>>513226904
>surplus value is not a "weasel word."
Yes, value is a weasel word. Always. Just like capital. Money is not value. Price is not value either btw.
>It's the tangible profit extracted from labor with every commodity produced.
Financial profits come from money printing and from cutting costs (through cutting quality or cutting serving size or automating or moving production abroad to get production costs further away from the glut of domestic fiat currency and the inflationary effects on production costs which it would otherwise have).
>Capitalist warfare is the ultimate exploitation of this surplus. The West’s rhetoric of "freedom" and "democracy" masks the reality that its military aid is financed by the same profit-driven system that benefits directly from the war. This "imperial-capitalist logic" is, at its core, a system of surplus extraction.
The goal of war, for capitalism, is to get more people to adopt your fiat currency so you can spread it out and lower inflation while also creating demand and accelerating money velocity
>redistributing surplus.
Is this your high level abstraction way of saying getting the conquered population to adopt your fiat currency in place of theirs?
>The failures in Iraq and the Iran-Iraq conflict showed that this strategy is self-defeating when the bureaucratic costs become too high. The conflict in Ukraine is just the latest instance of this over-reach. Russia's relative advantage stems from a defense industry that is publicly owned and not beholden to the profit motive, allowing it to sustain its efforts where a profit-driven West cannot.
Russia is still capitalist and likewise runs on money creation. Very, very fast rate of money creation. Russia preserved her Soviet industry by intentionally keeping her currency weaker than others so its exports remain competitive. And also limiting / restricting what foreigners can buy and own in Russia. The sanctions are good for Russia's real economy but bad for Russian capitalism