Assimilate or Die

Israel's attack on Iran is driving up the price of oil—a small price to pay to open Iran's markets

In December 2023, British papers reported that the cost of policing Just Stop Oil protests had cost the “public purse” £20 million—a number which would have been significantly smaller had the Conservative government not all but outlawed our freedom of assembly, facilitating the police to arrest small groups the minute they set foot on public roads to march. This figure, a hefty sum to your average punter, was used to berate JSO for their tactics, accusing these civilians of draining public money.

It is four days into Israel’s aggressive assault on Iran, and the oil markets are spooked, with the price of a barrel rising 10%. Yet not one single paper, journalist, or talking head has pointed to that extra £6–7 million spent on oil per day as a wasteful drain on the British public purse.¹

Today, four days into the assault, that is an additional £24 million minimum spent on oil. But instead of berating Israel for draining our resources, or pushing them to the table, the British government is sending war planes to the region and refuses to rule out aiding Netanyahu’s maniacal threat to “burn” Tehran.

Come on, capitalism! Show me that invisible hand! Spank the naughty boys who are playing fast and loose with market stability! If you cannot bring yourself to proclaim that we cannot afford the loss of lives, of 55,000+ Palestinians, at least take the stage to denounce this reckless pressure on the public purse! Bring forth the intelligence of your rationality and condemn this affront on our liberty, on our consumption! Punish these inefficient ideologues who have abandoned the regime of goods and services!

Ah, but capitalism is at work here. What a great shame (more so than the bodies of men, women, children, wildlife, olive groves) for some of the world’s biggest reserves of oil, gas and other resources to be under siege by an anti-Western Supreme leader! What a waste for the consumer market of the Iranian people to be sanctioned into financial meaninglessness thanks to one man! If only, if only we could liberate the bodies in the Earth and the bodies on the street and integrate them, truly integrate them, into our wonderful, global system.²

War becomes the cost of intervention, paid with by bodies, the currency of assimilation, an assimilation which is merely a mask for consumption, for feeding bodies into the colonial wood chipper after which they exit as pieces of themselves, bereft of tradition and language and family. The slave buys her freedom by paying off the man who profited from her body; the oppressed buy the right to no longer be exterminated by agreeing to play by the rules. Starbucks opens up shop. McDonalds follows suit. Foreign companies mine the guts of the land once cared for. The cost of liberty is repatriated in consumption. “The settler's work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native,” wrote Fanon.³

Assimilate or die, roars capitalism. Hand over your body and the bodies in your charge or be killed.

£24 million is a small price to pay for the triumph of violence; for liberty; for swallowing dead women and children so the economy can swallow up vast reserves of oil and gas and make dependents out of those who survive—capturing them in order to furnish them with something to lose and nothing to gain.⁴

55,000 Palestinians. 224 Iranians. 500,000 West Papuans. 770,000 Sudanese children under five suffering from the deadliest form of malnutrition this year alone.

That’s the cost of the public purse.

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1. The UK imported, on average, 874,595 per day between December 1980 to December 2023. Before Israel attacked Iran, the price per barrel was around 67 USD.

2. “If they were, the experts told us, asking for anything at all precise in their wailing, it would be integration. Of course, there is no question of granting that; the system, which depends on overexploitation, as you know, would be ruined.” Sartre in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth

3. The Wretched of the Earth, p. 93

4. “And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” The Wretched of the Earth, p.61