Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

To say . . . that wars are caused by the ammunition industry, would be a cheap assertion. The ammunition industry is by no means a branch of production existing for itself, it is not an artificially created evil which in turn calls forth the ‘battle of nations’. It ought to be obvious . . . that armaments are an indispensable attribute of state power, an attribute that has a very definite function in the struggle among state capitalist trusts. . . . [J]ust as it is true that not low prices cause competition but, on the contrary, competition causes low prices, it is equally true that not the existence of arms is the prime cause and the moving force in wars . . . but, on the contrary, the inevitableness of economic conflicts conditions the existence of arms. —Nicolai Bukharin,  Imperialism and World Economy

"In this pandemic, the mask reveals far more than it hides. It exposes the world’s political and  economic relations for what they are: vectors of self-interest that ordinarily lie obscured under glib talk of globalisation and openness. For the demagogues who govern so much of the world, the pandemic has provided an unimpeachable excuse to fulfil their dearest wishes: to nail national borders shut, to tar every outsider as suspicious, and to act as if their own countries must be preserved above all others. When these tendencies combine with a fawning loyalty to the free market, the results can be ruinous. In mere weeks, the mask went from being an urgent human need to a cynically exploited asset in a global resource grab – the fastest such journey, perhaps, of any product in history. Sometimes, it felt as if the mask itself was beside the point – that it was just a trigger to rehearse old routines of acquisitiveness and discord, with no further, greater end in sight." Ho...

"Marx's Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value"