THE SHAH OF IRAN, IS HE A MARXIST?
Pachter, Henry
At the press conference in Tehran—while solemnly announcing the raise of posted oil prices to $11.6 a barrel and the government take (correctly called royalty because it is the king who receives...
...But just as the Great Revolution of the Sansculottes did not bring to power the third estate as a whole but only the bourgeoisie, so the national revolutions of our time have brought to power not those who are hungry and destitute but their managers and functionaries, Djilas's "newclass...
...Their only problem has been what to do with their wealth...
...The nationalist form may actually develop some forces of production in underdeveloped countries where the economy still has to "catch up" with the more advanced types of industrialism...
...We must compare the price of oil to the price of other sources of energy...
...But neither is productive except in its own area of activity—the refinement of codes of ownership and the development of management techniques permitting the growth of •the organization without necessarily contributing to the growth of production, or to the improving of goods and services that fill genuine consumer needs...
...Special Assembly, consequently, we heard a lot about sovereignty, rights and ownership, but very little about the needy millions in the least developed and endowed countries, who are the real victims of the general price increase...
...This will lead to a system of COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 369 "postindustrial feudalism" where most of the consumers' needs are being filled but actual power is in the hands of the national and international managers...
...We shall have Rudolf Hilferding's General Kartell in a consumer culture but without the charms of his 19th-century heritage...
...His Highness, most likely, has never read the third volume of Das Kapital...
...Are we going to be dominated by the sheikhs in the end...
...Nor can they sell their stock without depressing the market that measures their wealth...
...they need current income...
...There was a time when such measures looked like a help either to the wellbeing or to the ego of some new countries...
...The representatives of Iran and of Algeria were vying for the leadership in pulling together a united front of claimant countries and pushing through the most sweeping resolutions, which have only one drawback—they cannot be implemented and therefore will diminish the prestige of the United Nations...
...I believe it is inevitable that these big organizations will both fight each other and cooperate with each other...
...They even have gone the Western imperialists one better: they exploit their economic monopoly for political purposes...
...If it costs $7 to liquefy coal, the $3 price for oil we have been enjoying so long is unrealistic from the viewpoint of the royal monopolist...
...The cosmopolitan form may, thanks to its size and its all-embracing organization, actually promote technological advances in its subordinate units...
...They continued to accumulate riches, and at least some of them even let their subjects share in the bonanza—to some extent...
...We have seen demonstrations of this power in the recent Middle East crisis...
...In Europe, where the gasoline tax is heavy, this might mean the surrender of all the highways built with this revenue...
...It is as simple as that...
...The sheikhs tremble for their thrones and dare not defy the orders of terrorists...
...Meanwhile, their successors would have to take care of the Palestinian refugees and deal with their minorities—Druses and Christian Kopts, Kurds and black Sudanese, Berbers and others...
...These owner-nationalists, whose power is based on territorial sovereignty, now are locked in a bitter fight against the multinational corporations whose power is not tied to any particular nation...
...At the press conference in Tehran—while solemnly announcing the raise of posted oil prices to $11.6 a barrel and the government take (correctly called royalty because it is the king who receives it) to $7—Shah Mohammed of Iran said: We must base this matter on a new concept...
...Whenever there is a limited supply of some resource, for instance of land, Marx explains, the price of the product will rise high enough for the least efficient producer to make a profit...
...Still, who needs jobs if the foreigners provide comfort in the form of royalties...
...Neither the oil, copper, and bauxite countries nor the Soviet bloc were prepared to admit any obligation, and an American proposal to create a fund for emergency aid was not even placed on the agenda...
...At the recent U.N...
...The same goes for mines and,though Marx wrote before their existence, also for oil wells...
...Since the transnational corporations have become a symbol of neocolonial domination, it would be better to nationalize them in all countries...
...It has been estimated thatthey own something like $80 billion in stocks, bonds, and currency abroad, and that their yearly income will rise from $17 billion last year to $60 billion in years to come...
...This is no longer the case...
...What have the Ba'ath regimes done for Iraq and Syria...
...The price should be the minimum you would have to pay for the extraction of shale, the liquefication of coal...
...They only invite envy...
...Those who claim the power must assume the responsibility...
...They do not develop any new forces of production...
...They cannot eat or drink the oil...
...Whether state-owned or private, their new organizations are essentially capitalistic...
...They may, however, not be able to keep it because the owner of the land will force them to yield it in the form of rent...
...Historically they are born dead...
...NO, IT WILL NOT be the sheikhs who will rule the world...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 367 Clever...
...The Special Assembly also saw the nauseating spectacle of the Western governments fighting, not to protect the interests of their consumer populations but, the Transnational Corporations, actually yielding on important points of international organization in return for the deletion, in the final resolution, of a clause that would have placed expropriation under the exclusive jurisdiction of the expropriating country...
...The new imperalism is no longer economic...
...Here, I think, they are mistaken, and the Western nations who think it is better to deal with the sheikhs than with gangsters are mistaken, too...
...But they still did not use this new wealth in a capitalistic way, to pump it back into their own economy, to let industry grow and provide Bedouins with jobs...
