PI Briefing | No. 28 | 38 million lives. A study by the Center of Economic and Policy Research has revealed that, between 1971 and 2021, US and EU sanctions killed 38 million people around the world.
by Progrssive International
8/2/2025 https://progressive.international/wire/ ... -lives/en/
In the Progressive International's twenty-eighth Briefing of 2025, we look at the brutal effect of imperialist sanctions on the peoples of the world.
The people of Gaza are being starved. The scale of this man-made catastrophe — a cruel, seemingly terminal phase in Israel’s genocide — is impossible to overstate. “The level of urban starvation in Gaza has not been seen since the Dutch Hunger Winter and the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War,” Alex de Waal, an expert on famine, wrote in the London Review of Books.
Those words were written in February. Today, at least one in three people in Gaza goes days on end without eating anything at all. At the same time, thousands of humanitarian aid trucks sit idle at the border, blocked by Israeli occupation forces. On its own, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has 6,000 trucks on standby, waiting to be allowed entry. "This is unlike anything we have seen in this century," the United Nation World Food Program’s Director of Emergencies Ross Smith said. Everyone in Gaza is now at risk of slow and painful death by hunger.
But Gaza is just a microcosm, a radical condensation of a much broader crisis of structural violence that imperialism inflicts daily on the world’s working and oppressed people. Most victims do not die because of bombs, bullets, or artillery shells. They die from the thousands of deprivations that are threaded — actively or passively, with intent or as a byproduct of systems of accumulation — through the global economy.
Sanctions are one of the main tools in this arsenal of ruin, and their effect is lethal. According to a landmark new study of mortality rates and sanctions in 152 countries conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and published in The Lancet Global Health, United States and European Union sanctions have contributed to 38 million deaths between 1971 and 2021. In the past decade alone, these sanctions have killed approximately 560,000 people every year. That amounts to roughly 1,500 people per day, a death toll comparable to that imposed by Nazi Germany on Leningrad during its 872-day siege.
Economic sanctions are often framed as a humanitarian alternative to war — a way to pressure "rogue states" or "terrorist regimes" to change their behavior without resorting to armed conflict. But the latest research confirms what the victims of sanctions regimes have long known: sanctions are more lethal than any bomb. By some estimates, over the period subject to the CEPR study, US and EU sanctions have claimed at least as many lives as all the armed conflicts and genocides that swept the planet combined — forms of violence that were often also imposed by the very same sanctioners.
Today, roughly 25% of the world’s countries are under US, EU, or UN sanctions, with a large part of these imposed unilaterally by the US without the approval of the UN Security Council.
This is no accident. Sanctions form just one part of a broader imperial arsenal, one that includes clandestine operations, aerial bombings, propaganda campaigns, political isolation, diplomatic pressure, wars of aggression, and economic strangulation. Together, these tools seek to force states to submit to an international economic order dominated by Western powers. Like a medieval siege, which denies food and supplies to a territory, sanctions gradually erode states’ capacities to develop, while weakening the resolve of their people to defend their sovereignty.
In this way, sanctions function as collective punishment, violating fundamental principles of international humanitarian law while remaining cloaked in the language of diplomacy and security.
But in the corridors of the State Department, the aims of sanctions are explicit. In the case of Cuba, for example, a memo issued in April 1960 called for the US to take all actions to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Their effects are acknowledged, too. In the 1990s, the UN reported that US sanctions against Iraq killed half a million children. When former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the deaths, she said that “the price, we think, is worth it.”
In aggregate, the scale of the violence imposed by imperialism on humanity is so great that it amounts to a “structural genocide” — a continuous wasting of human lives and nature. This was the subject of last week’s lecture of The People’s Academy, in which Professor Ali Kadri taught a class on his landmark book, The Accumulation of Waste. Capitalism, Kadri argues, has reached a point where it has become an instrument of death, which devalues people and nature to the point of their systematic destruction in order to guarantee continued profits. (You can watch the lecture here and sign up for future classes of The People’s Academy here.)
