Guerrilla History - Surplus Populations and the Political Economy of Waste w/ Ali Kadri

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we kick off a brilliant new mini-series with our friend, Dr. Ali Kadri!  Here, we discuss surplus populations and the political economy of waste.  We always hear terrific things about our conversations with Ali, and we are sure you will similarly love this one.  Be sure to stay tuned for the next installment of this mini-series, which will be on The Future of Resistance! Ali Kadri is an esteemed Professor at various institutions around the world, as well as the author of many important books including Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction, and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.   Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, and please note that Guerrilla History now is uploading on YouTube as well, so do us a favor, subscribe to the show and share some links from there so we can get helped out in the algorithms!! *As mentioned, you will be able to find Tsars and Commissars: From Rus to Modern Russia on YouTube.

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckmacki, joined as usual by my co-host Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing? I'm doing well. It's really wonderful to be with you, Henry. Yeah, it's nice to be back with you. I know that we were on your show relatively recently. But it's been a while that since we've had a regular guerrilla history recording, as we both had a lot of things going on over the summer, including I was in Crimea and the sanctions there, if I thought the sanctions where I live in Russia currently were bad, they're

much worse there. So it was difficult to get things done. But I am back now and we are back to getting new material for guerrilla history listeners. So listeners, thank you for bearing with us during that little bit of a lean period during the summer. But we're fortunate to be joined by a many time returning guests and one of our most important guests. Before I reintroduce him, I just want to remind you listeners that you can help support the show at patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history.

And you can follow us on social media, Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, Instagram, Gorilla underscore History. And we also have a substack newsletter, which will give you up. dates to your email inbox periodically guerrilla history.substack.com. And in all of those cases, guerrilla is spelled with two R's. So as I mentioned, we have a returning guest, friend of the show, personal friend, all around brilliant person, Professor Ali Kadri. Ali, it's nice to have you back on the show. You know, I like to embarrass you with all of these superlatives, but I do believe them. That's why I say them. How are you doing? Thank you so much. Fine, yes. Altogether,

they're okay, I think. Yes, and I'm looking forward to this discussion. Absolutely. So listeners who were listening to guerrilla history episodes just before we had the, I don't even really want to call it a hiatus because we were revamping and remastering some old episodes during that period. But after the hiatus of no new episodes, we had Ali on and announced that we would have him for a mini-series very soon. And while that mini-series is starting today, listeners, we have a couple of episodes planned with him. Today's discussion is on surplus populations and the political economy of waste. Now, that might sound like a really theory-heavy conversation, and inevitably this conversation is going to have quite a bit of theory in it, but this is

very important stuff. So, listeners, you know, don't be off-put by the very theoretical-sounding title of this episode. But we should open up by a defining terms here. And specifically, the term that I really want to discuss at the beginning here is surplus populations. So kind of a two-part question to this, Ali, what is surplus population and how did Marx conceive of it? Because Marx did write on surplus populations and you cite the passages from Marx and your work on surplus populations. But also in your work, you don't only analyze surplus populations in the terms of Marx, but you also look at surplus population and how that works in the world system today, the current mode of the imperialist world system.

So can you talk a bit about what surplus population is in Marxist term and then also how surplus population functions in the current system? The surplus population, I mean, the notion that there are too many people is something alien to the Marxian class ethic. You cannot say there are too many people. It's something that Lord Montgomery or Lord Malbatten or one of the lords would say it's the heritage of, you know, of Malthus, Reverend Malthus and the 1820s, it is often attributed to him, but the discussion about the fact that there are too many unemployed people and people cannot work for reasons that there aren't jobs for them and there isn't enough food and food grows arithmetically

that is one, two, three, four, whereas the population, when it is quite fertile, it grows as in geometric terms rather, as 24, 8, 16 or something like that. So there are too many people relative to the resources, and that's the sort of Malthusian framework. But that's before that, the discussion, this discussion is often attributed to Malthus. But it was at around the beginning of the industrial age, as early as 1750, others were actually positing the same formula that, look, food grows very slow. Whereas people grow very fast, and we need to limit the growth of people because otherwise we're going to have pressures that are going to lead to wars and so on and so forth. But that's also in terms of ethics, first of all, the fact that there are too many people, and there's something has to be done about this to bring down the number of people in very gruesome ways is one point. But aside from ethics, the fact, the very notion that there is, there are too many people is also untrue.

It's like every concept that is used to delude us, to make us think of a reality that isn't there. Marxism doesn't view things that way. It thinks of people as a resource, as the most important resource, as the vital resource, and man as the object of development and the object of better living conditions and the object of welfare and so on and so forth. So the fact of the matter is, now, when we speak of too many people relative to scarce foods and to scarce things like that, we think of, let's think of the moment. I mean, there's so many ways to think about this. But if we think of the moment, but this historical moment, there are, in the most recent studies I've looked at, there is enough food and all the planet for 12 billion people,

but, and we have 8.5 billion people, and the fact of the matter is, some, depending on the source and the estimate, anywhere around 50,000 people. every day die necessarily from hunger or something. It varies from 36,000 to a total 70,000 it depends what they how they do

the estimates and what they include in the cause of death. The point to keep in mind is that so the idea that that there is going to be the scarce food over time while there are too many people the opposite has happened

we don't have any scarce food and so scarcity is constructed scarcity is something that the mode of distribution under capitalism creates it doesn't send the food resource to the people it doesn't send the money

to the people to buy the food resource. So capitalism creates the scarcity. It needs to create the scarcity and it needs to create the scarcity in order to discipline, foremost to discipline and to subjugate

the working classes. The notion is very clear that we need to subjugate the working classes. delete its consciousness, remove the potential of revolutionary consciousness. So basically, the notion is, in the end, capital needs to control people.

