“Historical surplus value designates the looting of all major continents as of the fifteenth century and the accumulation of their wealth in the then rising bourgeoisies of the West. The roots of violence and the roots of global war lie in the historical restructuring of the international order, that is, the formation of western hegemony, rooted in the historical surplus value from the fi fteenth century onwards. This strangely ignored condition by western academia considers capitalist surplus value as if it was a product of the last stage of the history of mankind and or a product of the of the last phase of the class struggle, during which the bourgeoisies were to exploit the working class. The historical surplus value is not limited to economics, raw material, energy, resources, land and space etc., it above all provided Europe with the means to secure world hegemony. Historical surplus value provided the grounds for the rise of the scientific and technological revolution. Its geopolitics furnished Europe with the means of control of the world via sea routes while the dissemination of ideas from the centre via communication technologies dictated the theories and conceptions for the third world to grow into. As such, the ethical-normative position by which the Western liberal left judges violence as a pathology of the system, or as an exogenous syndrome, conceals the fact that the historical context and its colonial policies were laid down by the violence of European imperialism, and that Asia, Africa and Latin America could only develop along the lines suggested by Western schools of thought. Imperialism as a central factor in the power structure of modern times was viewed in its immediacy and not as a contemporary expression of a historical process.”
—Anouar Abdel-Malek 1981, 71– 73, quoted in Kadri, The Unmaking of Arab Socialism, 2016, p. 16
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