Through strategies of permanent and deepening deprivation, imperialism deforms and truncates human lives, beating people into submission and exhausting their very belief in resistance. This is what sanctions do globally, and what hunger and attacks intended not to kill, but to maim, do to the Palestinian people. A body depleted by hunger can't raise its fist, and a limbless child will never pick up a gun. But it might find itself surrendering its land to destruction or working for a pittance before collapsing, unceremoniously, from exhaustion — this is imperialism’s agenda for all the world’s working people.
Juxtaposed with the abundance just beyond its walls, the forced starvation of Gaza offers us a mirror image of the wider world under imperialism — one where great misery exists among obscene abundance, quarantined behind fences, across seas, and beneath turrets prepared to mow down those seeking sanctuary from deprivation. This profound contradiction was captured by a young Palestinian poet named Taqwa Al Wawi, writing from Gaza amid its growing and all-consuming hunger:
In a world of full plates
And overflowing shelves,
A crumb of bread is rare.
What will we eat When there is no food?
The Accumulation of Waste with Ali Kadri (The People's Academy: Ch.2, Unit 2)
Progressive International
Streamed live on Jul 26, 2025
War is often understood through the destructive effects it has on countries affected by it. In Palestine, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, imperialist war has devastated economies, claimed millions of lives, and destroyed the natural environment.
But war has a more fundamental role in the global economy. It is central to the process of economic accumulation. It lays the groundwork for economic expansion. It enables the capture of cheap materials, resources, and labor — devaluing humans and, in the process, devaluing nature itself.
In Unit 4, we look at Ali Kadri’s seminal work, *The Accumulation of Waste*, which gives us the tools to understand how capitalism and imperialism waste human lives.
Transcript
We should be ready to go in just a second. Okay. Yes, there we are. We're live.
All right. Uh, welcome back everyone to the People's Academy for the second unit of chapter 2 of our curriculum. In the last unit, we covered the fundamentals of the question of imperialism, how it has been theorized, uh how it evolved and why it remains central uh to understanding our struggles to formulating strategies uh in the present day. Today we're going to delve deeper into the question of capitalism and imperialism as a destructive force whose system serves to advance capital accumulation but also produces death on a genocidal scale.
Uh to help us understand these dynamics we are joined by professor Ali Kadri. Ali Kadri is a professor at Sunyatsen University in Guanjo China. He has written extensively on the political economy of war and development in West Asia. Uh, professor Kadri is the author of several critical books uh, including a theory of forced labor migration, the proletarianization of west of the west bank under occupation, Arab development denied, and of course the accumulation of waste, which I personally consider among the most important contributions to contemporary Marxist thought.
Uh, Professor Kadri's lecture today will focus on the themes covered in that latter book whose full title is the accumulation of waste, a political economy of genocide and imperialism. Professor Cadri, it's a great honor to have you with us and uh the floor is yours. Yes, I mean I you know I always start by saying let's look at the obvious. Let's look at the uh you know what we all experience, what we all see out there.
And what we all see is, you know, we throughout 500 years of capitalism, we've uh we've accumulated many things. We're supposed to accumulate many commodities and this heap of commodities, you know, the cars, the computers, the televisions, and the pens and so forth. The commodities, these things that we produce to sell these uh uh this considered this heap of commodities is the wealth that we've produced. But alongside this this wealth, we produced a lot of social and natural waste.
We've wasted uh the lives of many people. We've uh prematurely uh we prematurely uh extinguish the lives of many people in the process of production and we prematurely uh also extinguish uh nature and you know much is talked what is talked about is is that we you know nature the environment is is is it's the situation is cataclysmic. It's it's it's uh it's devastating and you know so all the reports say that uh in 50 years time it will be difficult to support life as as we know it uh you know the physical basis for the support of life will be eroded and there is a a risk also that this this uh devolvement into a a lesser quality nature might not occur. uh uh in on an arithmetic scale you know sort of one two three it could uh follow a you know it could go enter into a disquilibrium stage at a certain point in the quantitative progression h you know things could go out of hand nature could go out of hand this is what one means and so so all of this you know when we look at the commodities we produce produce the pens and the TVs and cars and so on.