It controls people by controlling the minds of people. It has to have ideological hegemony. And to have ideological hegemony, that doesn't occur without the physical violence, the subjugation, the imposition of hunger, the imposition of scarcity. These two go hand in hand. They're inseparable. It's not by the power of the logic of capital or it is logical eloquence that people internalize the ideology of capital.

It's rather the guns of capital that it reinforce the submissive ideology such that people interject and internalize the idea that we can only work under capital as a supernatural force. It is there since the beginning of time. There is no way to overcome it, and we must get accustomed to it. And the fact that there is scarcity, scarcity is essential for efficiency. The world cannot have a planned economy, a planned economy, does not have a price system to guide it for better resource allocation. And you can see what happens in North Korea.

And they don't tell you that they've destroyed the population. A quarter of the population of North Korea was a quarter of the population was destroyed in the Korean War. They've thrown more bombs on North Korea than many atomic bombs put together. that they miss. They miss that they left nothing for people to work and eat with. And so what we have is a situation where they constructed the scarcity and they also and they constructed the notion of a surplus population.

A surplus population is a very venomous and a very insidious concept like every concept of the mainstream. It's an ideological tool that works closely and correlatedly with the submission that capital has created and imperialism has created in the minds of the people, and it has created over time by, again, not by the force of its logic, but by the force of its guns. that people could be obliterated within minutes such that they get accustomed to basically eating less and getting obliterated in many more minutes than a minute as in the sudden death from war. So they have so so the working classes in given the power of imperialism works with a time dimension that like that, do I submit to imperialism and suffer the consequences of having only one meal

a day for a few years to come, or do I basically confront it with primitive weapons and die within minutes? This is the transaction that occurs, and that is why the ideology is the ideology. of capital is accepted as sine canon for survival by the working class, where there is a missing revolutionary consciousness, and where by definition, under capitalism, we always must introduce new technology, and by the introduction of new technology, we displace people from the productive economy. Now, that before capitalism did not

occur. Before capitalism, the problem was you know, they had very few tools and very good, lesser technologies. So when they produced very little food. And in fact,

they view the human resource as the most important resource. Many religions would say, populate the earth. Make sure that you have babies and so on. And so, but of course, the infant mortality rate was several times what it is today, a hundred times what it is today, probably.

And, but you needed the human resource. You needed humans in order to work the vast lands. And because you've worked it with very primitive tools and you were subject to natural diseases and natural disasters and so on. So you're subject to more natural than social devastation. What you've had is a situation where the world was somewhat always underfed because you had a crisis of underconsumption and a crisis of underproduction. You produced very little with the technology.

Now, what we have today under capitalism is a crisis of overproduction. We produce too much of everything relative to the markets that we intend to send those things to, or sometimes in absolute terms, like in the case of food. And we produce and we have very, very little income to buy things with because the way the incomes are channeled by capital is to make sure that the majority of the working classes do not earn enough in order to. to cut costs and so on. So when, let's say, I recall, Friedrich Engels when, you know, when he was asked to comment about Malthus, he says this theory is rather vacuous. Why? Because if we think of the number of people relative to the existing food or so, you know,

food, I'm saying resources, food, if we think of that, then the earth was already overpopulated from day one. we produce very little food, so we must have had a surplus population from day one, whereas day one on Earth, or prior capitalism, let us say, the more people we've had, the more food we produced, and the conditions of productions were just the same. Nothing has changed. Because the conditions of productions were the same, there is not much that is going to change in the way in the longevity of people

and the better health people the natural conditions for reproduction were pretty much steady relative to the low technological levels that they've had at the time whereas what we have now

is a situation which of course proves there's the Neo-Malthusian now are speaking about a half-earth project that you know the earth is overpopulated and there's environmental devastation.

So maybe we can set aside half the earth as a biological, healthy system and keep the rest as a complete disaster zone. It's reflective of the class divide. Those who can will live in the biologically diverse area and healthy areas. who cannot, will live in smoke cities and die way prematurely than the others. So the natural divide will come to mimic the class divide, the global class divide.

And these are some of the neo-Malthusian recipes to address the disasters that capitalism has. Now, I've said so far many things. But I'm, when we speak about a surplus population, the concept itself, Marx uses the term reserve army of labor. It's, you know, it's something that pressurizes the waste system, makes sure that the others who are working are not. But there's more to the story than this.

This is something we all know, even the comedians speak of that. Now, in the Western Marxist vernacular, we see that this story. is said as if capitalism is a great thing and capitalism is creating jobs and we are employing people in these positions but lo and behold because of some

competition pressures you know some economic pressures here and there we cannot employ everybody there are some people who are going to be unemployed and we can actually concoct a system of unemployment insurance for those and fix the problem

and the higher the more growth there is the more jobs there are and so on and so forth and the more you know welfare there is now in a world structured by imperial standards

where which is when I say by imperial standards the world is one integrated and unitary unit. It is not a dual, it's not a dual world separated from each other. It's not like the third world is one place and the first world is another place.

