The permanent imperialist war is raging in every corner of the world and, by now, it amounts to a proper world war

“The war which is coming
Is not the first one. There were
Other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.”

Bertolt Brecht

War is raging anywhere there is even just a single trace of oil, gas or any other strategic raw material,. Even the conflict between Israel and Hamas, – which last round has just concluded – although on the background of a long-standing and unresolved territorial question, has further intensified from when important gas caps in the Gaza Marine depths have been discovered. [1]
Therefore, we would be tempted to conclude that there is nothing new in this last wave of conflicts which, going from Ukraine to Iraq, from Gaza Strip to Libya and, factually, to whole Africa, do not spare any continent and involve all the most important imperialistic powers. But it is not so or, at least, it is so only partly, in the sense that to the usual causes, at least other two have added, specific of this phase of the structural crisis in which, from some decades, the capitalistic way of production is thrashing: the failure of the monetary policies implemented by the most important central banks, in anti-cyclic function, and the by now acclaimed trend to the permanent depression. [2]
Like we know, all the most important central banks, and in particular the Federal Reserve and the Japanese one, in order to face the crisis blown up in 2007, have flooded with liquidity the world economic-financial system but by far not with the expected results. The most recent data point out an economic cycle still in substantial stagnation. Even decreasing in Europe and in all the rising countries (BRICS), included China, “where”, the economist and 2001Prize Nobel  Michael Spence informs us, “the production can have temporary flares, but it remains in a decreasing trend.” [3]
But the most significant case is given just by USA. Although the Federal Reserve has been, among all the central banks, the one that more than any other has poured liquidity in the economic-financial system: “The growth – Spence says on – is weak and uncertain…as GNP contradictory numbers from a trimester to another prove.” [4]
And, first of all, as a few days ago also the current FED president Janet Yallen admitted: “ The unemployment rate stays meaningfully over what most of the Federal Reserve members consider normal in the long period, and the resources are underutilized…The slow rhythm of wage increase reflects the difficulties of work market.” [5]
That is as to say that the monetary policy pursued until now by central banks has not given the desired results. Romans would say: parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (the mountain has brought forth such a ridiculous mouse!).

A ghost is wafting around the world: the debt

Banks have been saved by transforming their debt in a public debt, but because there has not been the real economy increase or, at least, not to an extent that it has been possible to compensate the monetary mass emitted in surplus, the whole operation has resolved in a stratospheric production of a new debt. “The bank of international regulations – F. Rubini wrote last March – estimates that from 2007 the global economy debt has increased of the 40% to 100 billion dollars. The big central banks have answered to a debt crisis by helping the system to generate more and more. It reflects specularly in the form of assets (that is of credits) in the budgets of Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank or of Bank of England. With its politics of currency creation, the FED has produced and introduced about a trillion dollars; only in the last year, its balance sheet quintupled…The ECB one, often disapproved because it does not help enough financial system, has triplicated (only recently it has started to decline). And also the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan have created currency in such an unprecedented amount.” [6]
more than 7 years after the subprime crisis and after we do not know how many monetary measures and countermeasures, indiscriminate cuts to direct and indirect wages and millions of unemployed, the machine is still stationary at the starting point, with, an extra huge debt in the engine that sooner or later someone will even pay.

Dollar seigniorage

And it is just looking for someone who will have to face this situation, that it comes into play the production control of energetic sources and of the other strategic raw materials, because their price is one of the most important macro-economic variables underlying the production and the management of monetary mass and then also of the debt and its derivatives. In effect, since the prices of energetic products and of every raw materials with a strategic importance are expressed mainly in dollars, any variations reflect unavoidably on the USA monetary mass value, too.
So, for instance, if oil price increases, by considerably halting or decreasing, thanks to a war, its production, who will have to buy it at the new price, at the same conditions, will also have to buy a higher amount of dollars and in this way will also absorb a share of the monetary mass emitted in surplus by the American central bank, that, ultimately, is nothing more than a share of the USA debt. This is the mechanism through which the so called dollar seigniorage is exerted, furthermore somewhere else already described in more details. [7]
To avoid easy and misleading simplifications, we immediately need to say, however, that it is not only the American bourgeoisie to benefit to the detriment of the entire bourgeoisie of the rest of the world. Because it is a matter of the system on which the process of price formation on a world scale is based, actually the advantages and the disadvantages are given by the position occupied, time by time, by every fraction of it in the world economic-financial system, with reference to the economic cycle tendency.
Let’s take Russia as an example. Even it, as a producing country, is surely interested, just like the USA, so that on the world market a price of the energetic products higher than the one coming only on the base of the law of supply and demand will be formed and so, for example, it will support an eventual war caused by the Americans, promoting this upward process. But if this same war, according to its results, should also involve the risk of a radical change of its position on the world market of energetic products and on the currency one, for the benefit of other producing countries or only of the USA, its interests will irreconcilably contrast with the Washington ones. And this is the risk taken in the case, for example, Ukraine got completely out from its influence area. So, on the one hand, between the two powers there is, at least theoretically, an objective agreement of interests, but on the other hand, there are also strong reasons of conflict. With this crisis and lots of dollars getting round, as we have seen, to search a last resort payer, for Russia, for BRICS countries, like for all the countries that, not having a currency accepted as a way of international payment, must, in order to settle all their exchanges, even different from those inherent to energetic products, use, grudgingly, dollar, the risk to end up being the last resort payer of the USA debt has become very high, despite the common interest in an oil price higher than the one that would set up without extra-economic disturbances. In other words, because of the crisis, the dollar seigniorage has become by now too onerous also for the one who, until some time ago, has anyhow considerably benefited from it. In many senses, today there is a resurgence of the same context, on a much bigger scale, because of which, years ago, the current Eurozone countries were forced to create, first, a common coin of account (EMS) and then the Euro. [8]

