Nuclear energy as a weapon in the imperialist competition between states
1. Nuclear energy: power for capitalist growth ...
All modern life uses energy, especially electricity. Nuclear energy really is about the supply of energy. Opponents of nuclear energy think it surely can't be true that they have to accept radioactive contamination in their energy supply. They are right that they are expected to put up with a monstrosity; but they are mistaken that it is about their supply. Then nuclear energy would really be a paradox: if it was about their supply, then the critics of nuclear power would be right to appeal to the politicians, again and again, that they can't ask their people to want nuclear power.
It is about the supply of electricity, even to the remotest inhabitant in the most faraway town, but at the same time it is about the comprehensive supply of the capitalist economy with energy; and that is what electricity is for, so that even the least involved citizen functions as a resource who is accessable, available and activatable for this economy. Without electricity, a modern state can't have flexible workers, consumers with the Internet, families raising young, citizens with TV, or a people to govern. Supplying electricity to people in their role as a resource for business and the state is obviously not the same as supplying them with night lights and cold drinks; that it is not their supply is showed particularly blatantly by the impertinence of nuclear energy, but also by the fact that a business is made out of supplying them, that they have to pay dearly for electricity and that it is turned off when they can't pay for it.
Their electricity supply is used by – and made useful for – the capitalist economy. It is about its supply with electricity and nuclear energy. What is the capitalist economy's need for energy? The capitalist economy's performance target and measure is growth. That does not mean the production of more goods. The invested capital in each case must both enlarge the given property of a capitalist with profit, and then enlarge the capital again, and on and on; so it is the abstract growth of monetary wealth. As unlimited as this capitalist purpose of the economy is, so is the measure of its energy needs. This is not disproved by strategies to “decouple” capital growth and energy consumption. Then it is a matter of lowering the energy cost of growth, thus increasing profit-making and growth, thus energy demand, even if it then grows relatively slowly. So to satisfy this demand for growth, the inhabitants of a capitalist nation must accept and pay for the sort of energy business geared towards it. 2. ... is a state program: National energy for competition on the world market
The state looks after the energy supply. This is a special sphere in the “free market” system, where usually supply is dependent on private capital being able to make a business out of it. The state wants this free economic activity – but not with energy. And precisely because the state wants capitalism. Firstly, it wants growth. Secondly, this growth consists of nothing but competing capitals which only produce what is profitable for them and only as long as they are able to profitably survive in their competition. The state does not want to expose energy to the same risk, because without energy there would be no capital to compete and the entire nation couldn't function. Especially since, thirdly, not only sometimes one or another capital is eliminated from the competition, but the capitals regularly produce a general crisis. If there should be a lack of freely available energy, there would be no recovery and generally no growth. Because the state wants the growth of capital, it ensures its energy basis against the risks to growth posed by the competition of the capitals for growth. Incidentally, this is a first argument as to why the cost argument of an individual business does not have the last word in the energy business. It is not adequate to counter the false advertising for nuclear power that it is cheap with opposing calculations.
The state ensures the energy supply for growth, but that does not mean it is done by state enterprises. It is done by private companies like Tokyo Electric Power Company or Pacific Gas and Electric; huge capitals which make a huge profit supplying power to the entirety of the business world. The state obligates these supply providers to calculate their costs and profits; on the other hand, it assures them profitable selling prices and generally protects their business results: they are “too big to fail.”
It is about energy for growth and therefore about cost-effective energy for the fewer number of capitals remaining. The lower a capital's energy costs, the better a capital calculates the profit that it gets out of its workers and the market. (Cheaper energy for the diminishing capitals versus profitable selling prices for the energy monopolies as the guarantee of the supply – this is an intra-capitalist irrationality that the state deals with).
Energy and energy prices which are favorable for the costs of all the goods and services of all the capitals: that has a very different role in the world market, in the economic competitiveness of nations. With cheap prices, the companies and the state want to conquer the good money of all other countries; with this money, with the growing capital, with credit, the companies and the state also want to buy and exploit foreign sources of growth as well. It is not a division of labor with other countries, but a competition against them, and they also want the same thing for themselves. In this competition, the energy prices in a nation are either good as their weapon or not; and the reliable availability of energy is not only the aforementioned concern of the state, but a must in the competition with other states for the growth that the nation wants. These are reasons a capitalist state expects a lot of its people. 3. Imperialist energy policy: “energy security” through domestic mixed energy and the control of the energy states
For this world economic competition of the nation, nuclear energy first has the same benefit and purpose as other forms of energy on or under the national territory: disposal over this energy is safe and secure from the nation's competitors. The special feature of nuclear energy is that a nation disposes over only a limited amount of raw materials, so it's just a matter of national technical abilities to gain a very large and expandable amount of energy from them. Even if the nation has to acquire the initial volume from overseas, it then has a bit of self-sufficiency. And that's what competing states seek in the long run, even if they seek self-sufficiency neither in their policies towards the world market or their energy.
A state uses every means to become a world market power. The crucial energy for it is still today oil and gas, which is drilled abroad under foreign soveriegnties. Indeed, politicians' sayings about “our dependence” on “foreign oil” are well known. In energy, all the leading world market nations both want to use the global market and are critical of it. Basically, a nation which gets its money power from business with the world of states and wants to make it the basis of its political power at the expense of its competitors, does not want oil to expose its capitalism to the money interests and power interests of other states that are oriented towards the same thing.