...they are both parasitical, neither is creative...
...At first, they invested in the London stock market, where another magic mechanism seemed to provide them with dividends and capital gains, again without putting in any work of their own...
...They command no secret that could 368 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS make their power superior to that of others...
...Underdeveloped countries buy weapons, build nuclear bombs, and use economic monopolies for political purposes...
...Only then would it be possible to negotiate about the establishment of true international agencies for the management and distribution of the world's resources in the interests of all nations...
...When the market sagged, the kings had second thoughts: why let the Westerners take out all that oil if its value can only increase in the ground...
...It is a repetition, of sorts, of the old rivalry between conservative protectionist landowners and cosmopolitan laissez-faire traders and industrialists...
...370 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...
...Shah Mohammed, King Faisal, and the other oil potentates could reason that in not getting this royalty they were being cheated and (pardon the expression) exploited like proletarians...
...The revolution has not given the resources of the earth to the peoples of all countries but only to the managers who are able to identify their own position with the cause of a nation, especially the nation on whose soil the facilities happen to be located...
...There is another reason why the new empires may not last even as long as the empires of Western capitalism...
...John Philby has reported that king Ibn Saud said to him on his death bed: "A man's riches and his children are his enemies...
...They can charge that the oil-consuming countries have been living off them too long, and they now could resolve that this would no longer be so...
...By every definition of the word, we now have imperialism in reverse: the exploitation of the West by Arab and other monopolists...
...How much it costs to exploit these other sources of energy should be the basis for the price of oil...
...Socialists, however, cannot be satisfied with nationalization and with international raw-materials cartels...
...So the sheikhs increase the price for oil to unreasonable heights, not because they have any illusions about the workability of the new monopoly system, but because they think that this defiance of the West will be accepted, by the terrorists whom they fear, as a patriotic move in the war of liberation...
...Special Assembly on Raw Materials, the excolonial countries have even asked for "reparations" in the amount of all customs duties and taxes that have been levied on imported oil over the years...
...For a long time they have stood in awe of the clever foreigner who knew how to extract this liquid from their soil...
...But some saw it coming when more • and more sophisticated weapons were delivered to Bedouin armies, which could hardly use them properly-- ,but are learning fast or, as the weapons grow more sophisticated and idiot-proof, no longer have to acquire high technical skills to use them...
...Let the West and Japan work themselves into a frenzy, consuming ever more and more oil, thereby making themselves more and more dependent on new supplies and thereby increasing the value of what was left...
...but his words could have been taken verbatim from this source, in which Marx explains the workings of ground rent and monopoly prices...
...and hence we shall have stagnation, monopoly, cartelization, distribution of the advantages of the system among those who are in, and new bars against those who are out...
...But this economic empire pales by the side of the political muscle that the monopoly of oil confers on those who know how to use it...
...Now this has changed, and all the oil producers needed to do was to create their own monopoly, the cartel that now is known as OPEC—the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries...
...They are purely parasitical and rest on ownership rather than function...
...In all their bloody history the Western imperialists never have accumulated riches at a rate anywhere near the oil sheikhs' accumulation of wealth...
...If the world is governed by monopoly capitalists, then it is better to be a monopoly capitalist than a sucker...
...The oil corporations now have created their Frankenstein monster...
...Maybe this will prove as true of the new imperialists as of the old ones...
...One need not decide which of these two forms of exploitation is more and which less moral...
...The recent surge of nationalism, the expropriations and so-called nationalizations, the establishment of independent political units, the formation of cartels for the exploitation of the consuming countries—all this some see as the new revolt of the masses, the insurrection of the world's poor apd disinherited against dependence...
...It increases the danger of war every day...
...They are about to invest money in the distribution of oil products...
...These are civilized, feudal societies whose people have not been spoiled by any Western standards of worthiness through achievement...
...By leading one revolution, the governments of some countries apparently were trying to ward off another...
...it is political and nationalist...
...If the sheikhs wish to join the gangsters, or think that this is the only way to save their thrones, they should look out for the consequences themselves...
...The old imperialists usually operated the other way around: using political influence and military superiority to acquire wealth and secure for themselves the natural resources of the earth...
...Producers on more fertile land or producers using more efficient machinery will pocket the difference between their own low production cost and the high production cost of the marginal producer...
...They may join the Bao Dai and the fat Fuad in some Riviera resort...
...Let the sheikhs defy their own gangsters, let their thrones crumble, let the gangsters rule in the Arab countries and ruin them...
...Anyway, if and when the rulers have to flee to the West, their wealth will be immunized...
...The sheikhs are sitting on top of valuable merchandise...
...Until recently, Western consumers benefited from competition among the producers...
...At the U.N...
...To some extent this is so...
...they will have their own tankers, refineries, storage facilities, and gasoline stations in the West...
...They may also invest in other branches of industry, and the big corporations, anxious to be on the side of the mighty, have made them interesting offers of partnership...
...It will be terrorists and gangsters, blackmailers and irregular armies...
Vol. 21 • July 1974 • No. 3
