#2

#2

A recovery of unity, from which streams commodity, merges aspects detached from reality as images. The view of this world of unity regroups reality looking back on itself fragmentedly. Images that autonomize worlds, through this fragmentation process, evolve these worlds of images through the specialization of their appendages. The movement of autonomy is inverted concretely to produce the totality of the spectacle of mediation.

“The capitalist economy represents a union of the material-technological process and its social forms, i.e. the totality of production relations among people.”¹

Does Charles Levinson, writing from the same era as Victor Riesel, an era in which Citizen Smith fondly remembers by the apparel of the bellbottom trouser, make a socialist or conservative move when he states that “authoritarian regimes” become more abundant “through the influence of big western companies and groups” by leaving it open to doubt?² Citizen Levinson reiterates what has become an adage of the contemporary age in the sentiments that “a few people at the top” subjugate the populations beneath them, pursuing greed through commercial empire-building and they do this because of their materialist background, one that has been ideologically reinforced by capital, capital being institutional; Kapital, the institutional being!

International trade was the one thing that state communism had to forego: the output of its internal production was unsustainable to its internal consumption. Neoliberal economies by their very abundance stifle the abundance of developing economies by flooding them with an inflated exchange value which alters the exchange rate of global capital thereby making commerce unsustainable.³

Citizen Levinson tells us of how “{i}n the United States, the Dartmouth Group {had} been studying for a long time how to overcome the obstacles in the way of exploiting the gold mine represented by Eastern Europe.”⁴ When capital becomes institutional it becomes more-and-more effective at exploiting people. Now Kapital even owns the Ruble even though there is no official symbol!

Citizen Levinson explains how in the mid-1960's the International Basic Economy Corporation took care of the interests of Standard Oil by colonizing, a process to which Citizen Levinson goes referring to as the white man civilizing, by colonizing communist states with the apparatuses of Kapital so that Kapital could extract capital for the lowest price of labour possible. According to Citizen Levinson, Europe was a breeding ground for subsidiary activity by firms that needed to hide the volume of their transactions, all in the name of higher profits, and all this at a time when the war in Vietnam needed an anti-communist line. A suitable distraction. War in one direction, in the other, extraction. Not backed by the collateral of treasury, viz-a-vie, gold, remunerations to the communist countries could be made at the lowest price.

Guises were crucial to advisors. By 1970, 900 special partnerships existed that fused “anti-communist capitalist enterprise {with} anti-capitalist state organization”⁵ - amazing how overseas trade can oversee the affairs of states abroad. Yet, according to Citizen Levinson, the doublethink of this ideology in the undertaking of business relations led to richer profits, in the economies of motors, chemicals, and rubber. The communist hypothesis cannot call its dialectical materialism ideological doublethink by its very opposition.

Citizen Levinson describes Kapital's machinery perfectly:

“{T}he western firm produces knowledge, capital and technology, and the eastern partner the work force, premises, energy and primary materials. In order to recover its investments and secure a profit, the western firm takes on the worldwide marketing of the part set aside for export, and makes its profit on what is sold abroad.”⁶

Citizen Levinson tells us that the need for a strengthening of commercial ties between Russia and America led to an end for the Vietnam conflict. The irony is, that the firm General Dynamics, the main armament supplier for the Vietnam war, in the 1970's “signed a technical agreement with the Russians which may be expressed in the terms of manufacture of its products in the Soviet Union and their subsequent export.”⁷ Same old story: manufacture cheap labour. Whether the Soviet Union would then arm a state that was antagonistic towards The United States is a question of Kapital's ultimate competition.

Corporations such as General Motors and certain Texas oil companies ended The Cold War with their contracts long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. That's the neoliberal rubric for international trade: keep import tariffs low and export tariffs high. Soviet leaders, Citizen Levinson aptly tells us, considered it important for their economy to acquire Kapital's technology; it didn't have to come with the appendage of a doctrinal ideology. This was left as a trade secret – perhaps communism blinded by the ideology of the proletariat it so wanted to abolish – within the cabal that is the very Kapital.

Authoritarian regimes become more abundant, “under which the rights of individuals or the community as a whole are not of paramount consideration{.}” It's not that the Eastern European countries of the Bloc were ever liberated from communism before this event took place within history but that they were already owned by the multinationals by 1970. The multinationals' participation in the economy subtracts from democracy, forms a democracy that is exclusionary, and reduces the abundance of any developing economy. If, as Citizen Levinson says, that “{r}unning a business efficiently and at a profit is not an activity which concerns itself with all the complications involved in the question of civil and human rights,”⁸ then, the state legislatory body should become separated from the economy.

1Kicillof, A. & Starosta, G. (2007) “On Materiality and Social Form.” Historical Materialism, Vol. 15, No. 3; p.12.

2Levinson, C. (1974) "Multinationals crusade in communist countries." The Montreal Gazette, Feb. 13.

3(p x i = wp x i / e ): price multiplied by investment equals world-price multiplied by investment over the exchange rate.

4Levinson, C. Op. Cit.

5Ibid.

6Ibid.

7Ibid.

8Ibid.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.