It's a single unit of an axis. I mean, it's a single factory. And the working class in America is the same as the working class in India and the same as working class everywhere. It is part of the working class. the working class, like the value of the commodities we produce, which originate from the rest of the world, from every nook and cranny around the world, the working class itself

is synonymous with this international conditions of being, international condition. It is everywhere and it produces the same thing everywhere, whether actually or potentially it is involved in the process of production. So when we say that we want to create jobs in a certain nation, aristocratic nation in the North and create unemployment insurance for the unemployed, what this argument forgets is that in this whole unit of analysis, which is the globe, there is an immense pressure

on the South not to industrialize and not to create jobs. And the way it doesn't industrialize and it doesn't create jobs is by permanent imperialist aggression. So it is the permanent imperialist aggression that is the subject of the growth of jobs and productivity and technology

and everything else in the North. So what we have so far is a social relation. This social relation is is imperialism, it's a sociopolitical relation and it's imperialism and what it does is that it ensures that the resources

and the technology and the knowledge and the leisure time and the know-how and everything else is centered and concentrated and centralized in the north. It's not just the money as the

store of value which flies to the north. Everything from the south must fly to the north, and the north is the only place where it can nurture the development of technology and so on. So the reserve army of labor is not simply the unemployed the 3% of the Swiss population or the percent of the American population, the reserve for army of labor is the totality of the disengaged and dislocated population of the southern hemisphere of the planet, of the south. And if we consider them as surplus population relative to the way it is.

are being allocated, and resources are being allocated, not because there is a social criteria to allocate resources. Resources are being allocated because there is a class of entrepreneurs represented in power that need to make profits. And to make profits, they need to cut costs. And to cut costs, they need to make sure that people don't live long enough to cost to cost us. any more money, so if they retire, let's say, at 65 and they're going to get their pensions, I'd rather they die at 65 and, you know, the banks get the pensions and so something of this caricaturish nature, but it's much more than that. You want the entire population to either live early, die early and get sick as well and make it pay for its sickness and the sickness

is socially inflicted. And so you benefit from the commodification of ailments. And at the same time, you reduce the cost of these people over the time of their lives. So you end up winning by basically making them sick and making them die early because you reduce the cost of their social reproduction. They don't cost much. they were alive, they were paying me money for the technology that I've developed to treat them for the diseases I have created for them. And so you have a situation because of the slow of

profit, because I need to cut costs at any cost. And I need to commodify. I need to make everything from water to air. I need to make that into a commodity. I needed to make it sellable. I need to make it consumable. I needed to earn a profit off of it. And all of this rests on the fact that I am going to have this huge reserve army of labor in the developing world that necessarily grows because

there is not much we can do about the fertility rates of a population that has just been displaced from a rural area. which has an ethos and a way of life determined its betterment, its fulfillment of a better life is determined by the number of people, it bears by the number of children, a woman bears. So we have a high number, a high fertility rate related to the ethics of, and the ethos of a mode of life that depends on the growth of the population that has just been dislocated and has become urban in nature and it still guards the old modes of fertility and fecundity and so on.

So you have this factory of people who are born into misery and they're born into misery because of the continuous application of the of the of the social relations, the sociopolitical relations that have called imperialism, which is you need to clobber the South continuously in order to make sure that the flow of all the resources, not only money, people and other resources and and knowledge and technology and all the the wealth is going to be centralized and concentrated in the North, it's nurtured to grow into a more of a weapon against the people of the South. And what you have is a situation where we've created so many dislocated people

that and since capital totalizes and commodifies everything, it's going to commodify people. That's why it calls it a surplus population. It's going to commodify these people. And commodifying means you set a price on people. They have a price somewhere. When we say it commodifies air and water. That means air and water also have a price and everything else has a price.

And then the price system is liquid. It is an integrated structure that belies all the commoditification. and all the commodified social relations of the world. Everything, when we say everything is for sale, that means everything has a price, including the lives of people. And these people's lives now have a price, and they have a big price.

There are two bodies in which they exercise the structural genocide against people of the South that they call surplus populace. One way is the structure of genocide. It is basically the rationing of resources. We have a lot of food. We're not going to give them any food. We have a lot of money.

We're not going to give them any money. And what more we're going to appoint a comparador who works for us is a partner of sorts, a junior partner maybe, or of the same color of the neo-colonial context of the same color of the population, of the

same passport of the population. But that sort of fake identity does not make the real identity of the social class, the ontological condition, the condition of being, the condition that we have a worker who reproduces himself

through his work and this worker is not an abstract individual. He's a social. He's a social individual. This society as a whole and society is the global society. He's part of the international working class and it's the international working class that reproduces itself. That sort of, these sort of definitions of are important. Now what we have is we have a population of idle people, supposedly idle, because they're not idle really. They have a, they

They must, they're gleaners, they must equal living and they work in harsher conditions than anyone else to remain alive. But we have this population which doesn't count much for money, but it counts a lot as a source of making money. In itself, it doesn't count much for money, but it's death, its premature death by austerity counts a lot. So I'm going to employ all my ideological apparatuses to basically instill the notion of scarcity as an inherent condition of being. Or we can't have much because everything is scarce.

