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The Collapse of Yemen's Sovereignty by Permanent Violence: A Means of Both Production and Consumption of Value
Abstract
To defend the thesis of “permanent violence” in Yemen that leads to state failure and in the context of the structural crisis of capital (where Keynesianism has reached its structural limits), this article will look at the Yemeni war through a Marxist lens. It aims to analyze the deep sociological roots of the Yemeni war through the laws of capital as presented by Marx and to show why the Yemeni war is a goal in itself for Imperialism. Three main laws of capital are considered: (1) the general law of capital accumulation developed in Volume I of Das Kapital, (2) the law of the “transformation” of value into price as presented in Volume III of Das Kapital, and (3) the law relating to the contradiction between production and consumption (leading to a crisis of overproduction and a crisis of underconsumption) that was developed by Marx in the Grundrisse, in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and by contemporary Marxist author, Istvan Mészáros . All of these laws are all tied to the Marxist “law of value” which refers to the idea that socially necessary labor time acts as the ultimate regulating force in exchange and production under Imperialism.
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News sources or think-tanks that have defined Yemen as a “failed state” include: Fund for Peace, Haaretz, al Jazeera, MEPC (Middle East Policy Council), crisisgroup.org, CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies).
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