frenchelon - France has nothing to envy in Echelon', ZDNet UK News, June 30, 2000.) Intelsat is in the process of privatizing itself (Intelsat press release, Washington, D.C., March 2, 2000). What then has been happening since September, 2001?

11. Russell Mokhiber, Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the Decade, dealing with the 1990s. For the record, the BP oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico deserves at least a mention here, and will surely become a symbol of transnational abuse for many years to come. It has exposed the opposition these corporations have aroused, and it is now being revealed that the crude oil that contaminated such a wide area is in the food chain - undermining the means of existence of fishermen. It is to be hoped that the sequels of this disaster based on greed will continue to be investigated and reported on.

12. See: Russell Mokhiber, 'Crime without conviction: the rise of deferred and non-prosecution agreements', Corporate Crime Reporter, December 28, 2005. The attitude of those who defend these arrangements is exemplified here by a Law Professor at America's George Mason University: "Parker argues that corporate crime simply does not exist and cannot exist. "Crime exists only in the mind of an individual," Parker said in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter a couple of years ago. "Since a corporation has no mind, it can commit no crime," Parker said."

13. Paul Lafargue, in his study of 1880 (The Right to be Lazy) refers to the deliberate adulteration of silk textiles, whose life-span is thus reduced. After that the idea of "built-in obsolescence" worked its way through such writers as Thorstein Veblen (Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, (1924)) and Vance Packhard (The Waste Makers, (1960)). But in 1935, New York realtor Bernard London adopted the term "planned obsolescence", in his book, Rebuilding a Prosperous Nation through Planned Obsolescence; where he called on the government to institute laws banning the production of goods that lasted beyond a certain period of time, to combat what he believed to be the cause of the 1930s depression - under-consumption.

14. I have not investigated the extent to which McDonald's waste exceeds the waste generated by urban wholesale farm produce markets, thanks to centralization. I am assured by people who have worked at McDonalds that the waste of food is very great.

15. The latest detailed figures available for the United States at the time I began this were published in January, 2007, for 2005: Survey of Plant Capacity, published by the U.S. Census Bureau. Since then, the Federal Reserve has published more general figures which appear to show a continuing increase in capacity utilization since about the beginning of 2002. The current capacity output rate is about 80%. For example, manufacturing is at 80.4% compared with an average for the period 1972-2006 of 79.8%. Growth since 2005 has been steady for both total industry and manufacturing, but the Census Bureau for 2005 shows severe under-capacity usage in certain sectors of manufacturing. For example, in the fourth quarter of that year, the lowest utilization rates (of national emergency production capacity) were in leather and allied products and furniture and related products (both with 42%); miscellaneous manufacturing followed up at 43%. The weighting of these industries in the total for manufacturing, however, is quite low. Meanwhile, case studies of over-production of facilities could be revealing - it is known, for instance, that soon before its demise Enron built a power plant in India for several billion dollars, which was left in ruins.

16. This should be qualified, because even a small company can be monopolistic if, for instance, it is impossible or very difficult for other companies to supply the area where it operates because of a lack of effective infrastructure. Massive new highway schemes (like the Pan-American Highway planned to traverse Latin America) clearly serve the powerful corporations, whatever the spin-offs may be.

17. Famines, sometimes said to have disappeared during the 19th century, are still with us all over the world. The following passage shows how famine in Bangladesh in the mid-1970s was used not only by domestic hoarders to make money, but also in a politically criminal way by the United States: "Two distributional failures stand out. The first failure was internal: the specific configuration of the state rationing system and the market resulted in speculative hoarding by farmers and traders and a consequent rise in prices. The second failure was external: the US had withheld 2.2 million tonnes of food aid to 'ensure that it abandoned plans to try Pakistani war criminals'. And a year later, when Bangladesh was faced with severe monsoons and imminent floods, the then US Ambassador to Bangladesh made it abundantly clear that the US probably could not commit food aid because of Bangladesh's policy of exporting jute to Cuba. And by the time Bangladesh succumbed to the American pressure, and stopped jute exports to Cuba, the food aid in transit was 'too late for famine victims' (Devinder Sharma, 'Food as a Political Weapon: Providing Some Missing Links', 21 September, 2010).

18. Its twin is poverty, which Capital has also forced into existence continuously.

19. I recall here the ugly interiors of the American poor in some of Charlie Chaplin's silent films.

20. Was he a member of the family whose name adorned the Chase Manhattan Bank even after it became Rockefeller property?

21. Stuart Chase, The Economy of Abundance (1934), 168.

22. If I hypothesize that by making production increasingly local many of these services would not be needed though, problems do arise - would price divergences occur between different localities due to comparative advantages, leading to opportunities for arbitrage profits via trade? Nevertheless, I think this is part of the solution to freeing ourselves from Capital's sway.

23. The service sector currently represents 63.4% of the world economy, 72.8% of the European Union, 76.9% of the United States, and still only 42.6% of China (all in purchasing power parity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector_composition)

24. In their Thursday, September 9, 2010 Market Commentary on the continuing debt crisis that blew up in 2007/8 (The Significance of Consumer Deleveraging: Household Debt relative to GDP), U.S. investment fund Comstock Partners discuss the extent to which consumers had by that time cut back on "their severe debt burdens", a process they say "will take a number of years": "Household debt relative to GDP soared from a range of 43% to 49% in the 20-year period between 1965 and 1985 to a peak of 97.3% in 2009. As of March 31st (the latest data point) this dropped only slightly to 92.7%."