That sort of thing. And I'm going to employ a huge number of NGOs, huge number of academics, huge number of journalists, and so on. All the ideological apparatuses of the West are going to be telling me that, you know, Just like Mr. Barrack yesterday called the third world animals. I mean, you know, some animals, I think, you know, when we think of the barbarity of imperialism, animals are less, I mean, and the pain we have inflicted upon animals in this planet by the wrath of imperialism and capitalism, such that many of them are gone extinct. This, the human species under the leadership of imperialists and America is delivering more death than anything at any other time in history.

So what we have to keep in mind is that we have created a third world with vast numbers of people who are equal living in dreadful conditions. And we have devised methods and mechanisms to destroy them. And the act of destruction itself, the waste here, is an industry. We have created an industry to dispense of people before their time. And the product of this industry is the life of people itself, cut short. And if that doesn't work, then we have the war, because the war must go hand in hand with the structure of genocide. And the war inflicts direct genocide. It kills more abruptly than the structural genocide.

And the war is not something that occurs on the sidelines or is it's a haphazard. It's actually the fundamental condition for the existence of the system, because it is the fundamental condition to instill in people if imperialism win. an ideology of defeat and the spirit of defeatism. That sort of, the war itself is the sort of industry that doesn't have an issue with lesser growth over time. The death of people as a product and the machinery involved and the labor involved in making the death of people in wars, is an industry that has the potential for exponential growth all the time.

It's not like selling chewing gums where I'm going to run into competition with another chewing gum and that competition might involve a better technology for chewing gum, and that technology is going to make my current technology and my investment obsolete as a result of his or her better technology, I don't have that problem. I don't have the problem of my technology aging over time. What I have is I've imposed upon people a system of taxation, a system of, I other tax them with money, or I tax their lives, because I'm going to kill the others through war. And it is this loop, this system that has a feedback loop that reinforces the exponential growth of the system.

And when we think about the ripple effect upon the development of defeatist and surrender consciousness, then these things altogether come to tell us a lot about the situation of the world, as we see it today, we have a world in which there are people war and austerity forced into poverty and a system that profits from the very execution of the masses of the third world at an early stage in their lives relative, always relative to the historically determined level of life given the wealth that

we have developed in the development of the material conditions of existence. We have huge wealth. We have huge technology that could better human conditions. We produce too much food, but the system of allocation of resources, the law of profit, makes sure that this

doesn't occur because because there wouldn't be any profits made if the wages of the international working class rise and the working class becomes more adept, more capable of controlling its life. And so capital, the ruling relationship, the historical relationship, the relationship at the helm of history

and the entirety of the social relationship of production. this relationship holds steady by the victory of imperialism over the planet that sort of thing. Yes, yes, very interesting. It brings up so many

issues and consequences, this kind of picture and this analysis. One thing I wanted to go back to just as a way to perhaps add some component is looking at the way, this is clearly an accumulation problem, right? You know, rather than socializing the gains of productivity with new technology or new techniques, etc. The accumulation of capital requires, as you were saying, this unequal and, you know, very wasteful and destructive sort of process. But there is, there are some conditions under which, in the 19,

century, well, 18th and 19th century, in particular, where given perhaps the stage of capitalist development, it became useful to make certain populations surplus, as it were, after taking them off the land, having a reserve army of labor, but then avoiding any problems of like demands for socializing or rebellious kind of populations to export them through colonialism and settler colonialism. And I just had a good set of conversations two different episodes about settler colonialism historically and with Max Isle very recently about settler colonialism in the world system. And it seemed to me that this question of the surplus population is, of course, course, a mirage in ideological terms, but it also was used in a particular way to somehow

capture new gains, solve both a domestic kind of question politically and socially, while at the same time, given the structure of the imperialist world system, to capitalize on exporting these populations in a violent process of expropriation and primitive accumulation. So I'm wondering if you could say something a little bit more about the parallel history to that larger global point you are making about, like, the structure of capitalism, you know, that has, you know, kind of created this ideology of surplus populations. But with actually how it has used that, you know, historically in different eras of this entire period, even to the contemporary, you know, how would you analyze and kind of really put into context the sort of settler colonial populations that were exported, you know, into the, into the Western Hemisphere, into, you know, Australia, Southern Africa, and so on in this kind of global picture that you've been analyzing?

Well, yes. Well, I think the notion that, you know, I mean, when we think of capital as a social relationship, we often think of it as just a social relationship, as something, you know, you can't touch. You know, it's a power relationship. And like any social relationship, it's based on a set of ideas that exist before. So, for instance, if there is a teaching relationship in the classroom, teaching as existed before, I started teaching, or you started teaching. And this teaching relationship is also a power relationship. The teacher enjoys a certain power over the students.

And it's untouched. And it's the same for the capital relationship. It's a power relationship. It's a set of ideas which develop over time. and it's also it exists historically it's the principal relationship the leading relationship of history

at the epoch that we call capitalism capital relations but it's also and that's the point that's often missing it's it has personifications in reality it's not just an idea as people who actually are engrossed in the idea and live the idea And when we think of settler colonialism and, you know, this transfer of people and the elimination of whole native people throughout the history of capitalism and the import of people, so capital is displacing its own person, it's placing its own person in a position of authority.

and the labor of the personification of capital, the class, the white settler class, or the Zion settler class, they are the embodiment of capital, they are the exemplification of capital, they are the instantiation of the capital relationship, the capital relationship, I cannot see it, I know it's there, I know I'm born into it because it's there before me, but it's also not just, an idea. Ideas can carry guns and can't do things. So capital in a sense also works. It has a job to do and it has a certain population to do its job and it must create the conditions for that population to do its job at all times. Ergiri Immanuel in the discussion with Charles Bethlehem on, he says, I will not be forgiven for one idea, I think, if I'm a memory service as well. And the idea is that the differences in wages has created a two-tier structure globally, a structure of capital and a structure of labor that cannot be reconciled. We cannot call the sections of the working classes in the north a proletariat.

