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The Canadian Conundrum – Causes and Consequences of a Containment Catastrophe

Internationalist Observer | 03.11.2014 16:34 | Tar Sands | Analysis | Climate Chaos | Workers' Movements | World

Justin Bourque is being flanked by Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Pelletier as a political prisoner of the extinction system for a reason that represents the distinction between the two political entities of North America. In Unitedstates, the latter was so lucky to hit a rare period of suspension of the death penalty in the calendar, while the former was openly sentenced to execution and then at whim changed to death in prison without execution as to be misused as a bargaining chip by an unscrupulous politician. In Canada the supreme enemy of the state is however never being killed openly, but with a verdict that amounts to death without spelling it. It is of course being taken into account here that the common denominator of the three cases is that the reaction pattern of the repressive apparatus unloading upon the individual is of much more urgent need of attention than the blame it is meant to express. It matters little whether these prisoners were involved in these killings. But it matters a lot that the repressive apparatus is attempting to masquerade as the advocate of future generations when it is a solid matter of fact that the loss of a cop father is far less traumatic to a child than the loss of a non-violent father. If a reactor operator wishes to have children, it is common sense that something can only be a means to an end if it does not contain excessive contradictory risks. If the reactor engineer were to hide behind children to defend himself against the Abolitionist it would be recognised as an abuse of the children or at least as a fraud, given the toxic legacy. But when the cop who keeps the reactor operating does, apparently it does not yet attract the broad smack-down such grossly inappropriate kid-ducking deserves.

Sometimes it is all contained in the name. Canadian politics is such a case. The key issue of it is buried in the name of the head of state, or more precisely that position is staffed with an employee with no other qualification than its name because that is the only aspect of life competition cannot entirely manipulate. The so-called “HAARP”, the nuclear submarine contact antenna grid designed to penetrate the ocean surface as the single most powerful instrument to control these weapons, which is often cited for the unknown range of side-effects of its grossly disproportionate operational construction, is an Unitedstates undertaking though, but due to its location in Alaska and the history of that land it is more of a Canadian than an Unitedstates issue. Beyond the deliberately maintained confusion over the purpose and capabilities of the installation, and the strategic significance of the submarine fleet as “Queens of missile chess” it is ballast for the diplomatic relations of the two sides so enormous that it always puts itself at the forefront of public attention and only can be contained in its own image.

With all due caution for the fallacies of inaccurate moral equivalencies (Canada is only a democracy, not a people´s republic), for the Soviet political bureaucracy there was a point when the pressure of conformity had become so bad that no one would stand out significantly enough to leave a lasting impression, at which the role of original thought was taken by memorable appearance. In the Canadian case instead of “glasnost and perestroika” there is unbalanced fossil sell-out and unchecked police state terror, and instead of a man with an iconic body malfunction there is one with a name that nearly spells the number one issue of his office (with one letter dropped) and a policy that deliberately avoids it. In its relations to Unitedstates, Canada is a landlocked country; although it has multiple coastlines and is all but geographically landlocked, diplomatically it is, such as Gambia in Senegal (or any West-Eurasian state which would abstain from the lockstep with Brussels). That situation essentially is the result of the worst mistake in Russian history, surpassing even the alienation of Leon Trotsky and other internationalists as well as the undervaluation of the Juche policy despite the collapse of the Seato pact in the flames of the containment wars that devastated South-East Asia, which is the sale of Alaska to Unitedstates by the Czar of Moscow who then had not yet been ousted by the Soviet movement.

Across the Bering Strait despite the routinely alleged end of cold war elsewhere, Russian and Unitedstates submarine commanding antenna grids are still facing each other as ever since the military-industrial complex lost its common sense. The Canadian territory is in the grip of geopolitics that can only be successfully defused in bold decisions bigger than Ottawa´s current standing, and the authoritarian terror state is exploiting that constellation to pillage and sell out the treasures of the land in order to overstretch the remaining tenure of its superiors a little more. Feeding in the public trough of tar sand revenues, the biggest pig occupies the biggest stash of stuff and keeps all the smaller ones at a distance, because the barn-keeper made the mistake of merely emptying the bucket instead of spreading it out. And probably it feels the same vain satisfaction of the apparatchik dancing on the line between conformity and treason just like Karzai in Afghanistan when he gives oil exploitation privileges to China to covertly snub Unitedstates for unspoken human rights violations.