Further light is thrown on the problem in the paragraph that follows: "To be conservative, let's assume that the household debt/GDP ratio falls back ... to the 65% level of 1998... Under that assumption household debt would have to be pared back by about $4 trillion (from the present total of $13.5 trillion), an amount that constitutes about 40% of current consumer expenditures. While this could be accomplished over a number of years, it can readily be seen that the deleveraging would create a highly significant drag on consumer outlays for an extended period. Since such spending accounts for some 70% of GDP, this creates a serious drag on the overall economy as well." (my emphasis)

25. Amadeo Giannini pioneered consumer lending, while the then more powerful banks (like JP Morgan's) concentrated on their wealthy customers. Bank of America seems to have had a rather captive audience of Italian (Catholic) émigrés.

26. Just comparing the mean incomes from the U.S. Census Board's lowest and highest family income quintiles from 1966 to 2005, we see that the lowest grew from $11,969 to $14,767 during this 40-year period, whereas the mean income for the highest quintile grew from $86,867 to $176,292 during the same period. The ratio of the lowest mean income to the highest mean income therefore moved from 13.8% to 8.4% during those 40 years. The highest mean more than doubled during the period, while the lowest mean increased by only 24%. Plenty of other figures can be produced to show how this aspect of social polarization in America intensified during the post-War period.

27. "Union-busting was only one aspect of Reagan's anti-labor policy. He attempted to lower the minimum wage for younger workers, ease the child labor and anti-sweatshop laws, tax fringe benefits, and cut back job training programs for the unemployed. He tried to replace thousands of federal employees with temporary workers who would not have civil service or union protections." (Dan Meister, Labor and a Whole Lot More, Ronald Reagan's War on Labor)

28. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy Dumenil, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (2004).

29. The terms predatory lending and predatory mortgage servicing (and a host of other "predatory" terms) have sprung up in recent years to reflect the methods used by lenders to bamboozle people into accepting the terms and conditions of loans they would not be able to repay.

30. The development of Las Vegas by the mafia from the end of the 1940s was from the start financed in part by the banks. This is evident from Sally Denton and Roger Morris's study, The Money and the Power (2002). Denton and Morris point to the Reagan era of the 1980s as the time when the mob changed its image and became more sophisticated. At the same time, a new brand of Wall Street capitalism was developing: "When these post-modern speculators and predators met the post-modern Syndicate, it would be the most spectacular Las Vegas wedding of all." (352)

31. "Voters of the labouring class in the cities are very emotional: they value in a public man what we are accustomed to consider virtues only to be taken into account when estimating private character. Thus if a man is open-handed and warm-hearted, they consider it as being a fair offset to his being a little bit shaky when it comes to applying the eighth commandment to affairs of state. In the lower wards (of New York City), where there is a large vicious population, the condition of politics is often fairly appalling, and the [local] boss is generally a man of grossly immoral public and private character. In these wards many of the social organizations with which the leaders are obliged to keep on good terms are composed of criminals or of the relatives and associates of criminals... The president of a powerful semi-political association was by profession a burglar, the man who received the goods he stole was an alderman. Another alderman was elected while his hair was still short from a term in the State prison. A school trustee had been convicted of embezzlement and was the associate of criminals." James, later Lord Bryce, quoting Mr. Roosevelt from the November 1886 issue of Century magazine. See Bryce's The American Commonwealth (1888). It should be noted that Bryce became an important anti-German propagandist working for Lloyd George in World War I.

32. William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, first published in 1623.

33. A book published back in 1990 gives a breakdown of the incomes earned from a kilogram of cocaine powder, costing $100,000 on the street in the United States. The "crack" from which this is obtained brings in $35,000, while the process prior to this (chloro-hydrate of cocaine in the United States) produces a total value of $15,000. If the latter process is carried out in Bolivia, the value is only $3,000. The cocaine base for this kilogram of white powder is worth $1,500, the paste is worth $300 and the coca leaves that had to be collected and packed etc. by Bolivian campesinos brings in $1. (See: Rudolf H. Strahm, Ursula Spring, Por Esto Somos Tan Pobres).

34. In what researchers describe as the largest, most comprehensive analysis to date of cocaine contamination in banknotes, scientists are reporting that cocaine is present in up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, particularly in large cities such as Baltimore, Boston, and Detroit. The scientists found traces of cocaine in 95 percent of the banknotes analyzed from Washington, D.C., alone. Presented here today at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, the new study suggests that cocaine abuse is still widespread and may be on the rise in some areas. It could help raise public awareness about cocaine use and lead to greater emphasis on curbing its abuse, the researchers say. The scientists tested banknotes from more than 30 cities in five countries, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, China, and Japan, and found "alarming" evidence of cocaine use in many areas. The U.S. and Canada had the highest levels, with an average contamination rate of between 85 and 90 percent, while China and Japan had the lowest, between 12 and 20 percent contamination. ('Up To 90 Percent Of U.S. Paper Money Contains Traces Of Cocaine: New Study', The Huffington Post, August 16, 2009). A study with similar results for British currency was carried out in the 1990s by the Bank of England.

35. Just to give a few examples: Peter Dale Scott appears to have spent most of his life getting to the bottom of what he calls "Deep Politics" (for example, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993)), unearthing the connections between the CIA and the mob. Sociologist William Chambliss has done some very interesting studies of the way organized crime intertwines with what is supposed to be respectable business, etc. in America. Meanwhile, Catherine Austin Fitts' account of tobacco and biscuit conglomerate R.J. R. Nabisco's involvement in money-laundering - exposed by the European Union - makes interesting reading. Among other things, she has also written about Pentagon involvement in drug-trafficking.

36. James Jesus Angleton, a graduate of English who became the CIA's first head of counter-intelligence, was known to have been fond of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949). Indeed, it was Angleton who is said to have first proposed utilizing the mafia for certain CIA undercover operations.

37. Reminding me of those playground boys in the 1950s who used to shout "this is a free country - go and live in Russia if you don't like it".

38. This is the best translation I've seen of what I think Malraux meant.