Russia sells treasuries and buys gold

Moreover, it is the same Putin who confirms us that just the supervened untenableness of the dollar seigniorage is giving strength to the current conflicts, for almost all the countries whose economy is based on export, particularly of strategic raw materials. “I know – he has recently declared during a press conference – that many European leaders (that is the leaders of the countries with which Russia has most part of its commercial exchanges ) would like to suspend sanctions against us.” And then: “We will try to sell our oil in rubles. Dollar supremacy has become damaging.” [9] Where is tacit: above all for European countries. He wants in this way to stress that there is more convergence of interests between its country and these last ones than between them and the USA, and then that they have no advantage to line up themselves with these last ones in the Ukrainian sequence of events, lived by Russia as an American operation whose aim is to break up the axis – nowadays essentially commercial – uniting Berlin, and a great part of Eurozone countries, to Moscow and Beijing. An axis that, if it was reinforced, it could be the fulcrum on which to leverage in order to give birth to a new regulation of world commerce and to a new system of international payments, not anymore based on the dollar. It would be, as it is highlighted also in the editorial of the magazine ‘Limes’, n. 8/2014: “A rewriting of the rules of world commerce: where  the destiny of the dollar, the real strategic weapon of Washington, is at stake.” [10]
A too big danger for the USA, so that they could not stand twiddling their thumbs. To remove Ukraine from Moscow influence in order to block the most important way through which Russian methane gets to Western Europe and to open other ways in order to substitute it with the one coming from Caucasian area producing countries, and, in a more or less near future, eventually also from the same USA, [11] is for these last ones of an essential  importance. In effect, if the operation, as it seems by now very uncertain, was successful, the USA would catch two birds with one stone: they would isolate their still most dangerous antagonist and, at the same time, would bring back Berlin and its allies under their wing, breaking that axis threatening to deprive them of their best strategic weapon.
So, it was even expected that Russia would have answered by reinforcing its commercial pacts with China, [12] by taking back Crimea, and by safeguarding, by supporting the Russian-speaking separatist movement and the control of Donbass, the richest and economically most developed Ukrainian area. Meanwhile, it has begun to liquidate a part of its dollar reserves [13] by selling the USA treasures ( Treasury bills) in order to buy gold. Just in the last month of July, it bought: “…Almost 10 tons, the weight of five trucks, for a value of 400 million of dollars. This is the amount of the yellow metal bought in July by the Russian central bank, that is now among the first five in the world for owned gold reserves, after the USA, Germany, Italy and France.” [14]
A sale that wants to be, at the same time, a kind of counter-sanction against the ones promulgated by the USA and a call for its commercial partners to make the same, with a view to abandoning the dollar, by replacing it, at least in direct exchanges, with rubles, euros, yen and yuan, or, as China demands more and more persistently, with a coin of account, such as Bancor of Keynesian memory. [15]
Meanwhile, it grins and bears it, face to the bombings made by the so called alliance of willing countries, captained, as usual, by the USA, of the oil zones, controlled by ISIL – the self-styled Islamic caliphate -, situated both in Syrian and Iraqi territory, waiting from their demolitions, a total production decrease of Middle-East oil and a stall, if not at all a downtrend reversing of oil price, caused by its demand decrease, due to the crisis and to the supply increase, obtained thanks to the newest extraction techniques. [16]
Of course, current narration tends to connect this conflict, as moreover every conflicts in progress today,  to a specific controversy (religious, territorial, ethnic, tribal, etc.), in order to hide its real stakes, that are the entire system of international payments and, with it, the control of the main macro-economic variables, underlying  the mechanisms of parasitic surplus value appropriation, extorted from the proletariat on a world scale. In other words, in order to hide that they spring out, ultimately, from irreconcilable contradictions, immanent to the capitalist accumulation process in this historical phase and that, by now, given the stakes, each of them is actually a chapter of what we can consider a single big world war. A war whose only certain result is that, however, only proletarians will pay its very high price. Both of the losing countries and of the winning ones.