The meaning of the 19th century Arctic transaction deserves deeper attention. This incident is unique both in type and magnitude and mandates a scientific approach. Karl Marx observed in his epochal analysis of the labour market that a decisive transition of the whole of society took place in the switch from feudalism to capitalism, which in the Canadian case is contained in the sale of Alaska, the Pacific deal of 1867 mimicking the faded Atlantic slave trade in a grotesque exaggeration. But the understanding of the effects of that transition is obscured by technological progress and innovation which begin undergoing a period of steep growth at that point. Hence the economics of it is best visible in an example that factors out the technological variable, as well as all disruptions of local climate preceding any efforts of human organisation.

In feudalism, which is a decay product of imperialism, as well as an ingredient in the formation of new empires, the central power is limited and the land belongs to the people. Yet unlike in Anarchy, a local robber baron must be fed to keep away all the other robber barons. E. g. the tea plucker plucks tea and when he stores his results the armed bandit comes along to collect one tenth of the harvest. In capitalism, the tea plucker applies at a factory farm, is being paid a wage for which he can purchase tea products, and fired if anything is ever found in his pockets. Although the tea plucker still plucks tea, the entire economic system is different, although a farcical representation of the feudalist robber baron is still at work in capitalism in the form of tax authorities. Specifically, what has changed, and indeed makes fundamental difference for the circumstances of life, is the order of division and exchange. In feudalism, the result of the work is being divided before any exchange takes place. The worker may sell his remaining products, but the interference of the robber baron precedes the visit to the market. In capitalism, the result of the labour is exchanged for money before any division of it (into taxes, food cost and so forth) takes place. As a result, the division that in feudalism dominates the markets in capitalism is itself being dominated by the exchange rate of labour and wage, which is determined by the circumstances of the job market.

The amount of wage is detached from the market price obtained by the result of the labour, and instead determined by the market price of the workforce, which under the fear-ridden rule of the capitalist state is always unbalanced towards the supply side and hence offering less for the same job than a balanced competition. If there was no rule of fear the job market might possibly become balanced merely as a collective sum of individual choices, but the overwhelming experience with capitalism is that whenever that happens it is violently pushing forward its pillage of resources enabled through the technological development, so that fear of poverty and oppression ever increases and the job market malfunction can never self-correct, at least not until the looting has scraped the last barrel.

Marx describes this difference between the work result and the wage as the surplus value, that is being captured by the capitalist enabling it to bring about profits other than from gambling the markets and exploiting the resources, but also mentions that due to the technological variable the share of human labour in the overall consumption is ever decreasing, so a capitalist system without that component would be dried out soon by alternative economies. Capitalism only works when the job market leaves no alternative, either by its own circumstances or these brought about by means of the oppressive state as the collective representation of the capitalist class. This misconstruction makes the containment vessel of the job market in which the fossil access takes place a bottomless pit causing ever more destruction until it is itself being destroyed, hopefully before the technological variable multiplies destructivity to the utmost.

How does this basic lesson of political economy specifically apply to the Canadian situation? Contained in the Alaska purchase, of which “HAARP” can be seen as the surplus value unpaid by the price obtained through its employment by Unitedstates, the breaking point between feudalism and capitalism is determined by the same economic formula than in the Alaskan case. As in many other places at least the economic transition from feudalism to capitalism was gradual such as the increase of influence of the technological factor, in Alaska and therefore in the state of Canada as well that change came all at once: Exactly when the Russian czar had sold the land to the foreign capitalist, it was legally no longer owned by its natural inhabitants, and from there onwards Ottawa has been an appendix of Washington, cemented in the grotesque installations of the “nuclear age.”

In this analysis, the concept of containment is as well a function of the technological variable. Containment says that something is embedded into something else, so that it cannot accidentally be gotten in contact with from the outside. The tea plucker will self-evidently understand that rot is contained in the compost so that it can be stored without affecting the surroundings. But at the other end of the technological spectrum, an atomic chain reaction is meant to be somehow contained and that brings about unthought-of difficulties. The understanding of this requires a look at the definition the capitalist economy does itself make of the concept, hence it is appropriate to pursue a change of horses half-way in the middle and replace the great subduer with a capitalist of as solid scientific credentials as they can get for a bottomless pit. Given imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, this is of course the lone architect of Unitedstates hegemony of the 20th century, and up to the current day key figure of Unitedstates politics despite all the more or less duplicitous and dysfunctional attempts to get away of it from Reagan to Obama, the career official who had coined the term “containment” as a cornerstone of the diplomatic vocabulary.

