The threat of outright pillage
11.02.2023
What’s New in the World Capitalist Economy and in the Mauritian Capitalist Economy?
The opening 30-minute talk, prepared by Lindsey Collen and Cindy Clelie, for our 2-day LALIT Annual Seminar was on some new developments in the world economy right now, on the one hand, and some salient new-ish aspects of the national economy, on the other. Below is an article partly based on this report and on the one-hour discussion afterwards, written up for our web-site by Lindsey Collen.
The world’s entire capitalist economy, especially the western capitalist economy, risks sliding into a recession in 2023, the IMF predicts.
Russia will be pushed into a deeper recession than the rest of Europe because of the Western sanctions imposed against it over its invasion of Ukraine. The USA had predicted the collapse of the Russian economy, but the increase in petroleum prices due to US and EU sanctions back-fired and has alleviated the impact of these very same sanctions on Russia.
Britain is expected to plunge into a recession almost as acute as Russia’s. This catastrophe is mainly due to Brexit.
“Half of Europe”, again according to the IMF, is expected to go into recession.
The USA itself may dip into a slight recession, despite having benefitted from Europe being forced to buy US petroleum products at high prices, despite massive armaments sales as a result of the Ukraine war, and despite bringing industry that had delocalized from the USA back home. But, basically, the USA is in a relatively good position, economically, compared to Europe.
The USA has thus, succeeded, as it planned, in using the Russian invasion of Ukraine so as to weaken its, the USA’s, competitors.
First the war has weakened, and will continue to weaken, Russia. Russia is no longer merely a military competitor to the USA, but now has the status of “enemy”, an enemy that NATO is continuing to encircle and isolate, despite the USA having given its assurance, post Cold War, that it would not.
Second, the USA has weakened the rest of Europe, as we have seen. European union countries, though economic competitors of the USA, used to be fairly dignified allies that the USA had invested in, through its Marshal Plan from the rubble of WW II. Now, however, since the Ukraine War, they are totally subjugated client-states of the USA, via NATO’s stranglehold on them. The USA has successfully daunted all these competitors – Russia and the EU countries – in less than one year.
When imperialist states go into recession, they, like all capitalist states, work politically so as to force the working class to pay the price for what is essentially “their” crisis. It is, after all, a crisis in their capitalism. This is something we all already know. The capitalist class and its state do everything, especially during recessions, to impoverish the working people – to the very limit of poverty, so long as not so violently as to provoke rebellion – while the capitalists continue to enrich themselves. We see that again in today’s recession. This is so in Mauritius and everywhere else. We also see finance capital maintaining its leadership over all other sectors of capital. In such times – times of recession and when finance capital is dominant – capitalist states tend to become more repressive. Capitalist ideology tends to become more hegemonic, more populist, even fascistic. And imperialist states tend towards a return to outright pillage, veritable plunder, if they get half a chance.
And this is the new phase – of pillage and plunder – that LALIT addressed in its Seminar.
The USA-led so-called “Western World”, which auto-proclaims itself the “civilized world” whenever it gets a chance and as it has been doing since colonization, is attempting, during these past few years, to reverse its most recent “globalization” and to “de-couple” its economy immediately from Russia’s, and then follow on to “de-couple” from China’s economy. The Russia de-coupling started in 2014 with a first set of US sanctions against Russia following what started as a US-backed coup in Ukraine and Russia’s seizing of Crimea. The China de-coupling started with Trump’s anti-China hysteria that got into gear over the “China virus” as he called the Coronavirus pandemic, and his new taxes on Chinese goods and sanctions, and on Biden’s accelerated sanctions on semi-conductors and micro-chips.
So much for the glorious, much trumpeted “globalization”. It is now back to the old colonial idea of “Western supremacy” and the absurd notion of “American exceptionalism”, which means morals, ethics, good governance, apply only to those that the USA chooses to apply them to, and certainly do not apply to it, the USA, itself. This is otherwise known as hypocrisy, if not downright chauvinism, or imperial idiocy, the very idiocy that contributes to the fall of such empires. But, importantly, this kind of immorality and double-standards can be useful to the ruling class in empires in times of crisis, in terms of pillage, even plunder.
The so-called “civilized world” has converted its entire economy on to an “armaments-led” footing. The USA has led this effort by means of its arming and funding of Ukraine, and literally “running” Ukraine, to fight Russia. Ukraine is indeed in a defensive war against Russia, but this war is also clearly, simultaneously, NATO’s offensive war against Russia. It is both. The world’s biggest arms producers, who will benefit from this militarization as the USA creates a war-led economy, and the top five biggest arms-producing companies are all US companies, and they haul in the lion’s share of profit from war.