We know that social labor and productive labor has gone into into the making of of things. There's it takes labor to make things and that's everybody agrees with that. I mean even the neocclassical economists agree with that but they argue that that's too obvious. Uh what drives the economy is what consumers like.
uh I will not go into this because there's that's going through uh the subjective theory of value but that's what they say they nobody nobody says that this relationship of producing things uh requires people to produce things people produce the machines and people produce uh uh the things that you know that that that we consume but and so if we if we've produced so much premature for a death of nature and society. You know, people die way before their time. Uh their historically determined time because time is qualitative. I mean, we've now developed so many things that we can no longer compare this period of time with with the period before.
We must compare. I mean, we can't say, you know, in the year 100 AD, we were living only to 30 years or 20 years of age. Uh the reasons for the for that were were were uh that we we had been subject to natural disasters, diseases and so forth and uh and famines, crisis of underproduction because we had so little technology to produce things with. Famines and disease were the reasons why people lived to s such short lives.
Whereas now for instance we know that time is is qualitative that means it's rooted in the social conditions and the social and material conditions of the day in which we are living now. And at this time you know we supposed to live a much longer life. Uh but we obviously uh die way shorter than the historically determined potential that other societies better more you know not better societies but more tech advanced societies in the imperialist world uh experience like Japan and France and so forth. Whereas in you know Yemen and other places like that around the world the life expectancy is somewhat around 50 or 55 years old.
And in Afghanistan, I think at one time it was less than than 50. It was around 45 years. So we're looking at a lot of premature. And of course, man is also nature.
We're not only killing the trees and the oceans and things like that. We're killing people as well and together just destroying things. The process and this process of of destroying things is not haphazard. It's not like it it came from nowhere.
It came as a you know it is it is an essential product of production. It's just like we produced the the span uh we've also produced the uh the the uh waste the wasted lives and the wasted nature that that are also side products of the pen. In fact, uh you know, these are uh and and so we we've produced things and and you know, the wasted lives and the wasted uh nature and and so forth. And these are products of of socially necessary labor times.
We we we had labor involved in their production and therefore their commodities and commodities sell their priced when they when we say a commodity sell when you know capital commodifies everything you know capital totalizes everything and commodifies everything. We when we say capital commodifies everything that means that every everything has a price to it. Some prices we see some prices we don't see. Some prices are negative.
Some some prices are uh inbuilt into other prices. For instance, if I had uh paid uh $10 for this pen, but the merchant paid only five for it and he profited uh $5. 10 minus 5 equal five. Uh then one asks the question, how how did we uh how did he only pay $5 uh for the cost of production?
Well, uh to uh uh to make a profit because the real cause of the profit is the fact that he paid $5 and $5 is something he negotiated with the direct producers. those people who own the nature upon which the raw material for this thing exists and the labor for that went into the making of this. And so the fact that the he paid so little, let's assume that it's so little, $5, uh, it means that, you know, the the the land and the people upon which the labor and the raw material for this pen were found were beaten into submission, were, you know, were aggressed and uh and and and uh and their uh They had no more negotiating power to ask for $5. And in fact, if he wants to increase the profit rate uh by cutting costs and this is the cut the cost side of the profit and that's more important side because it's the production side.
Uh then he has to beat uh uh the populations and and where these the labor and the raw materials are found to basically strip them of their negotiating power so that they have no subjectivity, nothing to negotiate. They have no sovereignity over their land, no uh they do not master themselves. They are no longer masters of themselves. But you know I am their masters and I'm their master and I draw what I want from that's the sort of uh uh thing that occurs.
So the c the real that's that's exploitation. I mean I'm going to take a lot more from them than I'm going to pay to them and that's exploitation and it requires oppression. Naturally oppression requires uh doses of actual and ideological violence as you know you need to ideologically uh also address them uh to you know to to absorb to introject uh the ideology of defeatism because they have to think that they can cannot win against me that's why I'm going to get everything for so the fact of the matter is we are uh uh we live in a world which is you know the the facts are such as what is what phenomena what we experience what the obvious what we see is there is much more wasted lives and nature then there are things which are actually of use to society uh being produced why so because if we say that the planet is at least on on one side of the coin, the environmental side. If we say that the planet is going to basically go haywire in 50 years time, that means there is so much environmental death and destruction at the moment that that far exceed anything good that we've uh produced.