Politically, George Kennan was himself the result of a “change of horses” as he put himself ahead the engineer caste of Hitler´s military-industrial complex when the Soviet advance captured the ranches of the inner circle generals in Poland and liberated their slave labour camps, and the technological fallout thereof applied at Pentagon desks. Himself a rancher, Kennan understood to contain the captured criminal rackets in a plan anchored in the existential fears of the capitalists, and designed to alienate not only Stalin but even more so to deprecate the opportunity to hold him accountable for his wartime agreements on democracy in exchange for being held accountable for a proper clean-up of the economic crisis. Yet Kennan´s diplomacy also contained the notorious fossil fuel fiefdoms so effectively that this did not only defeat the Soviet Union but the “West” as well. Although Kennan has argued his recycling of the fragments of failed states many times and became the most influential intellectual of Unitedstates imperialism, his grand theory which serves as the raw material for all the later “great game” fetishists is itself suffering a congenital error at the very heart of its construction, presumably due to Kennan´s folkloristic perception of Russia and total lack of moral clarity of the coherence of e. g. John Reed.

The containment policy, the later “conservative overcoming” of which merely meant a quantitative acceleration rather than qualitative transformation, did and does not give a rash thought about the ingredients of its subject matter, be it Nazi lunatics or depraved Saudi kings or shell-shocked Yasukuni emperors, hence the same violent oddities do occur in its processing cycle again and again, with the entire apparatus accumulating all evil it is getting in contact with and refining it to untested toxicity. As a policy born out of the idea of atomic bomb monopoly, containment does not work and has only brought about the arms race and the Unitednations Securitycouncil, which as projected supreme containment vessel for all mutual wars is as unsustainable as the Fukushima reactor buildings. The weak spots of the strategic compass of the “nuclear club veto” can be observed in the leaflet-scattering issue haunting Korea, where due to cooked seals that apparatus is leaking its waste products in the homeland of its head, and thereby demonstrates that the two states are in fact not in the same tent. The cause of the toxic leak is on one side of the armistice line and the consequence on the other (the same goes for Guantanamo force-feeding by the way).

The occurrence of these incidents is iconic for the irreparably shattered condition of the so-called “world body” which in fact was meant to be a containment vessel. In their crass urge to trample their own illusions like mad, the capitalist states are displaying their post-meltdown condition. But the containment policy has generated a false sense of security, as well as blowback for arbitrary oppression of selected minority interests depending on together with whom they happen to be contained in siege or occupation. A functioning containment would simply have to vigorously exclude a certain range of ingredients and might therefore sometimes be less attractive than other options, while on the other hand ensure that these ingredients that can be dealt with by decay are circulating at the best possible speed for their reuse in the vegetation cycle of evolutionary administration. Summarily it remains undecided whether piling up rockets around an opponent can bring someone who is not already there on the right side of history. The blowback proves Kennan wrong but within the capitalist state there is no scientific alternative, because as the very centrepiece of the capitalist economy the division is contained in the exchange and not the other way round. The challenge posed by the conflict of containment is exactly as predicted by dialectic materialism: Instead of obtaining the result by an anew decay into feudalism, the ever malfunctioning job market must be contained within a new division encompassing all aspects of the hitherto system.

The out-factoring of the technological variable removes a significant amount of confusion around the Marxist term of the ”means of production,” that is the list of items that in order to permanently overcome the capitalist system must be taken away from the capitalist and become common property. In the case of the tea plucker, that includes the land and the seeds and the knowledge of making fertiliser. But even as the technological variable unfolds the entire calculation into complex dimensions, all means of production in one way or another derive from the Earth and cannot be entirely reproduced without depending on it. Economically, the extinction scenario reduces the entire complexity of the technological factor to the property of the supreme factory floor if it was meant to be one – the planet as whole. The revolutionary suggestion is to put the division of the fossil resources between the ancestors, the contemporaries and the offspring ahead of any exchange incorporated by the job market in order to restore a sustainable order of things and create a new environment that can absorb all elements of the old economy, exclude the toxic accumulations and contain the decay of the rest.