They are the embodiment of capital. And in the discussion further, he says, capital knows very well that it needs this stock of people, the white settlers, whether they are, you know, abroad, or those who are white settlers in their own. because the idea of settler colonialism is intrinsic to the Western Hemisphere. So if we think about, you know, it's a common idea held, upheld in the Western Hemisphere. So it's not just Israel, for instance, where the Zionists who are white settlers, it's all of Europe and all of America and all of Australia and all of New Zealand. All of these are white settlers by state of mind. And so capital is not simply an idea without a body.

It has a body and its body as Rheirin Emmanuel says capital is pretty much aware that it needs this body, that it is this body. And whenever the conditions, for instance, now there's a huge uproar, because of the televised massacre and genocide in Gaza. For many people with conscience, this is a horrific thing. But Capital is aware that it will make concession to these people and to others always to maintain a difference in a higher, it will argue later for a higher moral ground, but to maintain itself in a position of power.

And to maintain itself in a position of power, it must distinguish the settler with higher incomes. It redistributes the incomes of the settler, which also the European and the Western conglomeration, these are not earned through better technology and better machinery. That's hullabaloo, because the better technology and better machinery is earned via the violence, the continued violence upon the south. You must limit, you must destroy the productive forces in the south to have productive forces rise in the north. This is a law of, you know, this is a fact. Matter of fact, not a matter of opinion. And so you have a situation where

the technology itself, it's a product of killing, and that's what capital does best. And so you have a mindset and a culture that is the thrives on imperialist dividend. It's not incomes. It is not the better machine of Germany that is making the better wages of Germany. It is the power of NATO and the power that precedes NATO that is making the higher wages of Germany and the higher wages of the United States. This is the issue. This is what's at stake.

And capital is aware it needs this. body, this actual physical existence and this work, this work that is intended to basically better the technology of war and to conduct more war. And it's in a time of crisis, it will say, and like James Buchanan, I think, says a long time ago, we must drop the human rights rhetoric because it will come, there will come one day where our interests will require genocides, but our own rhetoric will stop, will be against us. And so the idea that you have a situation as such globally is, is again, like you said, it is a cornerstone of the accumulation process because the accumulation process is a social

process and the social process is at its kernel the creation of the conditions for the destruction of the productive forces and the destruction of the population of the South prematurely as well. And these are conditions which are not only questions of theory. We know that since 1500 and the rise of capitalism until now, when the relations of production changed when we started producing things to sell rather than to consume. This change in production relations sometimes is called use value over exchange value. This very condition, when that changed, everything else is going to follow. Everything else is going to fall in line.

And we're going to start destroying people in the South and creating the white supremacy. and I think and you know and sometimes the clergy comes in to make to basically ordain the the differences in order to

to ordain the conditions for capital accumulation so the conditions for capital accumulation are ipso facto by their very condition of being they are conditions

that reproduce a settler colonialism, not only in Palestine and South Africa, they are also settler colonialism, forms of settler colonial, within the center, within the center against disenfranchised minorities, gentrification, and the imprisonment of Arabs in Europe and the imprisonment of African, American and America. Well, this is also a settler colonialism in practice. against the people of origin in the third world and the people of origin and the natives of the developed world as well. And so what we have is a situation where that is not at all a theorization of things.

That is not a hypothetical condition. That's a statement of fact that you have throughout history an army of people. which are the actual being of capital, the physical, the life and soul of capital. And they exercise, they work and they work and produce for capital as well. They are like machine workers. They are in the process of, they produce the conditions of war, of genocide, and these conditions of war of genocides are theoretically now, we come in with the theory, they are the basis

for the creation of surplus value the basis for the creations of poverty at one level and death and disease at one level so little is spent on those who are dying early and so much is left for those who are going to privately appropriate

the social surplus which is the surplus of the whole planet because the whole planet is politically integrated and it's politically integrated and it's socially integrated and it's economically integrated and theoretically again we know it is economically integrated even if we find somebody who is not working

for instance we say he is productive we can say he is productive or she is productive somebody in the third world who's basically lives in a mountain alone like a Robinson Crusoe, this person is actually part of global society, and it's global society that produces. Global society is the totality of social relations, and to which this person who is a social relation and a subset of the totality of social relation is born. So if we have, why do we say, for instance, to make this clear, Why do we say women must have equal ways with women?

Why do we say that somebody who's born with a handicap should have an equal wage with everyone else? And it is a right and not a charity for us to basically endow this person with an equal wage. Why do we say these things? Because we say these things because society has all these strands of people as women and everybody who those who work and those who don't work. And it's society as a social nation, which is a set of knowledge, a set of ideas, a set of people put in practice, all these things. This is the totality of society, the social organization, and its forms of social organization. It's institutions. All of these things are doing the work.