Having to resort to an “armaments-led economy” is inevitably the sign of already-impending war, and it is, at the same time, an added cause of war. It is an attempt, in this case, for the US state apparatus to try to shore up its crisis-ridden capitalist system. It does this even as it plunges the world towards total destruction – by means of contributing to the world’s headlong rush into climate disaster, into the increased risk of mass species collapse provoked by pollution and habitat extinction, and the world’s ticking closer to the “doomsday” clock’s midnight of nuclear war. So the USA is using NATO expansion to totally encircle and try to stifle Russia, while it uses this same NATO expansion to weaken all its European allies, now on their knees without Russian energy, and by forcing them to pump money into arms production instead of other benign sectors that might benefit working people.
And worse is already being planned.
Let us dig under the CNN-BBC-type propaganda of war, and look at the economic aims of the war.
So as to increase its rate of pillage, the Western World is working out how to seize not just freeze Russian funds – Russian Central Bank funds, Russian Sovereign Funds, Russian Oligarch’s wealth and funds, and some Russian political leaders’ wealth and funds – to seizethem for good. They actually say this. Listen and read carefully. The good old method of “pillage from war”, “the spoils of war”, even under the euphemism “reparations” had long been branded immoral by the genuinely civilized world. Now it begins all over again. The FBI in the United States has already set up a special new unit to turn Russian wealth that they freeze into Russian wealth that they seize. And they use that very language. Rhyme and all. The new FBI Unit is called the “KleptoCapture” Unit and it is designed to steal all this wealth, as its name ironically belies. The KleptoCapture unit has already started its work, while the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs and National Security, the elected representatives now reduced to playing catch-up, has set up a group to look into the “legality” and policy advisability of the “seizing” of Russian capital. After the Congressional Committee’s first meeting on the subject, they concluded that such seizure would indeed be illegal and, even if made “legal” by new legislation put in place, it would nevertheless still be ill-advised as it would endanger all Western investments elsewhere in the world, once seizure becomes the rule, and thus, in turn, undo all the careful legal and constitutional amendments it has “nudged” governments world-wide into passing, over the past 30 years of so-called globalization, otherwise known as neo-liberalism. But the KleptoCapture unit lumbers and plunders on anyway. This all shows the gravity of the economic crisis in which capitalism finds itself. The western capitalists are reduced now to throwing overboard their own sacred capitalist rules against the expropriation of privately owned capital.
In Europe, the Estonian Prime Minister, notorious leader of Europe’s hawks, formally announced in December that she will declare the Russian actions in Ukraine “criminal” so that Estonia can seize frozen Russian capital on the grounds that it is “criminal” capital. “Easy!” The President of the European Commission and spokesperson of the E.U. Mm. Ursula Von der Leyen in November had already said that Russia must “pay in financial terms”. But, this was rather vague. Estonia intends to propose a formal resolution for the EU to do this. Meanwhile, the Western media habituate viewers and readers to this once-discredited idea of war being a means of plunder. The memory of how war reparations caused the rise of fascism in Germany is, it seems, long forgotten. The western nations do this new plunder even before returning all their stolen goods from the golden age of colonial plunder: in London, museums are still filled with pillage from Egypt; in Paris, museums are full of art plundered from African colonies, and in Berlin, the Pergamon Museum has a huge Iraqi construction, the Ishtar Gate 50-foot tall, stolen in the early 20th Century, and brought to Europe on wagons.
The “civilized” Western states have succeeded in freezing some one-trillion US dollars of Russian wealth in just this past one year. So far, so good, they say. Now they aim at seizingit. That is the strategy. [Since this paper was written, Ukraine’s President Zelensky has been in London and Paris, requesting that this “seizure”, inter alia, take place. As we all know, he is an actor: he has the role of begging publicly for something for x weeks, and after x weeks of saying “no”, the USA and its lackeys reluctantly give in. This way it is “aid” requested by an ally, and not the US participating in its own war. Zelensky then starts immediately, once he has got what he previously asked for, on the next demand. Zelensky started his acting career playing the piano, for a living, and he did this in a somewhat exotic manner – just Google his name plus “piano” and you will see how his acting career started; he then went on to the better-known TV series “Servant of the People” funded, and this is not made so well-known by all the western media, by the notorious oligarch Kolomoisky, where he acted the role of an ordinary citizen, who becomes “President” by chance; and now today he is directly funded to “act” for the US state. He has in the past month or so been forced to fire a number of top advisors, even deputy ministers, and to distance himself from his oligarch Kolomoisky, while he somehow lost his entire Ministry of the Interior in a helicopter crash that Zelensky has not blamed on Russia, nor clearly called an accident.]
After Western freezing and seizing Russian wealth, freeze and seize China’s?
