This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

A view from Au$tralia on the cause of all the wars

by comrade Oz and Web Minister

Imperialist wars are wars for protecting its profit system, but are increasingly driven by speculation.

Amerikkka's allies' economies compel them to join Amerikan imperialism's wars for profits and a descent into barbarism.

Competition for profits by imperialism has changed the nature of these countries' economies.

These wars are not caused because they are "bad guys" by some inborn nature but because the imperialist profit system demands it.

It is now how they live and are able to live "well off" lives.

Now, they may come up with all sorts of reasons to justify their wars and even torture, from a war to protect "values" and "fighting for freedom" and the like, but the basic reason is they are no longer able to make a good living from the home country's people.

It is no accident that Amerika's state terrorist allies when invading Iraq are bourgeois "service based" economies deriving the bulk of their incomes from exploiting the Third World's productive value created by their own work.

MIM has already documented the degeneration of the Amerikan working class into mainly a petty bourgeois rump, with a material economic interest in supporting u.$. imperialist empires' attacks on the Third World--to "keep them in their place."

A similar economy exists in allies Au$tralia and "Great" Britain. In Australia's case a great deal of its profitable economy and its tax revenues are derived from the high prices gained from its sale of natural resources to China.

A "boom" in the economy exists. Profits, have never been better.

These high prices are driven in the world market by Chinese demand for these resources for the production of commodities for export to the rich Western countries.

The exploitation of the cheap labour of the Chinese people is very profitable, so the Chinese compradors can afford to pay the best prices for these resources out of the massive amounts of surplus-value extracted from the Chinese workers. Of course, China cannot afford it as a people, but in the thinking of China's rulers, they will still make a profit within whatever crazy profit structure the dominant imperialists offer.

Usually we do not think of the sale of resources as beneficial to a country's economy, but in the strange case of Australia to China exports, the general arrangement or international class structure provides Australia benefit. The fake Marxists in Australia claim that the multi-billion dollar profits are the result of the mean exploitation of the labour of a very small number of highly paid mining workers. They claim "according to the Marxist theory of value" that profits are realised at the point of sale, that's it! Simple. End of story. This indeed is not out of habit for Marxism to think so, but the revisionists should have checked themselves: if Australian mining workers are such super-workers, then why do the imperialists not employ all Australians that way becomes the question. That's why we say it's important not to look at questions in isolation, especially where small numbers of workers are concerned. There's liable to be a distortion in the overall class picture. (MIM would actually say that if the fake Marxists believed only a small minority are such as miners, then they are still admitting that the majority is exploiter in Australia. They should also realize that there are those who caricaturize the whole labor theory of value by reference to such sophisticated but fake Marxism that says there is a super-worker elite producing all the gravy.)

Politically, the fake Marxists close their mind to the lack of free trade and mobility for labor in China--including the set up where a small bourgeoisie delivers super-profits to the imperialist countries. So the real question is: where would Australia's trade be if not for super-exploitation of Chinese workers.

The first question is if there would be any profit-causing demand for Australia's resources, if China had to pay Australian wages to its workers once Australia's resources arrived in China. Perhaps China can pay prices so far above average that they allow non-exploitation in Australia, because of China's own ability to super-exploit at home. Moreover, the whole question begs why if Australian workers are so profitable other Australian capitalist-led Australian workers do not take in the resources and do what Chinese workers do with them. Perhaps the fake Marxists should consider that there is something wrong with their overall picture of the class structure.

The second question is what demand even among imperialist countries would there be without Chinese surplus-value greasing the whole system. This has to do with the "dirty secret of capitalism," how surplus-value appears to be invisible for most bourgeois purposes. For example, would Australians care about the Amerikan stock market or loans or even its retail market if Amerikans were in an economic tailspin. Take out Chinese surplus-value and U.$. inflation immediately increases and there is a huge panic sell-off of the U.$. dollar internationally. Then Australia would care less about the greenback or exporting to Amerika and possibly vice-versa. (Probably, there would be after-effects for more than just the u.$. currency.) In other words, trade between Australia and the united $tates and among other imperialists would suddenly fall if, if the source of the greenback's strength suddenly disappeared--hidden Third World surplus-value arriving in the imperialist countries.

So the point is we need to get real about the fact that there is such a thing as a bourgeois business partnership. Trade in manufactured goods among imperialist countries does not occur outside of how China has depressed the price of labor-power globally. Too often people try to look undialectically at individual trades in economic isolation without looking at the class structure overall. That is OK for people who live on desert islands, not for the global economy today.

The fake Marxists close their minds to the fact that these mostly raw materials are about to enter the production stage in the creation of commodities in China. It is actually at the sale of those Chinese commodities that the real profits will be made, covering the cost of the raw materials as well as the low priced labour used for their creation.

