Daily Times

For capital, time is money, and money is a divine gospel, albeit it has liquidated the divinity, leaving Marx to analyze andcensure its gospel. With its appearance on the world’s stage, capitalism has not only changed all previous relations but altered the concepts of time and space too. Capital by its definition is value in motion and without the concept of time and space motion becomes an irrelevant term.

In the agrarian societies of the pre-capitalist era, peopleworked mainly during the time of cultivationand in the intervening period theyhad spare time galore. However, the rapid movement of capital keeps the people permanently on their toes. Life under the process of objectified labor has become hectic, alienated, and meaningless. Under the domination of the exchange society, people consume what they do not need. The consumption industry, bringing new wastes in the market, proves the authenticity of itscontrolover the inverted consciousness of people while simultaneously realizing the capital.

The fast consumption of the commodities remains the jugularvein of the capitalist system. If the value created by the worker remains unconsumed, it ceases to be value and everything that cannot be sold in a given time sheds its valuehence motion in time becomes the crucial factor under this mode of production. Through time capital conquers space.Neo-colonialism seizes spaceby expropriating the underdeveloped countries through IMF, World Bank, and the NATO,while neoliberal economy helps controls time through privatization, outsourcing, and the application ofthe latest technology, which hastens the extraction of surplus-value, deprives people of their jobs and intensifiesexploitationwithin and outside the country.

The realization of capital can be inhibited at the level of production, realization, and distribution, which can lead to its overaccumulation -the dialectic of disaster inherent in the mode itself. The infamous 9/11 was one such moment when over-accumulated capital reached its cyclic bust. The recession of 2001 was refusing to go away, and unemployment was on the rise. “Corporate scandals cascaded over each other and seemingly solid corporate empires were literally dissolving overnight. Accounting failures (including outright corruption) and failures of regulation were bringing Wall Street into disrepute, stocks and other asset values were plunging. Pension funds lost between a quarter and a third of their value (if they did not totally disappear, as it happened with Enron employees), and the retirement prospects of the middle class took a serious hit. Health care was in a mess, federal, state, and local government surpluses were evaporating fast, and deficits began to loom larger and larger” (David Harvey).

“The current account balance with the rest of the world was going from bad to worse as the United States became the biggest debtor nation of all time. Social inequality had long been on the increase, but the tax-cut fetish of the administration seemed set fair to increase it further. Environmental protections were being gutted, and there was a deep reluctance to reimpose any regulatory framework on the markets even in the face of clear evidence of market failure. To top it all, the president had been elected by a five-to-four vote of the Supreme Court rather than by the people. His legitimacy was questioned by at least half the population on the eve of 9/11. The only thing to prevent the political annihilation of the Republicans was the intense solidarity-verging on a nationalist revival-created around the events of 9/11 and the anthrax scare” (Ibid).

The tragic event of 9/11 happened at a critical moment of US history when its economy was shrieking stamps a question mark on the mystery turned into history. The consensus of the ruling class that America was not the same after the tragedy was true, but America had ceased to be the same much before the apocalyptic awakening that came to haunt her. The empire was living beyond its means.The mighty military-industrialcomplex had over-accumulated the commodity capital that needed to be sold,manufacturing/production (the real source of creating values)was outsourced, and the financial or fictitious capital was looking to control the real value by forcefully grabbingthe foreign resources.

The dialectical analyst of the tragedy of 9/11 will look for the beneficiary of the event. In the absence of a worker’s party, America is ruled by the party of capital, which dominates through overt coercion

The old policy of maintaining the internal consumption intact no matter what happened in the external arena was flunking. The outsourcing and technological innovation had deprived the people of their jobs, hence eroded their buying power. Under stagnation, controlling the oil wealth of Iraq became crucial for the capital’s realization. Every calamity for the capitalist class providesan opportunity.Every destruction is followed by construction.The mass death solves the problem of surplus unproductive population. Iraq’s destruction and its subsequentreconstruction could help capital to realize itself through the invasion of multinational corporations in rebuilding Iraq; money for the arrangement could flow in from the satellite state of Saudia.The oil and regional control were additional sources of absolute domination. Not only the maintenance of American hegemony in the region was critical, but to thwart the Chinese threat was equally important.

It is interesting to note that the victory of Bush, 9/11, and the assault on terrorism all came one after the other. Despite clinching majority, Al Gore was deprived of the prized presidential office by George Bush – a continuation of a tainted figure of senior Bush who during his tenure invaded Iraq and later committed hideous crimes of infanticide by imposing coercive sanctions on the country. Al Gore did not resist, he simply resigned to his fate. Were all those happenings a mere chance? The unrealized capital leavesnothing to chance, and once the US federal court ruled in favour of Bush, the American people suffered the double whammy of not only losing their belief in the happening of chances but in their power of changing their destiny as pointed out by Chomsky.

‘Militarism in the US’, for Howard Zinn, is ‘tied up with the economic system that was built into American history’. ‘9/11 fulfills the function of the ‘burning of the Reichstag’, allowing the junta to grant its police force powers like those of the Gestapo’. ‘The American ideology, Samir Amin says, is based on unmitigated economic liberalism, masked by a para-religious discourse, packaged with insipid rhetoric about democracy. American culture is shaped by…extremist protestant sects, the genocide of the continent’s indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the emergence of communities segregated by ethnicity as a result of successive waves of migration…The genocide of Native Americans was implicit in the logic of the new chosen people’s divine mission, proclaimed openly and proudly until the 1960s. The same holds true for slavery’. Hence when Bush raised the biblical slogans and spewed hatred against the Muslims, he merely repeated the racist, reactionary, inhuman American past.

The dialectical analystof the tragedy of 9/11 will look for the beneficiary of the event. In the absence of a worker’s party, America is ruled by the party of capital, which dominates through overt coercion. From the history of McCarthyism to the assassination of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and JF Kennedy,and the repressive unification and integration of people,everything points to the potent fascistic tendencies prevailing in the US. To avenge its 9/11 a country that can break havoc on the world will scarcely hesitate to push its people intotheArmageddon to preserve its inhuman system.

The writer is an Australian-Pakistani based in Sydney. He has authored several books on Marxism (Gramscian and Frankfurt Schools) and History