And that environmental death and destruction is also a commodity that has been produced. It's a product of labor. The death itself is a product of labor. And in one way we say it commodifies capital, commodifies everything. These are all commodities and they have a price.
Prices are not always visible, but the price system is an interrelated structure where the price of everything depends on the price of everything, and prices are either coherent or incoherent in time. I can say the price of oil it has a spot price and the future price. So it has a price at every point in time, and everything has a price at every point in time, and sometimes the environmental, and the social, and human waste, the wasted humans rather, that we've produced is a negative price. It's a price that society pays.
You know, the easiest example is if I have trash at home and I want to take out the trash, I'm going to pay $10 for somebody to take the trash out. And so that's negative $10 on my account. So basically my income, the incomes of society, get reduced by the amount of waste that capital produces, and the profits of capital is driven by the amount of waste for which capital does not pay.
They polluted the environment. They extinguished the lives of people way before their time, but capital did not pay for these things. Society ends up paying for these things. But these were costs of productions that capital was supposed to pay for, but it did not pay for.
Therefore, the profits of capital depend pretty much on how much it wastes, how much it makes society pay for, the costs of production. The cost of productions is not only the fact that I have a laborer who's going to get $10 in wages, and he's going to buy bread and butter for his family over the week, that's not the only side of the story that political economy and in the traditional sense and even neoclassical economics talks about. The wage is offset by the consumption bundle. What we have here is a process where society ends up paying uh way more in terms of taxes, in terms of shorter lives, because of the pollution that has been produced, shorter lives because of the wars that have been visited upon the masses of the developing world.
In order to cut the costs of production and to strip people out of their sovereignity, or all of these negative prices and quite a liquid price system. I mean you know the price system is quite complicated but in short society instead of capital ends up paying for production costs. Society ends up paying for production costs. And the more society pays for the costs of production, the more profits there are for capital, and the more waste capital produces.
Let's say if capital, the bosses and the businesses which are social relations instantiated in persons like the capitalists that we all know are personified in those guys. Now all of you know this is a process.It's an autodestructive process. Of course it's a negative dialectic. It's something that goes from bad to worse all the time, because in order to make more profits exponentially, you will need to destroy more and more, and make society pay for the destruction. Now the point is that when capital creates many pollutants for instance, without just saying war, war is like a major pollutant because war cuts life abruptly short for the population, because if you have a big war, like the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, the war on the region here, in Korea, nearly a quarter of the population, millions were lost. In Vietnam, I think 10-15% of the population was lost. In Algeria, 10 to 20% of the population. I don't recall the numbers, but it's huge numbers. And in the war on terror, some numbers of [casulaties in the] Iraq war and so on there, that's also in the millions as well. So that sort of reduces the population, and it reduces absolutely, and reduces it relatively, because it reduces the life expectancy as well.
Now pollutants are sort of slow motion war because it reduces and then it makes society pay you know [for all the] madness in hospitals and so forth. There's a tax bill which capital has to pay, because it's capital that polluted in order to pay less for the pen, or for the desk, or something like that. But then society ends up paying uh for it.
So you can see there's a relationship between profits and what society pays in costs. And what I want to say here is that there is a relationship between the death of nature [and man], because when we make nature sick, it makes man sick. And if it makes man sick, it reduces the life expectancy of man, while actually making capital gain from the sickness it has created, because there's going to be pharmaceutical, and all these things that society is going to pay for because it's dying, and it pays for the costs of its death from what capital has created.
So there's a war on the masses taking place all the time whether it's an open war like the major wars of the second half of the 20th century and this century, or there is a protracted slow motion war that is taking place to reduce the social costs of the reproduction of people. You need to pay a lot less to sustain people in a certain living standard, and if you make new sicknesses, you create new areas which has to be commodified, and into which money is going to be pumped as well. So you monetize new areas of production as well in the exchange. And the story of course is this is what actually happens.
