Militarism and imperialism in the 21st century
Claude Serfati *
International Viewpoint, March 2003.
http://www.3bh.org.uk/IV/IV348/IV348%2001.htm
The relationship between militarism, war and capitalism has a new
relevance at the beginning of the 21st century. This 'war without
limits', the new political programme adopted by the Bush
Administration, marks a significant change of in the militarism of
US capitalism, and more than ever, the globalisation of capital and
militarism appear as two aspects of imperialist domination.
* * * * * * * * * *
Militarism, capital and technology
Rosa Luxemburg noted that "militarism has a specific function in the
history of capital. It accompanies every historic phase of
accumulation". (1) Her analyses bring out what one might nowadays
call the 'historicity' of the relationship of militarism to capital
and they retain their pertinence today. She defines "the imperialist
phase of accumulation [as] phase of the global competition of
capital [which] has the entire word as theatre. Here the methods
employed are colonial policy, the system of international borrowing,
the policy of spheres of interest, war. Violence, cheating, pillage
are openly employed, without any mask". This is contrary to
the "bourgeois liberal theory [which] separates the economic domain
of capital from the other aspect, that of the blows of force,
considered as more or less fortuitous, of foreign policy".
Luxemburg stressed in a very contemporary manner that "political
violence is also the instrument and vehicle of the economic process;
the duality of the aspects of accumulation conceals the same organic
phenomenon, originating in the conditions of capitalist
reproduction" [stress by this author]
In his polemic against Dühring, Engels analyses the relationship
between militarism and the technological development of capitalism.
History shows that the conduct of wars rests on the production of
weapons, which itself depends on the state of the economy, more
precisely on industrial and technological development,
because "industry remains industry, whether it is applied to the
production or the destruction of things". (2) Engels notes the
radical changes that took place after capitalism came to dominate
the world. "The modern warship is not only a product, but at the
same time a specimen of modern large-scale industry, a floating
factory", For him, "militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe"
and this formula would find a tragic confirmation in the war that
broke out between the European imperialisms in 1914.
Weapons production is not only 'a specimen of modern large-scale
industry'; since the Second World War, it has been at the heart of
technological trajectories essential to the mode of production
(aeronautics and space, electronics, the nuclear industry). The
military expenditure of the United States, but also that of the
other imperialist countries, reached extraordinarily high levels in
the subsequent five decades, supposedly to meet the threat
represented by the USSR. In the latter country, the gigantic sums
devoted to defence consolidated the ruling caste and its parasitic
existence, while also contributing to the bleeding of productive and
financial resources.
The outstanding fact since the Second World War is a deep
implantation of the military-industrial system in the economy and
society of the US, which has in no way been weakened by the
disappearance of the USSR; on the contrary it is now entering a new
stage of consolidation. This strengthening of the military-
industrial system rests on a conjuncture of factors: an industrial
concentration and an ever closer liaison of the weapons companies
with financial capital, an increase in the military budget embarked
on by Clinton in 1999 and considerably amplified by Bush, and a
strengthened presence in information and communication technologies
(ICT). These technologies benefited from Reagan's Strategic Defense
Initiative ('star wars') and play a determinant role in 'information
domination' and 'network centric warfare' (3) which were the
favoured themes of Pentagon strategists in the 1990s.
Military supremacy has allowed US weapons companies to conquer a
central position in the development of ICT, dominated in the 1990s
by the civil companies (the so-called 'new economy' and its
associated start-ups).
The weapons companies must also develop new weapons systems for
ground forces. The preparation of 'urban wars' (the expression
employed by the Pentagon experts) waged by soldiers equipped armed
with hyper-sophisticated weapons, occupies an important place in the
military budgets. The aim is to wage war against the populations of
the immense agglomerations in the countries of the South (those of
South America obsess US strategists), and eventually against
the 'dangerous classes' of the cities of the North. One can then
envisage that the major influence the weapons groups have acquired
inside the federal and state institutions since the second world
war, together with the broadening of the 'national security agenda'
to non-military objectives (4) which increasingly concern aspects of
social and private life, will accelerate the formation of
a 'military-security system'. This latter will, in the coming years,
play a much more important role than that of the 'military-
industrial complex' during the Cold War.
The formation of this military-security system gives the US state a
considerable power.
Imperialism in the 21st century
We are far from the decline of the 'state form' of the domination of
capital, which, according to Hardt and Negri, would give way to
an 'Empire' inside of which capital and labour would confront each
other without mediation. (5) To maintain its domination, capital
cannot do without a political apparatus, institutions (judiciary,
military and so on) which have been constituted, strengthened and
streamlined for two centuries in the framework of the states of the
dominant capitalist countries. 'world capitalism', in the sense
spoken of by these authors, does not exist. Capital, as a social
relationship, certainly has a propensity to transcend national
frontiers and other barriers (forms of socio-political organization
for example). The 'world market is contained in the very notion of
capital' as Marx said, but it is a process marked by contradictions
which are expressed in inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist
rivalries as well as in crises. That is why the global extension of
capital has always taken and will continue to take on a physiognomy
inextricably linked to the inter-state relationship of forces and
its associated violence.
The domination of the US over the other imperialist countries is
obvious. That is one reason why the breakout of inter-imperialist
wars like those that took place in the 20th century is improbable.
The integration of transatlantic capital, between the US and a part
of the European Union, continues, and has constituted one of the
distinctive features of 'globalization' in the late 20th century.