And if these things are doing the work, then everybody in it, whether they are working or not working, they are part of the – they are the producers. And it's the capabilities of societies, the capabilities of the development of the productive forces of the globe, of their global societies, which produces, not the individual. The individual in the abstract does not exist. The individual is a product of time. When we put add time into the analysis, that is, we add history in the analysis. The individual becomes a family man, a citizen, somebody who's born, somebody who's rare, somebody who's going to deliver,

then when you put real time into things, the individual becomes a subset of society, who reflects and mediates the conditions of society and his productivity or her productivity are the productivities of societies into which are instilled in him. All these things have to, this is reality.

Reality is not without time. Reality is not without history, and man is social matter. These things are omitted And what is omitted is the fact of the, the fact of the matter is we have a world divided between people who are settler-minded and represent capital and people who are basically are mostly there to be known before their time. And that's the condition, that's the state of being of capital. And it's an ontological condition. It's a condition of being.

It is not an idea. It is of all things are. Ali, I want to bring in another integration. You talk about all of these integrations in society. We also have to talk about the ecological dimension of this. The logic of waste extends to nature. The planet itself is treated as an externality that is to be exploited, discarded. And I think the ultimate expression of this is the ongoing climate crisis.

which is only continuing to ramp up. And as I've talked about on this show before, what we see is that we're creating new generations of climate refugees in what locations in the global self. I've talked about specific examples such as large amounts of people, tens of thousands in Mozambique that are becoming climate refugees because of increasing severe weather coming off of the Indian Ocean and hitting the coast of Mozambique and making those areas absolutely

uninhabitable. We talked about Madagascar and the fact that they've had droughts that last for three years at a time. We have massive flooding that's taking place in many regions around the world, not to mention forest fires that we're seeing absolutely swallow places and making them uninhabitable as well. We have large amounts of climate refugees coming up, primarily and almost exclusively in the global south, who then are joining in a more full way, the ranks of surplus population being displaced by a system that continues the value profit over basic planetary habitability. So if we can bring in the ecological dimension into this conversation, Ali, I would

love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Well, I mean, we have a system, a sort of, we live, a sort of global society and the globe is a metabolic order. It consumes things in order to survive. in order to maintain itself. It's going to consume labor and natural resources. We assume that, and it's metabolizes. It's going to take like a certain amount of labor

and a certain amount of natural resources and it's going to make some calories and with these calories are going to move forward. And everything we produce, since we are locked in it, so it's a metabolic order, but in the sense that we've become dependent on things like Harvey would say, but it's a metabolic order in a sense that over time, we're going to consume everything we produce.

If we produce good things, we're going to consume the good things, and we're going to consume the bad things as well that we produce, the awful, you know, now, to make profits, we are going, do we need, you know, we have a two-tier structure, a poor structure that makes, you know, produces laborers and raw material and, you know, a class structure principally northern, but not geographically necessarily northern because of the Comprador and the extensions of the imperialist bourgeoisie down south, right? So we have that as well. So what do we have?

What do we have is, in fact, in this two tiers? structure, we're going to take the labor of people for very cheap prices. We need to buy this labor for very cheap prices. And the cheapest prices would be negative prices, right? I mean, instead of paying somebody $1 to work for me, I can pay him a negative $1. Can you imagine a situation like this? It's probably not too intuitive, but let's say a person was so poor that he earned an income and he died in debt over the 50 years that he's lived.

Okay, so that's a sort of, we think of time now, stretch time a bit to the life of society. No longer the conventional time that capital imposes, because this is fictional time. The real time is the time of life of people, the concrete time that people live, and to reproduce themselves. This is the real time.

And so we can pay negative incomes. And also, we're going to, you know, that person lives over a full, forest and, well, I need the wood, I need the timber. And so what I'm going to do is, I mean, this is a condition of, I mean, this is real, you know, I'm not theorizing. This is what happens all the time. I need, I need, so I need to basically bludgeon the person who lives in the forest in order

to desubjectify him, in order to basically cut him from his history, cut him from his cuts, cut his conditions of evolution and revolution, and all these things, sever those. And then, so that I also get the trees very cheap and also probably negative, because what I am going to do is I'm going to cut the trees and burn and slash and burn and also cause the person diseases, make him die early as well, you know, and the cost, and although I'm probably paid $1 for the three. The cost of the damage I have done is a $5 damage. So actually, the cost, the real cost to society are a shorter life.

So, no, this is again, this is, you know, it's a shorter life. What I have it here is a description of a process, of events that are happening. We have a global economy that's going to be. grow in order to, and it's going to profiteer all the time, right? And profiteering involves cutting costs at one end. The production, production takes precedence over the consumption. And profiteering needs to cut costs. So I'm going to do this not only for the trees and the person over threes. This is a holistic condition, the condition that implies that I'm going to do this for the whole planet.

And imagine that I have to keep the profit rates positive all the time because I need to report in the time of capital, in the chronological time, the quarterly profit rates, and the stock market and the bond markets and the commodity markets. And all these must be buoyant all the time because they're implying that there is growth and this growth is going to reallocate resources in a sense such that there is more growth.

So if these rates must grow all the time then the levels the amount of cheap labor that I must consume and cheap resources that I must consume at very little cost

and not only at very little cost I must make sure that their costs are diminished over time such that my profit rate increases all time because I'm talking about rates, not levels. So the rate at one end, the rate at which I pay wages and the rate at which I pay for nature that I've used must decrease all the time such that the profit rate increases. This is a mathematical formula.