We end up paying for new diseases, and we end up paying for wars, and the disease and the war are constant. And somebody the other day said that at this moment, there's something like 70 wars occurring around the world. And if we think about the premature death rate due to austerity and pollution and so on, and that's another, so there's a slow motion genocide occurring all the time. There is also of course the direct genocide such as that which occurs in Gaza, which says that we can basically eliminate people at will without concern for the heritage, the gains that the working class made over the last two centuries, ever since the appearance of Marxism on the world stage, and the rise of unions, and the rise of progressive forces.
So there's a legacy, there's a history of human rights, of gains for labor and so forth that we are now at a position in history where we're going to write this all off, and we're going to forget about it, and we're going to do what is necessary for profit, which is kill outright like we are doing in Gaza. And by the demonstration effect, if any peoples around the world are going to oppose us, that's what is expected of capital when it is in its element. That means it makes the most profits when it genocides more and more, either structurally or directly, because in the end the rate of surplus value is the rate of exploitation. And the rate of exploitation is the rate at which we economize with the life of labor. And that's from volume three. How do you economize somebody's life? You make them live a more miserable and shorter life. You basically kill them. So the rate of killing is the rate of profit. But no one says it in these obvious terms.
Now we can say this because remember when production relations changed from pre- capitalist to capitalist around 500 years ago, we've seen the emergence of wage labor, that there are people who are going to work in workshops, and little manufacturers, and instead of them owning their machines, they work for a wage. And we've witnessed the emergence of this phenomena that bloomed in the industrial age, and so we said look, there's a wage system. There are wage laborers. We see them. Therefore, we can basically ascertain that there is capitalism which has a specific visible phenomena associated with it, and one one is wage labor.
Now the same capitalism was said to be progressive. We should not basically reminisce or have nostalgic feelings about going back to previous times. We should not be romantic about romanticized feudalism, or anything prior to feudalism. These were horrific ages. They're class societies, and capitalism has ushered in a liberal thought and free wage labor and so forth. And so it is a progressive stage in history.
That's what has been said. And until now, the balance of power between capital and labor has been because of the new structure of imperialism. Imperialism has a lot to do with the fact that things worked out this way. What we have is a situation where we can no longer say that this is a civilization of progress.
Why? Because the first principle of civilization is what we accumulate in wealth, and things, and spiritual production, and actual production. And what we've produced is more pollution and death of society and nature. And the structure of thought associated with the production of death of nature and man, is a sort of body of art, and language, and politics, and so on. A superstructure that's basically attuned to the reproduction of the death.
So these civilizations are not western civilization, or eastern civilization, because the real lines are the class lines, not the national lines, which are fictitious, or the identity lines. The class lines are the ones we know for sure exist, because they're ontological. Because a class is about what people do to reproduce, what people do to survive from one day to the next. How do they relate to each other, and how do they relate to others? So it's a social relations of reproduction.
It's a social relation to itself, and it's a social relation to other social relations. So a class is determined by relationship to itself in the process of production, and the relationship to other classes as well. So a class is how I eat in the end. That's why it exists all the time across history and somebody eats and somebody controls what the other eats and so on roughly speaking.
So at this ontological level of class, we have a civilization of capital, we have the capital class, which is the consuming class, and it's consuming because it has this wealth and so on, and this wealth is based literally on the expenditure of life, the life of man and nature, the premature expenditure of the life of man and nature if I'm going to make profits beforehand. And so the point is that this idea of capitalism being progressive, we should not reminisce or have nostalgic feelings about the past. It's rather wrong, because if the balance of forces between capital and labor remain the same, it's the idea of prediction cap. They say Marx hated predictions in many respects when he spoke of the rise of socialism. He spoke as a man of revolutionary practice, and he spoke of things for ideological reasons, but Marx the theoretician knew otherwise as well. And so what we have is a situation where it is civilization of capital if the balance of forces remains the same. That means capital is in control of the reproduction of social life. It reproduces social life necessarily. That's not a prediction, that's a law of development, the law of profits, the law of value. All the laws of capital are going to say if you let me make profits at any expense, and I need to make it at any expense, I need to spill blood and destroy nature, and nature and blood are pretty much the same because that's social nature. Man is also nature. We are like you. We're not too different from the trees, but with consciousness. And so we are subjects in nature. But that doesn't makes us unnatural. We are still nature. And that process of reverse development globally is very scary.