The program to resolve this contradiction in favor of the nation, to get the world market supply and eliminate dependency on supplier countries, is called, “creating energy security.” That sounds as innocuously technical as if an electrician said it. But it is imperialism: the foreign authorities and their energy capitals should be secure suppliers of oil and gas and nothing else; oil states, gas states, transit countries which exist only for “our” demand – one notices that the conventional name expresses a reality. A state like the US or Japan does not want to have to pay tribute to their demands for national growth, their price demands should be expendable for the US or Japan, and it should entail no dependence for the US or Japan that these authorities are the owners of their energy sources; they should be overlords in their countries only to ensure the safe delivery of energy at a price acceptable for American or Japan's growth: their energy security. To push this through is a) a program of economic competition and b) a program of political-military blackmail.
The economic competition program is: the US as a customer wants to turn its dependence on energy suppliers outwards: oil states, gas states should be dependent on supplying the US, namely on revenue, thus they should also be blackmailed by the price. For this, the US and other big imperialists pursue a “mixed” energy policy, again such a nondescript name: the US uses the whole world's marketable energy sources from all the supplying countries together, so that it is relatively independent of the specific natural resources of any specific supplier country. Then, the program lets the raw materials countries earn money and ascend in the world market with their oil, etc., to use it against them. So “energy” is a weapon of competition; and therein nuclear energy: the big imperialist alternative of self-sufficiency. A source of energy apart from the world market, available for the US at prices fit for the US's capital growth in the world market competition: the “economic efficiency” of nuclear power measures up for the nation in these world market profits, not in the operational cost of nuclear power as such in comparison to other kinds of energy – an error of the anti-nuclear counter-calculators about the basic math of their opponents.
The program for the political competition to use foreign states in the way that the US uses the energy suppliers requires bringing their political will and their state power under its control. The headlines under which this power question goes are war on terror, Nato, “energy Nato”...
A national energy policy that produces “energy security” is also imperialism: it wants to have command over the energy wealth of other countries as if it were its own. Where oil is “our oil,” it is treated as a hostile act if an OPEC is founded to ensure oil revenues for the oil producing countries and their national advancement; Germany and the EU explain it to be “unacceptable blackmail” if Russia and Ukraine argue about amounts and prices, instead of supplying “us” – it wants them to be suppliers of the EU and quarrel only with each other over the revenue. The economic interests of a world market power is always a political power question between itself and other states. 4. The state's nuclear program: a question of power
It is now clear: nuclear energy is already in its civilian use a state's weapon in the competition between nations. A nuclear program is a question of international power, even if nuclear weapons aren't built, as in Japan or Germany; a nuclear state, which industrially dominates nuclear technology, can also build them.
The national budget creates and guarantees nuclear capital, its profits and growth. So it guarantees nuclear energy and nuclear technology as a capitalist business; this includes dealing with the danger of nuclear energy as a “risk” and an experiment: nuclear fission and its chain reaction release enormous energy, radiation and fission products. In a reactor, the same technical principle as the A-bomb's destructive force is used, however “moderated,” i.e. the chain reaction is braked so that the released energy is regulated and usable, the radiation and fission products encased; this means, however, that radiation and fission products which are destructive to organic life are inevitable in the normal course of operation; if the brakes fail, the chain reaction is an inexorably destructive energy like a bomb; radiation destroys the encasing material and makes it into scrap metal. A nuclear state knows all this and handles it as an experiment in a double sense: a) nuclear energy is so important that it will take a chance on these dangers, which is why they are called “risks,” and b) it organizes the operation of the nuclear industry like a test drive, sees what happens and brings under control what it can. Each day of successful risk management at the same time elevates the risk through the radioactive contamination of the safeguard equipment and preserves the danger as increasing waste.
The state carries out this incalculable danger and the certainty of harm for the capital location and its human resources as a calculation with its land and people. First, it claims its people and land as resources for national growth and its security policy: they are ultimately there to service growth and the nation; on the other hand, the state continually checks whether or not they are too damaged to function as a useful people, and it controls the damage if necessary with “limit values” and security measures; danger warnings to people are thus on the one hand superluous, on the other hand, the population also confuses them with being for their health.
With the nuclear energy program, the recklessness of the purpose of the growth of capital and the ruthlessness of the state to fight out this national goal in the state competition becomes a demand on the people which is calculated as a risk similar to war.
These are the gains which seem worth it for the state: 1. Mixed energy, including nuclear power, creates energy security; 2. exports of nuclear and other energy technologies take in/out the revenue of other nations; this is at the same time 3. power over the energy state basis of other nations, a dependency which states fight against. These are the energy-imperialistic calculations which the opposing calculations of anti-nuclear activists do not understand.
As harmless as wind energy and solar energy are dressed up as, for energy policy-makers they fulfil the same imperialistic use value qualities as nuclear energy: energy that has the geological good fortune of being available inside the nation and is purely a question of national technology, or in other words, the size of its capital. It is about a new energy security-weapon and indeed it is the same as a business on the world market. As to whether this adds up, capitalism decides whether wind energy is helpful! Another a mistake of the opponents of nuclear energy.
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