In the next war being planned by the USA, the West will continue to expand NATO further East still, and the USA will continue to arm and fund Taiwan, preparing in lock-step on when and how best to provoke a war with China. This far, the USA still accepts the “one China policy” that recognizes Taiwan as part of China. This time, to confront China, NATO will go way beyond the “North Atlantic” of its mission statement, and even beyond Afghanistan, to which it had already gone in almighty over-reach, and will, this time, aim to encircle China – there will be the same war aim: freeze then seize.
The only difference from older plunder was they don’t actually parade the wealth in streets, as the Roman emperors did, on elephants, but they parade the wealth – yachts and fleets of cars, in the Russian instance – on TV, and printing all the zeros in millions and billions of dollars.
“China”, the USA says again and again, “must be contained”. Study the word “contained”. It means kept in place. It means restrained. It means kept locked in. It means China can’t have friends. Only one imperialist power must move freely over the globe and get friends: the United States of America. The USA is already running around the globe well beyond its boundaries. The USA is not to be “contained”. The USA positively boasts 800 (eight hundred) military bases outside of its borders – how’s that, for not being “contained”? As if its 500 military bases within its own borders were not enough. It can make military alliances and do drills with its friends – all over the world, and non-stop, even in the sea next to China.
The USA’s allies, like the EU (that ought to be called the SU for “Subservient union”) and like Brexited Britain, are permitted some freedom of movement and do not have to be “contained” – so long, of course, as they remain in lock-step with the USA, and so long as they accept any amount of abuse and humiliation from the USA, which they do. Trump said each European country had to respect the NATO rule that more than 2% of GDP must be spent on buying arms. Or else. Even Germany that did not want to re-arm, has been forced to. The French state, to give one example of humiliation, other than having Trump wait until TV cameras are close by before ostentatiously brushing dandruff off President Macron’s suit lapels, had to accept the worst abuse capitalism knows, of watching his contract being publicly torn up and trampled upon, as France’s contract for Australia to buy French submarines was. You see, the USA most likely found France ungrateful. Like the rich benefactor Timon of Athens, who, when his “friends” are ungrateful, invites them to dinner, and says, “Sit. Sit. ... Uncover, dogs, and lap.” When they uncover their plates, as instsructed, they find water and stones. France uncovered its plate and found water and stones. All this means even the USA’s closest European Allies, subservient like Timon’s friends were to him, are not really allowed freedom. They too are “contained” to some extent. The USA, once plunder and pillage really speeds up, wants to get, and will get, the lion’s share of big armaments contracts for Ukraine (read long-range ground-to-air missiles, read fighter jets), and then, even more juicey, all the re-construction tenders and procurement contracts to rebuild all the electricity network, bridges and roads, hospitals and schools, cruelly destroyed by Russian bombs and missiles. The Russian people will find their country’s central bank’s funds have been frozen, then seized.
And soon, if the working class of the world does not stop it, the USA will aim to plunder China by freezing then seizing its assets, once it’s over with Russia.
It is not new, this kind of freezing of assets. It has gradually re-crept into the world again, as of old. The US has frozen the assets of countries like Iraq, of Iran, of Syria, of Libya. Afghanistan’s people starve to death right now, and freeze in sub-zero temperatures. Their Sovereign Wealth Fund remains frozen by the USA in the USA, the very power that was Afghanistan’s military occupier for 20 whole years. And before that, the USA was the same military power that nurtured the Mujahideen that later morphed into the Taliban that overturned a secular government in power in Afghanistan just to satisfy the economic and geo-political interests of this very USA. And now, the USA cold-heartedly freezes the Afghan nation’s funds. Whereas Marie-Antoinette, just before being over-thrown by the lower orders, said, when told the people of France were starving to death because they had no bread, “Let them eat cake!” The USA today, when told of the people of Afghanistan are both starving and freezing to death because they have no food or heating, effectively says, “Let them eat ice!”
During the LALIT Seminar, there were quite a few, mainly humorous, references to what the USA calls the “China spy balloon” and which China says is a meteorological balloon that strayed, and that, at the time of the Seminar, was drifting over the USA, prior to being shot down by the US military. What is certain is that the USA spies on others much more than it is spied upon. (Readers can just goggle “five eyes” to get an idea of the Anglophone spy network world-wide, that the USA controls.)
Mauritius
On the economy of Mauritius, our previous analyses of the bourgeoisie’s inability to plan for the people of Mauritius, and the ruling oligarchy here its continuing to concrete up and sell off the country as “real estate” remain a danger, what with the MSM encouraging this real estate pillage. The related issue of complete lack of food and fuel sovereignty continues, too, to be very serious. in LALIT, we have already analysed this a great deal.
For the Seminar, we shared our analyses on two fairly new forms of “state control” over the capitalist economy: Landscope and the MIC. These state organisms are being used in order to stave off the crisis in capitalism that was already playing out in Mauritius and that was heightened by the Covid pandemic.