So I need to cut costs and consume more exponentially to produce more exponentially. and the rates at which I'm going to pay for these things is going to be less and less and the rate of making money is going to be more and more. That's the state of things. Now that we've seen that we live in a world as such, right? What happens when I take out the trees and I slash and burn or I throw class? Now, there is probably debate on the impact of the carbon emission and, you know, on the plastics and all of this, and how bad it is, whether it is going to last for 60 or 70 years. The only thing that is certain is that I must cause damage to nature that I will not pay for.

If I pay for the damage to nature, I will no longer be able to compete. if I pay for the trees and the slash and burn the real cost and if I pay the laborer the real cost of his social reproduction or a social reproduction I will no longer be able to compete because I'm competing with others I need to cut costs and be profiteering and so there is the law of competition

the law of profits these laws are imposing upon the planet a condition where in nature and people must be destroyed continuously and all the time. And their very destruction is moneyed. It is not like I am destroying them because I'm an evil person. Well, evil is intrinsic to the system, but it's not because the person. It is because there is no way. I can make profits unless I cut costs.

And if I cut costs, I must cut people's lives and cut nature all the time. So the fact that there is so much destruction of social nature, social nature is people and nature together because man is also nature. We're part of the animal kingdom and the trees and so not much different in the DNA thing, right? So what we have done is we've created a world in which the very destruction of nature is of nature, social nature, not nature alone, not trees and things, but also people, is the source of profit. We're destroying social nature, but we're not destroying trees and nature proper simply because of, our lack of concern for nature. We are destroying nature proper because it also contributes to the early destruction of man.

Because in the end, it is man who is going to be the source of profit. It is man whose will, whose consciousness is going to impose the conditions for negotiating the price of the his labor or her labor and resources. So what that nature is going to do? When I created the plastics and the conditions for disease in the developing world, the smog and all of these things, what I have done is I've created a weapon, just like a tank or an airplane, that is going to basically ensure the death of people

but rather over slow motion type of time and so the pollution that I have created to cut costs I did not pay for it

I need to create pollution I need to cut costs because I need to compete the pollution that I created to cut costs that I did not pay for the also a tank positioned like a NATO base

It is positioned near within the developing nation state in order to exterminate the lives of people. So in a sense, in more Marxian language, so I've made, I've created nature and the death of nature and people, the death of social nature becomes dead labor. becomes a machine, a war machine, like not any dead labor, but a war machine that is going to contribute to reducing the social cost of reproduction, reducing the lives and the costs of living and the developing world, while at the same time increasing the cost of treatment and medication which also contribute to a lower quality life. All of these things are embedded into the way the system operates. Yeah, you know, that leads to, you know, this analysis of the wasteful character of

capitalism in its destructive, you know, destruction of nature, you know, it leads some people even on the left who frame their concerns about ecology around a degrowth strategy, Right? They just kind of suggest that this devastating consequence means that we can't sustain, you know, development or continuing growth in the economy and that there has to be some big adjustment in order to fit within the, you know, environmental frames. And we've done so much damage that, you know, they're often their way of approaching it is to, is, I think, because they don't quite analyze, the problem, perhaps, correctly, they assume and try to argue for a kind of solution that makes destroying capitalism, you know, maybe it would be wonderful, but that's, you know, that they put as a greater priority the need to protect the ecology, and they think that it's unsustainable in order to continue to have a kind of modern form of life. And I'm just wondering what you're, given that, I think, very cogent and important analysis, how you would explain

and respond to people that the problem isn't necessarily, you know, having a good standard of living for the entire, you know, world, that it is really a question of capitalism rather than these limits that they perceive currently on the ecological, you know, balance of the planet. How would you convince them that their way of framing the analysis misses something important and that their concerns while they have concerns to protect nature and they want to get rid of inequality, but that, you know, the way they're approaching it is perhaps not grasping where the solution lies? they're not grasping not worth a solution they're not grasping the actual conditions of being

they're not grasping the actual picture they're grasping the death of the tree as an independent thing from the death of man they're not knowing that the death of the tree is essential to the death of man and it's essential to the power of man and to the subjectivity of man and to the power of negotiations of man and it is man who is living labor and it's man who is society and it's society which produces and it's making sure that living labor becomes dead labor which is at the source of profits and another thing is when we speak

of people of the scholars of this nature remember that we are the majority of social science comes from the north it doesn't come from this no one in the self has a luxury to think in the conditions of living and the destitute

that there isn't any time to read, at least, in many respects or something on this nature. So the research in the beginning is done in the North and this idea, but then the North is, you know, especially the intelligentsia in the North, it lives off the dividends of imperialism. And the ecological disaster is a two-pronged thing. First of all, they don't want to breathe the bad thing, you know, the bad air that comes from pollution. in one respect because they are pampered in terms of social plus position

but at the same time they want to continue to have the dividends and the dividends basically are conditioned by not by ECHOSide because ECHOSID conceives the fact that

you know you are carrying ecocide because you want genocide, the actual the point is when social conditions shape social consciousness and when the social conditions of being, you know, their mode of life

depends on the imperialist dividends and the imperialist dividends depend on the destruction of nature and destruction of nature serves the destruction of man and destruction of man is a lowering of the cost of the production of the international working class

and that means they will have higher dividends and so the death of nature is in itself a weapon as I said earlier this is what they are missing they're missing the fact that living labor is produces such a lot and living the living laborer society it's just global society

it's the international pro-italia that's living labor in real terms, in concrete terms. I'm not going to look for living labor as a separate, as the one-sided abstraction of concrete labor, because there are two-sided abstraction of the same thing when we speak of dialectics.