We don't need to predict. I mean there's no prediction. I know the law of development. The law of development says that if I let the capitalists do what they want, then they'll destroy everything.
The logic of capital is to basically make and simply because also not simply but there's there's a precedence of production over consumption because we know uh producers don't know how much money there there is out there to buy and how much they should produce exactly there is no central planning I mean they don't have actual vision of what's happening and they get the messages of production postf facto that means things go to the market and then they get the message and they overproduce. That's why we have a crisis of over over production a permanent crisis of over production under capitalism for the specific markets for which things are being produced. When we have capital in control which is a subject in the capital relationship we are going to have uh death uh galore. I mean we you know at large uh we you know there's going to be more death more premature death of man and more premature death that's the logic of there's not much to predict what's being predicted is tell me how strong uh capital is how weak is labor how the working the international working class is divided it does not have a revolutionary consciousness it does not understand that in its solidarity against capital it will gain more years of life and better years of life.
class is a question of existence. A question I think what what to eat, what to eat, what to sleep, what to enjoy in so far as the living standard is concerned, that's a class. And so if the workers are not organized and they have absorbed defeatism, interjected defeatism, the crisis, the ideology, the ideology of capital, then eventually and necessarily because the law involves necessity rather but not exclus exclusively but it will necessarily but not exclusively uh devolve into conditions of poverty, premature death, emiseration and so forth and now it involves the death of the planet the foreseen death of the planet. So in in that sense is capitalism progressive?
Uh how do we can we say with that danger that potential of of of you know the erasure of the basis for the reproduction of physical life uh at risk? Should should we not rem you know be a bit more nostalgic about the feudal age? probably I mean even even the middle ages uh because if we're looking at a at a period in history in relation to the potential it could achieve in relation to how well everyone around the world could be living and could be because of the development and the productive forces and how cheap medicine and food and how abundant things have become. uh shouldn't we be saying that relative because times as again as I said are qualitative we cannot project things onto the past without a huge dose of arbitrariness uh but relative to the times this these are this this civilization is is is disastrous I mean we've never seen I mean you know let's say look at 1000 AD as I said earlier while you know the lifespan was something like 25 years old, no matter what what they could they could have done, they would have probably improved the lifespan by a day or two maybe sure but very little but now we we've noticed that China for instance improved its life expectancy from around 30 33 years in uh in 1949 to uh uh nearly 80 a higher level than the United States.
So, we've seen we've seen uh that this is possible that a society that manages its resources uh at the behest of the working class arrives at at at better conditions. So, in that sense, relative to the times, this civilization is is is disastrous. And if if labor continues to be in the shambles as it is now relative to the strength of capital and uh and so on then capital will drive the the planet uh to to complete uh dissolution. That's the point of of of of things.
I mean so so we've basically the production of waste is basically you know necessary the wasting of life and nature is necessary for profits and so profits have to grow all the time. We need to waste uh people and nature more aggressively uh along all along. And uh and as to the question of consciousness which is you know sort of a million dollar question. Uh what what we have the difference the difference now is is much of the global working class is a sort of is employed by rents to stabilize the political order and it's also employed by rents that feed on war as a domain of accumulation as on militarism as a domain of accumul accumulation.
So all the time we've talked about you know we need violence and you know ideological aggression to basically uh destroy people and destroy nature and to make them accept the conditions uh at which they sell their lives and resources. if they're going to exchange their lives for money in order to survive. Um, now the point is is that you know war itself is is is also a production sphere. War involves waged soldiers labor labor which are going to use machines and they're going to take down lives and uh and they're going to take down lives and uh and so um uh so the product is death death of man premature death of man and so on.
And then there's also money being made because there's uh uh the war is funded by uh uh treasury bills that earn rents and so on. So there is a lot to to uh to war as a domain of accumulation as an industry in itself and an industry which is the basis of all industries. I mean it's it's it's it's a feeder industry in in the stages of production. You know, if you're going to cut cost, you're going to go and make war somewhere and visit war upon other peoples.