Here is a list of the holdings of Landscope Mauritius, which is the organization that, inter alia, accords the land conversion permits that allow for the concreting up and selling off of agricultural land as “real estate”, a process that is ruining the entire economy. Landscope’s real estate business includes:
Iremia: Residential gated morcellement at Cote-d’Or, “sold out”. 200 plots of 160 toises all sold. Due to be delivered before the end of the year. Sipozeman pu livre lafin 2023.
Business Parks – Rose-Belle, Ebene, and plan for Riche Terre Business Park
Industrial Parks – La Tour Koenig, Riche Terre
Office Towers – 2 Cybertowers in Ebene, Informatics Park, La Tour Koenig, Rosebelle
Centre Vivekananda, Pailles.
Caudan Waterfront
Campus Cote-d’Or – Contract already signed with the Open University
Les Salines Waterfront
Les Salines Riviere Noire
Ebene Urban Regeneration
Lakur Siprem
We note that the NGO “Mission Verte” has a partnership with Landscope Mauritius – typical of NGOs – to do triage of the rubbish in Ebene at 6 points. So, the do-gooders get a little spot from Landscope, like so many other NGOs do from the Sugar Estate bosses – in and around the old mills.
In these times, it is not just in real estate that the state itself is an actor, but also in all forms of capitalist enterprise. The Mauritius Investment Corporation well-nigh “created” huge sums of capital via the Central Bank (BoM) set up in June 2020, in order to save capitalism during and after the Covid pandemic lockdowns. All this capital was, and still is, systematically dished out, and thus frittered away, on failed and failing capitalist enterprises – none of the hand-outs, buy-outs and loans addressing the crisis in food and fuel security and sovereignty. The capital has been used, inter alia, to save “Covid impacted corporations”.
In the first year, the MIC reports having spent Rs 6 billion on what it calls “Accommodation and Food service activities”. I think we can safely imagine that means “big tourist hotels”. Three-quarters of a billion was shared out amongst 16 enterprises for “manufacture”.
By mid 2021, their “financial assets”, in other words firms they bought out, or partly bought out, were only two big sugar estate companies in difficulty:
Omnicane got Rs 4.5 billion (15 June 2021, Omnicane ceded all its shares in Mon Tresor Smart City to MIC in exchange for this sum)
Medine Rs 2.85 billion. (They do not specify in exchange for what in the articles reports.)
Other applications, not classified as “financial assets”, meaning they are loans of some kind? (We give the list of those around or over Rs 1 billion. Almost all are hotels.
Long Beach Hotel Rs 2 billion
Anahita Hotels Rs 1.1 billion
New Mauritius Hotels Rs 2.5 billion
VLH Ltd (Rogers, Veranda Hotel) Rs 1.3 billion
Lux Resorts – Rs 920 million
Compaignie Mauricienne de Textile ltee Rs900 million
Those pay-outs from Rs 150 million to 650 million
Blue Ocean Hotel
Sagar Hotels
ABKID Mauritius (import-export)
Luxury Retirement – This seems to be the Royal Green
FM Denim
AVA Technoparts (car parts)
La Trobe (importer of consumer goods)
Lateral Holdings – deals in international real estate.
REAL Garments
Attitude Hospitality
Vacances Plus Lte
Casela – bird and animal park
Mauriplage – hotel and private villas
Watersports Village – hotel sports
Zilwa - hotel
Constance – hotels group
Beauports Industries – subsidiary of Constance hotels
White Sand Paradise – related to Constance hotels
Southern Cross Tourist Co
Ferme Marine Mahebourg
Merville Hotel
ICO (Mauritius) – Coin Offering
Anahita Hotel
Morning Light - hotel
LuxCollective - Hotels
Sharma Ltd – Construction and renovation (including of hotels)
Island Resort
PSH Investment Ltd – This pay-out caused a minor stir in opposition circles because it went to someone outside the big bosses, who have the necessary collateral?
Spa on the shores
Verandah Hotel Tamarin
Gleneagles
Akai Fisheries
This is a total of Rs 17.522 billion. Plus the Rs 7.35 billion handed over to Omnicane and Medine. So, Rs 25 billion has been “invested” in the private sector, to save them from bankruptcy. So much for the success of capitalism. Using public funds to shore up private companies, while the profits these same companies get go direct into shareholders’ pockets.
All this to say that capitalism today, in Mauritius and elsewhere, has been thoroughly taken in hand by the state. Either the state organizes wars and puts the economy into an arms-led situation, or the state organizes bail-outs, or both.
In a way, the MIC shows how easy, in purely economic terms, it is to imagine moving from capitalism to socialism. It is the politics that is difficult. Only the politics of class struggle will get us out of the end-game capitalism is preparing for humanity.
Conclusion
There are all kinds of threats – international and national – that working people in Mauritius have to know about, think about, and deal with. It is not easy.