As the step from capitalism to communism realises the reversal of the primacy of the economy over the state into a primacy of the state over the economy, the absorption model for the capitalist economy is reverse to that for the capitalist state. While it is self-evident that the two must be captured and processed separately, they are also being done so in opposite ways: While from the capitalist economy, a negative selection is to be made as e. g. just-in-time shutdown of reactors and other fossil speculations of unsustainable dimension, the capitalist state is subject to a positive selection for elements that could be contained and all the rest remains a toxic asset for the handling of which there can only be one consensus. If there is a border-line case between state and economy, such as the railway conglomerates Marx described as the first extramarital child of the capitalist state and the stock market, it can be absorbed by balanced detachment from both and then contained in the grand division.

Before attention might fade out, the formula for the taming of the entire labour market – all green job, brown job segments – might as well contain the solution to the conundrum of the meteoric surge of scientific entropy that has expressed itself in the reports of the two blasted spaceships. Although as an external observer it is not my department to step into speculation about operational details of the scenario of missile defence intentionally being turned from its head on its feet, it is recognisable to the undistracted eye that the reception of the double impact in the frenzy media is to be read as an indication that it strongly resonates with the toxic remainder which the containment policy of business-whoring think-tank-land left not so much where it came from but where it was allegedly meant to help. But at this point that means nothing more than that it could also be a “’HAARP” result resp. a possible indication of forbidden geoengineering which technically could neither be agreed upon neither before the Alaska sale nor after it. It must be emphasised that in the slave labour system of the European war machinery speculation of insider sabotage was difficult to survive and the unbalancedness of the benefit of the doubt was barbaric. That ingredient has remained present in the circulation which controls the biggest share of these missiles that are said to have the last word in any overkill. Given the impossibility to determine what the capitalist state has in mind with such projects and the significance of “HAARP” as the military legacy most likely to possibly be converted into an entirely harmless scientific instrument (while a warhead or a submarine reactor with absolute certainty is mere toxic waste), it should be considered thoroughly that there must not be any economic use of it (such as Japanese whaling must not masquerade as science), and in the absence of a scientific purpose that would be more convincing the installation is to be sacrificed to the emancipation of Canada in order to achieve an accumulated impulse of the dimension of the Kremlin´s geopolitical mistake of 1867. This decision is a scientific experiment as well, as the capitalist state there happens to hold the most capable and ambitioned deconstruction expert for the task hostage and is thereby being tested whether it successfully can get itself out of a monumental ape trap or not.

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See also:

- Has Australia Suffered a Covert Military Coup? (24.10.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/10/518520.html
- Demographic Endgame – IS/UK Relations in a Nutshell (15.10.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/10/518439.html
- Hongkong: Tehran in a Cool Pool (3.10.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/10/518334.html
- Marx, Lenin, Mao and the Futurology of Scientific Anarchism (26.9.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/09/518310.html
- The Anarchist Guide to IS Psychology (19.9.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/09/518183.html
- The Islamic State Messages in the Light of the Climate Catastrophe (11.9.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/09/518121.html
- Atomic Testing in the Digital Age (13.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517630.html
- Must Christians in the Islamic State Suffer Another Bloodbath? (11.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517608.html
- Double Emergency Alert: Ebola Acceleration, Internet Smokescreen (8.8) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517551.html
- The Gaza Massacre – Implications and Consequences (5.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517537.html
- The Japanese Occupation Legacy – A Defining Ingredient of Totalitarian Democracy (28.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517363.html
- Gaza – Vivisection of a Death Cult (20.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517265.html
- Macropolitical Side-Effects of the Imperialist Occupation of the Philippines (4.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517113.html
- Birth of an Independent Hope – the Revolution in West Asia (26.6.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/06/517081.html
- Hindu Supremacism – A Spent Force of Casino Capitalism (30.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516814.html
- The German Sustainability Scam and its Fascist Purpose (21.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516731.html
- The Pacific Fata Morgana and its Imperialist Origins (12.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516662.html
- Boko Haram – An Image From The Future (4.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516551.html
- How Deep Is the Atlantic Divide Really? (8.4.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/04/516271.html
- Palestine, the United Nations and the Refugees (21.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516041.html
- Why is Poland a Nazi Client State? (15.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515949.html
- What does the Invasion of Yalta Mean for the European Peninsula? (8.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515828.html
- The Suicide Attack Against indymedia and its Cause (28.2.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515677.html
- Obey or Die - The Pathology of Organised Treason in Europe (21.2.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515538.html
- NATO. Obituary to a Nukepool (27.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/515002.html
- Triple Treason in the Caucasus (23.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514946.html
- The Death of the Inclusion Policy in the East Asian Shelf Waters (16.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514789.html
- Why is the Nonproliferation Treaty Failing? (9.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514650.html

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