What is to become of the state? http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2012/10/03/what-is-to-become-of-the-state/
In our age of colonialist intervention couched under humanitarianism, the state became a social club modelled upon the fagging system of English public schools. That is, in the late 20th century, the concept of the state had to annul the concept of class altogether from the definition of the state. The state became an association of persons, living in a determinate part of the earth’s surface, legally organised and personified, and associated for their own government. This new breed of state developing in a constant condition of failure, however, fits none of the above definitions. By virtue of its inward collapse, it is a differentiated and degenerative form of even the nation state defined as a social club. Individuals in these on-the-brink states have no state or one government that they can call their own.Hence, personal livelihood comes to depend on allegiance to sect, regional grouping or ethnic identity. In no minor measure, the crisis of internationalism and its social ideology contributes to this disintegration. This new breed of state, furthermore, is no longer the institution by which the comprador class organises and maintains a dependent mode of integration with global capital; for a comprador class to exist, it must be set against the ‘other’ or the national bourgeoisie within a nation state. In this new breed of state, there is no national bourgeoisie to speak of. In Iraq, for example, two opposing militias guarding two different pipelines are said to shoot at each other when luring tankers to their delivery points. This is a stage in the development of third world states where national militias pitted against each, in close proximity to US military presence or bases which can tip the balance of forces in favour of or the other, come to represent the new form of social organisation that make up the nation state. This is what the colonial state looked like in the past, but smartly enough, this newly colonised state appears independent and without a preponderance of foreign soldiers on national grounds.On the development side, it goes without saying that this new breed of state not only engenders reverse development, but it also debilitates man. Shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality and illiteracy abound. Equally important, fragmented, insecure and de-developing states fall prey to drone politics and diplomacy. It is a state in which there is no analytical short or long term; the short term disaster shapes the long term tragedy. Its de-development, social weakness and incapacity to sui generis build national defences, drastically shift the balance of forces in favour of imperial powers. There will of course be the isolated anti-imperialist violent incident, but it is no more than the sting of a wasp in the armour of the charging knight of empire. Militarism as a province of accumulation flourishes. It is wrong to assume that the US lost in Iraq or Afghanistan. The US working class lost because it has to foot the bill, but its financial elite, and the global elite allied with it, have succeeded. Capital wins when it weakens/controls and under-develops raw material exporting states as was the case in Iraq.
The analytical notion that it is worse to escape exploitation by capitalism than to be exploited by it omits the fact that nothing lies outside the reach of capital as a social relation under capitalism. It forfeits the concreteness of colonial history and post-colonial military intervention altogether. Value as a qualitative category is created by the totality of the material available to capital. The dislocated billions in the third world whose income amounts to no more than 5 percent of world output are, by their very state of being, part of the material of capital. The real and ideological pressures that the pauperised and politically disempowered third world mass exerts on reducing the costs of production in terms of cheapened primary resources and lowering wages is essential for profit making. Just as important, the continued dislocation of the pauperised mass by war and indirect colonisation resituates the balance of forces upon which the money form and its associated financial system present themselves as symbols of power and power structures. Imperialist power progressively disengages more of the social material in the third world for the purpose of cheapening third world assets and resource grab. It also fragments and appoints itself as a proxy sovereign in order to reproduce the terms of trade and price ratios in its favour. The enigma that the cost of imperialist wars exceeds the returns from the colonies in moneyed terms occurs because exchange prices are not set by benign market conditions, but by the fact that a powerless third world mass cannot negotiate the price at which it valorises its assets. To some extent, encroachment wars couched under humanitarianism create the disastrous social conditions that implicate accumulation by the degree of destructiveness they cause.
The encroachment side of accumulation can be said to have thrived so far, further leveraging a market expansion side of accumulation beset by the crisis of financialisation. But development is not onlycombined and uneven, it is also organically tied together. This means that the rate at which capital metabolises man and nature will also rise in inverse proportion to the crisis of capital under financialisation. The growth process in middle income countries achieved so far as a concession related to shifting balance of forces with imperialism, will imply more dislocation wrought upon the poorer class countries. Many more countries are poised to undergo this metamorphosis to a state, which is the form of social organisation of militias plus American drones/military bases. Iran is one possible target, which would expand the car bomb corridors from the Fertile Crescent to Afghanistan. So far, capital successfully tested these new forms of social organisation in the periphery. At the expense of the working class everywhere, it has been nicely drawing the rewards of Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq for more than two decades. However, much like it tested other disasters before in the colonies and then applied them at home, in the defunctness of present day internationalist ideology and a western political economy that measures value creation from Eurocentric spectacles, capital might as well bring these experiments closer to home once again.[ED NOTES;THEY ARE!]

Dr Ali Kadri is a Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Kadri was visiting fellow in LSE’s Department of International Development and head of the Economic Analysis Section at the United Nations regional office for Western Asia. He is curently conducting research on the political economy of development in the Arab World
[ED NOTES;DR ALI MAKES EXCELLENT POINTS,BUT I TAKE MUCH ISSUE WITH THE FACT,HE'S CLOSELY TIED (OR AT LEAST PARADED) TO THE VERY SAME GLOBALIST AND IMPERIAL INTERESTS HE EXPOSES.HE IS WELL KNOWN TO ATTEND CFR,THIS ABOVE WAS CITED BY LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS,HES TIED TO M.E.I.(HOTBED OF ZIO ARABS) ,ALL GROUPS WICH PROMOTE AND ENDORSE POLICIES HE EXPOSES...SO IN A SENSE ITS LIKE HIS TALENT GOES TO WASTE,OTHER ARTICLES I'VE READ BY DR ALI IN PAST WERE.. The Recolonisation of the Arab world-Dr. Ali Kadri  ITS A GOOD READ..HE OFFERS A CRITIQUE OF MARX ..SMALL EXCERPT,DO READ IT AS WELL.. The real reason for colonisation has not changed, it is undertaken to strip the people of the third world of sovereignty over their resources. It is to allow the balance of forces behind the scenes to set the price of their primary commodities far below the social value necessary to reproduce the population and maintain living standards. In addition to this, wars, by dispensing of human beings, cheapen labour globally. The acquisition of third world labour by means of forced migration, which gets engaged in the capitalist production of a centre that has not initially borne the social costs of reproduction of the immigrant labour force, generates immense value and, hence, profit, insofar as it transfers grabbed value and depresses wages. In this ongoing endeavour, imperialism gets something for nothing- keeping buoyant its rate of profit.