Notes

[1] In this respect, we quote here a part of the article that, in the light of the successive events, we could define prophetic, by Margherita Piccioni, published on Limes n. 5/2007, ‘Il gas di Gaza, l’ultima spiaggia’: “While the rupture between Abu Mazen’s historical PNA and Hamas has created an unprecedented vacuum management in the Palestinian field, it is in full swing a negotiation, that Tony Blair, in its new shoes of peace builder, sent by the Quartet, does not hesitate to define ‘historical, in order to strengthen relations between Abu Mazen and Olmert.’ But it risks actually to become historical, in a negative sense, first of all for Gaza inhabitants, who could see suddenly fall down their dream to access a day a better quality of life, thanks to the gas resources verified seven years ago by the British Gas group in the Palestinian offshore overlooking the Strip, become over time a more and more precious resource. And verified in such quantities – 40 billion cubic meters – sufficient to satisfy the Gaza central fuel supply requirement, included the furniture to the sea desalination plant, preserving a large fringe reserved to export…But the negotiation to which Blair refers anticipates a very different prospect: the result, decided in a limited and coded assembly, will be, in details, a furniture program that destines to Israel gas needs the whole possible estimated gas  production of Gaza Marine deposit in the next fifteen years…More simply, this is an operation turned in solving Israel urgent budget and energetic security problems and in supporting the economic and commercial interests of Anglo-American and international firms, attracted in the country by the forthcoming boom in gas sector.”
[2] G. Fontana – “Uno spettro si aggira per il mondo: la depressione permanente” – http://www.istitutoonoratodamen.it/joomla/sullacrisi/291-spettroperma
[3] E. Occorsio – “Basta con i muscoli dei parametri UE” – La Repubblica, August 14^th, 2014.
[4] Ib.
[5] “La FED lascia i tassi invariati. Ridotti gli acquisti di bond.” – http://www.repubblica.it/economia/2014/09/17/news/la_fed_lascia_i_tassi_invariati-96014144
[6] F. Fubini – “Yuan, rublo e real: finisce la corsa dei Bric, le svalutazioni presentano il conto all’euro.” – La Repubblica – Affari & Finanza, March 17^th, 2014.
[7] For further in-depth analysis on the relation existing among the USA public debt, FED monetary politics and oil price, see: “Il saliscendi del prezzo del petrolio ovvero il dominio del virtuale sul reale” – http://www.istitutoonoratodamen.it/joomla/sullacrisi/190-petrolioreale
[8] See: “L’euro della discordia” – http://www.istitutoonoratodamen.it/joomla/sullacrisi/187-eurodiscordia
[9] N. Lombardozzi – “La sfida di Putin all’Occidente riparte da Yalta” – La Repubblica, August 15th, 2014.
[10] Limes n. 8/2014 – “Obama e la camionetta di Mao” – pag. 27.
[11] In the last few days we have had the news that at the end of summer the USA oil production has resulted equal to 11,5 million, as the Saudi Arabia one. On the Ukrainian events, see also: G. Greco – “Ucraina, cronaca di una deriva annunciata” – http://www.istitutoonoratodamen.it/joomla/internazionale/57/312-ucrainaderiva
[12] Last May 19th, in full Ukrainian crisis, Russia and China concluded a commercial pact, envisaging the furniture for thirty years, from 2018, of methane, extracted in Sakhalin area, for 38 billion cubic meters (at the price of about 350 dollars pro cubic meter, against 485 dollars charged on the European market), as well as the pipeline building for 4,000 Km and stocking facilities. Projects that will be co-financed by China with a credit of 50 billion dollars.
[13] Nowadays computable in about 470 billion of dollars.
[14] F. De Palo – “Russia, con la Guerra in Ucraina vende titoli USA e compra oro” – Il Fatto quotidiano – September 1^st, 2014.
[15] In 1944 in Bretton Woods, Keines, fully  capturing the enormous advantages that the USA would have had if an international payment system based on dollar was born, as then it happened, suggested, unsuccessfully, his own  system, considering the creation (with sums paid by any countries and calculated every  three years on the base of each of them’s international commerce amount) of a clearing house between debts and credits of any country participating in the pact, regulated through a coin of account that would have been called, to specify its peculiar function, exactly, Bancor. 
[16] Between 2012 and the present day, the oil price has decreased from 125 to 95 dollars per barrel and the supply on world markets of even 3,5 million barrels per day.