Clash of Civilization, or Capital Accumulation?

Over the past three years, we have published several articles where we made a series of very ‘contrarian’ predictions on the new wars. Specifically, we claimed: (1) That direct U.S. intervention will conveniently if not intentionally ‘fail’ to stabilize the Middle East; (2) That the new wars will make oil not plenty and cheap, but scarce and expensive; (3) That the leading oil companies will profit greatly from the new environment of heightened instability and soaring oil prices; (4) That rising oil prices are likely to fuel global stagflation (stagnation together with inflation); and, (5) That the shift toward stagflation – should it occur – would not hinder accumulation but rather boost it, particularly for the largest corporate coalitions. When these claims were first made, they were greeted with a mixture of indifference and hostility. The conventional ‘postisms’ of ethnicity, race and culture pays little attention to capital accumulation, oil prices or inflation, and none at all to their analysis. By contrast, analysts of politics and economics deal extensively with such questions – but to them our arguments sounded like conspiratorial nonsense. As it turns out, the pundits got it wrong.