The dominant classes of the US and the EU are, to a certain extent,
in the situation that Marx described in relation to the competition
between capitalists: "while there is little love lost between them
in competition among themselves", they "form a veritable freemason
society vis-à-vis the whole working-class" and, need we add, vis-à-
vis the peoples of the countries subjected to their domination. (6)
Globalization of capital and militarism
The improbability of wars between the dominant capitalist powers
does not render obsolete the relation between war and imperialism
established by Marxism at the beginning of the 20th century. It is
enough to think of what would happen if the capitalist
transformation of China under the control of the bureaucracy of the
Chinese CP came to threaten the US on the economic terrain. (7) The
ultra-imperialism that would allow capital to overcome its
contradictions, as imagined by Kautsky, is surely not on the agenda.
War maintains and expands its role in the current phase of the
globalization of capital.
The globalization of capital does not involve an expansion of
capitalism defined as an enlargement of the reproduction of value on
a planetary scale. It leads rather to a growth of predatory
operations on the part of capital, whose 'property rights' (over
financial assets) allow it to collect financial incomes as well as
to appropriate the processes of life itself. "There are not too many
necessities of life produced, in proportion to the existing
population. Quite the reverse. Too little is produced to decently
and humanely satisfy the wants of the great mass." (8)
It is this contradiction that the globalization of capital has
carried to an unequalled level, crushing most of the countries of
Africa and, in the course of the 1990s, plunging the 'emergent
countries' of Asia and Latin America into crisis. The state has
always played a major role in this process of expropriation of the
producers by capital, not only in the so-called phase of 'primitive
accumulation' but also during the colonial conquests whose objective
was to submit the peoples and territories of the planet to the
domination of capital.
The violence of the state is more than ever necessary today, in
polar opposition to the mystifications that associate the 'markets'
and free trade with peace and democracy. The globalization of
capital is accompanied by a process of commodification that could be
defined as the extension of the area where capital can exercise its
property rights. Such is indeed the prior condition to the existence
of 'markets', whose objective and effect are, on the one hand, to
increase the dependence of the producers while rendering them
more 'free', that is more constrained to work for capital, and on
the other hand, to enslave new social groups, in particular in the
dominated countries. These areas are not only geographical
territories, but also new areas of private appropriation, like the
biosphere (permits for the right to pollute), the life process
(patents on seeds and so on) and increasingly rights of intellectual
property whose incessant extension represents a serious threat to
human liberty. All these objectives cannot be attained without the
use of violence.
The US is at the centre of the globalization of capital. The
strengthening of militarism observed in the 1990s is not an
additional extra tacked on to an otherwise healthy economic
functioning. The globalization of capital and militarism are two
aspects of the "same organic phenomenon" as Rosa Luxemburg put it,
and it is in the US that they are at their most interdependent.
Political-military power was a determinant in the process that
allowed the US to attract influxes of money capital seeking
high 'security' in the 1990s, with an accelerated tempo after the
Asian economic crisis of 1997.
Finally, the US economy was hit by recession in 2000. (9) It is not
possible to analyze here the mechanisms, but the important thing to
understand is that if the US is at the heart of the globalization of
capital, it is also at the heart of its contradictions, much deeper
than can be measured by the indicators used to characterize a
recession. The rapid development of these contradictions has given
the lie to those who thought that the US constituted an 'island of
prosperity' in the ocean of global devastation produced by the
domination of financial capital (the 'new economy'). The economic
contradictions have been amplified and not reduced by the
implementation of the budget programmes decided on after September
11, 2001, for which the term 'class war' has been used. (10).
In this context, the 'war without limits' the Bush Administration
has committed itself to is in relation with the trajectory of
capitalism over the past 20 years. This policy expresses the
interests of a financial oligarchy, whose material bases rest on the
pillage of natural resources (with oil, of course, in the first
rank) and on the endless payment of the debt, even if endangers and
threatens the very existence of the most vulnerable social classes
and peoples. The control that the US and the other dominant
countries of the 'international community' are in the process of
exerting ¾ through forms of direct management, mandate or
protectorate ¾ has, still less than the colonial conquests of
imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century, the pretension and
the possibility of stimulating the economic development of the
dominated countries. As shown by the tragic example of the African
continent over the last 20 years, what is on the agenda now is the
dismembering of the states of the 'South', which cannot resist the
consequences of imperialist domination.
The social classes whose existence rests on a mode of social
domination which privileges to this point the appropriation of the
value created by the producers and encourages still more predation,
can only have very short term concerns, without regard for the
catastrophic social and environmental consequences for humanity.
They need governments and state institutions that assure them the
full enjoyment and security of their property rights. The more
financial capital succeeds in extending its logic, the more the need
for armed force grows.
* Claude Serfati is a lecturer and researcher in economics at the
university of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in France
Notes
1. Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Accumulation of Capital', Book 2, Chapter
32 'Militarism, Field of Action for Capital'.
2. Friedrich Engels, 'Anti-Dühring', Part II: Political Economy,
III. Theory of Force
3. Military superiority now rests on the efficiency of
communications, the power of informatic tools, the precision of
weapons guidance and so on.
4. The enlargement of the notion of 'national security' to the
defence of 'globalization' was already present under Clinton and it
has been developed by the Bush Administration.
5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 'Empire' (Cambridge MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2000)
6. See my contribution "Une bourgeoisie mondiale pour un capital
financier mondialisé?" in Séminaire d'Etudes Marxistes, 'La
bourgeoisie : classe dirigeante d'un nouveau capitalisme', Syllepse,
2001
7. A significant part of US military programmes (including the anti-
missiles defence system) are directly focused against China
8. K. Marx, 'Capital', Volume 3, Part 3, Chapter 15, 'Exposition of
the Internal Contradictions of the Law'.
9. According to the figures of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the
rate of profitability of the capital of companies began to fall in
1997.
10. The title of the dossier in Business Week (January 20, 2003) on
Bush's proposed tax-cutting programme.