I'm not saying, you know, let's look into the way the decompositions are tallied in order to account for the creation of surplus value in Marx when he speaks in that's capital and I'm going to lose myself in the details of the abstract and the concrete when the actual

facts before me is that I must end living labor, that means I must end the life of society and I end the life of society with guns and with the death of nature to produce more profits, more dividends, more

imperialist dividends, and that's for me in the West. So you're not going to have a theory of ecological importance coming from these circles. What you're going to have is we care for the trees and the animals that are going extinct, but we don't care for the children that are dying of hunger every day. One child every four seconds under 10 drops of hunger, for instance, in one report a few years back, I read. from the food reporter in the United Nations, which struck me as an almost unthinkable,

you know, unimaginable withdrawal system. So you live in a class system in which there is a cannibalizing class, a northern aristocratic nation, whose political structure is the structure of capital, whose working class is the embodiment of capital, that cannibalizes. and that brings Fanon, although Fanon did not, you know, sort of elaborated in the Marxian

terminology that I'm used slightly here, but it's which actually cannibalizes. It's really, it's a cannibalistic system. He was right and saying, it cannibalizes man, and it destroys nature, not for the sake of destruction, for the sake of the destruction of man and the subjectivity of man and the consciousness of man. And so what we live in is it is a horrific system. It's not necessarily, you know, when you say that I'm going to produce something of use like a pen or something like this, what I've produced alongside the production of this pen with socially necessary labor.

That is the form, the reified form of value, the things that I produced. I produced also with the same effort so many things which were also commodified and priced. you see like all the pollution and all the I did not pay workers to live good enough I'm killing workers and I'm killing nature this is production this is the real production of capital so it's not it's not unusual to say oh we are going you cannot discipline a system and you cannot tax if you contribute let's say we we're going to put a tax for two three trillion dollars in compensation for the developing world, that's actually going to enhance the conditions for the destruction of the system, because you're going to overflut the global economy

with money that has to earn profits. And the earning of profits must involve in a metabolic order that is cannibalistic. It's going to involve the death of the lives of the social, the surplus population. That's why it calls surplus population. going to involve the death, you're going to, the death of people, that you, that, that it's been called surplus population and it needs, it needs to be hunted down like a, you know, a safari, Africa for the lords and Lord Mountbatten, sort of, I just know this name, so I'm using it often.

Well, we're just about out of time for today's conversation, but don't worry, listeners. Ali Kadri, we will be back very soon. with the next conversation in this series. That conversation will be on the topic. The Future of Resistance. We're actually recording it tomorrow, but it'll be a couple weeks before you hear it. Ali, it was great talking with you today.

I'm really looking forward to the next conversation as well. Do you have any brief thoughts that you'd like to leave the listeners with at the end of this conversation before we get into the next one? Now I'm fine, so far. I hope I made sense. because sometimes I get distracted but I tried in as much as I could. Hopefully it was okay.

At your most distracted is still better than me at my most focused. So, you know, we'll take it. Adnan, it was nice to see you again as well. Can you let the listeners know where they can find your other show and help support it? Yeah, well, you can check out my show on YouTube and also audio podcast.

We have a lot of, I think, complementary discussions to the kinds that we're having on guerrilla history. So if you'd like to have more, go ahead and check out Adnan Hussein show on YouTube and podcast. And you can, of course, help support, especially the video editing costs by contributing at patreon.com slash Adnan Hussein or buy me a coffee.com slash Adnan Hussein. And so that I can pay my video editor an appropriate wage. You know, we've just been talking about exploitation. So help me do that. That would be great. But I think in general, you'll find that there's a lot of great material on settler colonialism.

And, you know, we just had a great discussion with Radhika Desai about geopolitical economy, compatible to some of these sorts of discussions here. So do check it out. Absolutely. As for me, listeners, I also have another new show, which recently started. I was finally able to get the introduction episode put up, and next week, episode one will come out of it. That is Tsars and Commissars from Roost to Modern Russia.

That's on YouTube as well as podcasts. If you follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-N-N-N-5, you'll get those updates, but the YouTube channel and the podcast feed are both Tsars and K-S-A-R-S and Commissars. That's going to be a history. of Russia in 25 parts. The first part that we're doing, which will come out in hopefully next week, is about an hour and 20 minute conversation, maybe just shy of that, on Kree Rus Foundation. So prior to the year 962 AD. As you see, we're starting at the very beginning and we're

recorded up through the beginning of Peter the Great's reign. And so we're really far ahead in terms of the recordings, but I have a lot of editing that needs to go into it before those are up. You can't support that show, though, because of course, we are sanctioned here. But you can support guerrilla history by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history with two R's and gorilla. And as I said, at the top, you can follow guerrilla history on social media by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod, Instagram, Gorilla underscore History. And you can follow our substack newsletter sub-garilla history.substack.com. So on that note, and until next time, listeners, Solidarity.

Thank you.