The imperialists do that. But uh you know, the war itself is actually a good business in a sense because it's going to employ. It's going to make the working class pay for the costs of war. It's not going to empower the working class because they're going to be taxed uh to pay for the war.
It's not going to better the conditions of the working class such that it has more autonomy and so forth. All of this is uh when we think of war as a domain of as an industry as an industry of death then and we think of how rents to the developing world uh I mean you know if you think about of the developing world when we import techn we import technology from from the west I mean we already import laborsaving technology uh and there are little wealth there is little wealth in to basically stabilize society by employment in in arts and culture and so forth and other services and so on. So there is very little wealth to also create jobs that will stabilize the political and social structure. So what happens is the rents that come in the form of aid in the form of NOS's and so on from from the imperial centers what they do is they increase the divisions between uh either you know if if it is not the imperialists that are waging war they're going to send rents to create a sort of military militia uh proletariat in in in the developing world that's going to be engaged in the in the act of uh self-destruction the process of killing itself.
It's going, you know, obey the on the basis of ethnicities, border national, border lines, uh whatever sectarianism, uh tribalism, all of these things because of these people are going to be there are there's you've created the conditions, this the scarcity, you've drawn resources, there is nothing left and now you come in with very few dollars and you pump those dollars with a few guns into the societies and you basically say your job now is to produce the death of the other and the other's job now is to produce your death. And so you have these powder kegs which are a blaze all over the developing world and this is a huge industrial project and it's industrial project that's also you know it's it's a death is a commodity that is realized like pollution it's realized the whole planet is saying you know if you if we're saying consumption leads production which is not the case but let's assume hypothetically that this is the case that consumption is going to production then what we are consuming globally is a huge amount of pollutants and premature human death. That's what we that's the major item of consumption. And of course it does the price of it doesn't show but the price of it is embedded in all the price system that filters and appears in the profit rates which is you know roughly if there is no uh under the same distribution conditions it's roughly the the growth rate the growth the global growth rate is adds up to roughly the profit rate because it's all the new things that have been bought and sold.
I say uh so so we have we are in a situation where uh uh the planet is the biggest industry in the planet is the industry of death the death of nature and the death of man. Uh and it it's and and the you know the the creation of bad nature of sick nature is like a a creation of of a machine that kills because you know if you sick in the river if you throw pollutants in the river and people drink the water that's going to kill. So you know the m the the pollutants the machine that we created which are the pollutant then the sick river has sickening people that in itself the the sickness that capital has created the machine of death that capital has created is uh is a is a sort of machine that capital didn't pay for but it's acting as it's acting out what capital wants. It's destroying people's lives.
There's too there are too many people for capital here and there are too many people that are not really useless. They are useful if they engage in an act of self-destruction either through uh protracted genocide, structural genocide or through direct war and direct genocide. And all of this is uh is is is the basis of the profit rate. And of course if we think in terms of the value relation when we say value we're saying you know that uh we're not just saying that you know there are certain hours of socially necessary labor time which have been objectified in the commodity and they're going to be sold and uh so on.
We're also saying that there is a uh uh a uh value is a uh a contradiction between capital and labor. Uh because value is use value and exchange value and exchange value is what's what capital is going to gain. Use value is what we are going to gain as a society. So there is a a contradiction between use value and one can go on you know it's a bit too murky but forget about value now just for for the time being we're seeing you know that you know what is we are consuming what is of disuse to us uh uh we are consuming all the pollutions and all the death globally we're accepting that we are exceeding to that we have been exceeding to that over the the 20th century I mean this essentially of death of mega death.
500 million people died in wars and so on. So this this is stuff that we consume and we pay for. And of course it doesn't look, you know, if I go to the store and I paid uh $10 for this pen. I'm not going to uh end, you know, uh look at, you know, my $10 registers here hypothetically at the cash machine.
But it also the the $10 symbolizes all the uh reduction in the social cost of the reproduction of labor or the death and disease and the wars and the you know all the stages of production all the people that have been in the nature has been shortchanged in the process of production. How was it short short changed? It is it is this it's the life of nature and the life of man have been cut short for you know and and this is in the $10 that I have paid. It's $10.
