Motivated by wealth, power and appeal, the capitalist-imperialist-patriarchal Establishment is primarily engaged with controlling the modes of extraction and abstraction; that is with ensuring privileged access to resources such as cheap labour, cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap care, as well as ensuring that this is no longer recognized as arbitrary and violent. It is not for nothing that Weberians are obsessed with practices of legitimation as the basis of social order. Maintaining social order and thus legitimating certain acts of violence as necessary, is the primary role of the state. Althusser was not wrong when he identified two major components of the state in capitalist societies as those of repression and ideology, but thereby ignored a major third aspect: its role in the accumulation of wealth.
If there is one lesson to be learnt from the close association between capitalism and fascism, it is that arbitrary violence is a two edged sword. On the one hand, it can force masses into compliance to provide cheap labour under the possible threat of being singled out for whatever (arbitrary) reason, but on the other hand, this fear requires continuous reinforcement which is expensive and ultimately counterproductive. The “never again” that followed the second World War II may have been sold as a purely moral motivation, it is obvious that the motives of wealth, power and appeal are obviously more important as morality is cheap and easily replaced but it is a really good façade to hide behind and the appeal-motive can absorb moral posturing as part of attracting admiration. The fact that the use of “never again (is now)” as part of a protest against the current genocide in Gaza is condemned as anti-Semitic by cynical western politicians and sycophantic pundits, proves that words are cheap and morality as such is worth very little.
Cheap morality is perhaps not as essential for the triad of exploitation (capitalism), domination (imperialism) and subjugation (patriarchy) as cheap food, cheap energy, cheap labour, cheap raw materials and cheap care, but it should be understood nonetheless as a useful by-product of the interplay between the modes of extraction and abstraction that characterize this triad. Morality is the façade of the Establishment that enables it to deflect attention away from its particular interests (which are always bound to the Estate). That is, the appeal to morality is much more difficult when the connections between the Establishment and the Estate are clearly articulated, i.e. as if modes of abstraction (e.g. universal ethics, universal morality) are presented as independent from modes of extraction.
We must thank the baffling stupidity of Donald Trump for the fact that we now know that the USA have an explicit interest in the exploitation of the Ukrainian estate as he himself articulated the link between supporting the Ukrainian war effort in exchange for American companies being able to make a profit out of extracting its resources. American taxpayers pay for the military support to the Ukraine, but the money is invested in above all the American military industrial complex of which billionaires are primary shareholders (managed by power brokers such as Black Rock). The companies that are going to exploit Ukrainian resources will also be American ones, with mostly billionaires as shareholders. Thus American taxpayer money is being funnelled to private billionaire bank accounts via a war in Ukraine to accumulate profits in a two-pronged movement of extortion and deception. “America First” and “MAGA” clearly refer to “Billionaires First” and “Making American Billionaires Richer Again” (MABRA) respectively.

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