The fake Marxists should also consider where they leave their comrades internationally--in an inexplicable forever-comprador position. The Au$$ie revisionists are going to say that miners with incomes in the top 10% in the world are "proletarian," while Chinese, Indian, Indonesian etc. comrades are going to speak of an "urban petty-bourgeoisie" referring to people with on average a fraction of the living standard of Australian miners. Internationalism goes out the window when we do not look at the whole globalised class structure. If we are ever going to get out of the class structure we have now, we have to break the comprador cycle which means that Third World leaders have to be able to stand up for their people as equals to First World people. Right now we have an occasional labor aristocracy/comprador alliance which maintains the anti-internationalist status quo, sometimes with new politically correct rhetoric.

Australian manufacturing output has been dropping for years. What little is left is often the assembly of component parts manufactured in the Third World.

The small car industry the multinationals continue to operate in Australia is dependent on receiving government protection and subsidies to the tune of about a $7000 dollars per worker per year.

That is a bribe to keep jobs for a contented labour aristocracy. A similar situation exists in Britain's economy but here the bribes are more directed towards propping up the total service economy.

Once England was the "workshop of the world" a "competitive" exporter of manufactured commodities to its captured colonial markets. The bulk of its profits came from these monopolised markets. All that has changed as British imperialism has found new ways to exploit the Third World. Structural changes to the British economy are escalating as it turns more away from productive work to pure speculation as its means to create wealth, especially in banking, financial, insurance and other business services, carried out on its own behalf and for a cut from its international bourgeois clientele, especially the dictators of the Marcos types of the Third World. Britain services a lot of bolthole money. It also has a bit of a tourist industry catering especially to members of the international global labour aristocracy easily gob smacked by a bit of royalty and traditional imperialist militarism.

In an article by Tom Wolf as part of a series on Britain carried out by the English Financial Times, Martin Wolf points out some of these changes, including: Between 2000 and 2005 the number in employment rose by 1.2m. No less than 47 per cent of this additional employment was in the public sector.

While the government's increased regulation of the labour market--via the minimum wage and a host of other interventions--has not halted the growth of private-sector jobs, overall performance would have been appreciably worse without the 562,000 jump in public-sector employment.

The fifth feature is divergence: among sectors, regions and incomes. Manufacturing continues its relative decline: between the second quarter of 1997 and the same period of 2006, the volume of manufactured output rose by just 2.4 per cent, while the output of services expanded by more than 38 per cent; manufacturing's share in gross value added, at current prices, fell from 21 per cent in 1997 to under 14 per cent last year; employment in manufacturing fell by a quarter between the second quarter of 1997 and the end of last year, while employment in services rose by 15 per cent. The UK has also enjoyed a favourable specialisation in trade, with the prices of its exports rising strongly relative to those of its imports: since March 2001, the terms of trade (the relative prices of exports to imports) have improved by 7 per cent (largely explained by gains in services.)

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "command GDP," which allows for the additional real income generated by improving terms of trade, grew about 0.3 points a year faster than actual GDP between 1995 and 2004.

Openness to capital flows and the role of London as a world financial centre is a signal feature of the country's globalised economy.

UK external assets and liabilities were a respective £4,837bn ($9,086bn, €7,181bn) and £5,006bn at the end of 2005, or around four times GDP. Yet, despite its small net liability position, the UK apparently ran a surplus on investment income of £30bn (2.5 per cent of GDP). This offset two-thirds of the deficit on trade in goods and services. The country runs a persistent current account deficit, though one far smaller than that of the US in relation to GDP. In 2005, the deficit was 2.6 per cent of GDP. Of course defendants of capitalism like to talk of its robust nature, the jobs and wealth that are created by free competition and so on, but as Wolf goes on to point out:

"The final feature of Labour's UK is its active government! According to the OECD numbers (which are surprisingly different from those of the Treasury), spending by general government will rise from a low of 37.5 per cent of GDP in 2000, itself well below the 43.1 per cent of 1996, to 45.6 per cent this year. This, then, has been a pattern of famine and feast. At the 2006 level, spending will be little below the eurozone's average of 47.3 per cent and very close to Germany's 46.1 per cent. The 8 point jump in government spending as a share of GDP since 2000 is far and away the biggest in the OECD."
Wolf, in summing up these changes on how the British earn an income declares:
"The U.K. earns money from borrowing in safe assets and investing in riskier ones. It is a giant hedge fund."
[Web Minister adds: two separate writers for the MIM website came to this same conclusion in the same week based on data on foreign income flows to England! We welcome the spread of proletarian science into Au$tralia! See also our article on how imperialist economies never balance.]

Of course a bit of war also helps create jobs from the government. Clearly there is not much real wealth creation in Britain. But a lot of surplus value extracted from the Third World.

Those Marxists in Britain searching for a proletariat, especially an industrial proletariat have a difficult job to do. The only place left to look is at a possibly exploited migrant population. Of course it is well known that hedge funds love to make a buck out of wars. A sniff of war and the prices of oil and gas go sky high. So what else can a "giant hedge fund" do except support more wars. That is the material basis of the support for U.$. imperialism by a decadent parasite British imperialist ally. The Aus$$ies simply tag along with the dominant imperialism to hold a bit of market share for their exports.