It's in there. It's it's in the power structure of of of the superructure that says this is a value but it's only of $10. it has equated the $10 with with this with this this total value that has emerged in the span uh throughout the process of production. Now, uh, as you can see, the uh the the point of of the matter here is that the the real cost of the pen.
If if we were going to tally the real cost of the pen uh had you know the people that throughout the stages of production that before we arrived at the plan been powerful enough to argue for higher wages better better lesser pollutants better living conditions and so forth. That price wouldn't have been $10. could have been probably much more but at least it's a you know the price would have reflected the social benefits not the social cost that have accured to other societies and so forth but that that's so as you can see uh the um we are in a in a process of complete waste wasting lives, wasting nature, uh, and waste cell, we consume the waste and we it's a process of auto waste. It's it's a it's a very, you know, I'm I'm just being descriptive.
I I scratched the surface of theory when I talked about the value relations and the value relation is is is a is a relationship also between capital and labor, between use value and exchange value. uh capital wants, you know, to appropriate uh the money. It doesn't want to sell things because they're of benefit to society. It just produces a commodity because a commodity is is meant for sale.
Now as you can see uh in a in in a global order that is based on you know I want to sell at any cost and if I cause more damage to nature and man I sell more I I not only sell the pen I sell the death that is related to the making of the pen and if I destroyed trees and nature and so forth in the process the trees that I destroyed are also making me profits because they are an industry in their own rights. And if I make a war to cut costs for the making of this pen, it's an industry in its own right. And what I do in so far as the value relation because it's subject object, the value relation has a subject which is either capital or labor is subject depending on the balance of power. If capital is stronger, it's, you know, exchange value is way stronger than used value, then what we're going to have is a is a situation where uh uh death is far more beneficial to capital uh to sell for capital because it's it basically uh erodess and uh and destroys the very bases that create an autonomy of the working class And which brings me you know to the idea of the rents you know that the rents that you know the the foreign aid and the NOS's and uh all the uh ideological production uh of of of you know c capitalism the human rights of capital capitalism and so forth.
All this language uh is is meant to basically uh to to destroy man and nature uh to in order to ensure profits and that's I think I has it been long enough have I talked long enough or well we could we could do much longer but we are coming close to the hour. Professor Ali Kadri, you know, listening to you, uh, I was reminded of this story that emerged just after Donald Trump launched his wave of tariffs against the entire world and chiefly China, where one of the capitalist uh, newspapers, I think Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal, calculated that if an iPhone, it's an example we often like to use uh, when talking about exploitation, if an iPhone was made from start to finish in the United States, it would cost 56 $6,000 and not $1,000. And of course, even liberals would admit that we pay $1,000 in the United States for an iPhone because a child in uh the Congo uh mines cobalt for $2 a day. And so there's a general acknowledgement of exploitation.
But there isn't, as you say, or much much more rarely do we talk about the fact that before there was exploitation, the people had to be beaten into submission again and again. Patrick Mumba had to be killed. The movements had to be exterminated. The will for mass politics had to be disabled through NOS's.
Um debt had to be imposed. Structural adjustment had to be imposed. And even today you have proxy warfare waged by uh you know militia funded by the west against the people of Congo to sustain what are really catastrophic uh conditions for for ordinary people. And that points to a direction of class struggle.
And if you allow me to maybe grossly paraphrase um an argument that you makes at several points in the book is that the task especially when you're organizing in the global north is not to ensure that there are higher wages or shorter work work weeks for your workers, but to make sure that those higher wages and shorter work weeks in the north don't mean shorter lives in the south. And I think that gives us a very powerful uh orientation for our internationalism and our solidarities. Uh, Professor Alicadri, thank you again so much for joining us. Um in two weeks time we will return with unit three of this uh course on the national question where we'll explore uh the question of you know what is the exercise of sovereignty within the state uh and how does the national struggle relate to uh the international struggle.
So once again, professor, thank you so much. It was an honor to have you um on the People's Academy. And uh everyone else, please look out for the following lecture in two weeks time. I'm going to stop the stream now.