By Ingo Schmidt
The country needs more cannons. From Ampel (“traffic light”: government alliance between the PS, the Greens and the Liberals) to the AfD-Alternative für Deutschland everyone agrees on this point. The disagreement is whether one should give up butter for this or whether enough money can be found for cannons and butter. For example via a reform of the debt brake [politique budgétaire en vigueur en Allemagne comme en Suisse] or new special funds.
The proposal from the SPD co-president [depuis 2019], Saskia Esken, to increase taxes on high incomes should not be taken seriously. It is too contradictory with another consensus in German politics: to guarantee competitiveness, we must reduce the tax burden on the “economy”, of which high incomes are a part, as everyone knows!
Less clear is why “our” war capacity needs to be increased. Instead of formulating war objectives on which the military could base its strategic and tactical planning and on which governments could orient themselves during peace negotiations if the military objectives are achieved, the defense of “Western values” is put forward. » against the authoritarian threat from Russia and China. A normative data, non-operational on the military and political level.
This noble goal is even less serious than Esken’s proposal “cannons rather than caviar.” Too often, Western governments and corporations have colluded with dictators, helped them gain power, waged wars of aggression across the globe, and subordinated national democracy to the dictates of capital. What motivates today’s militarism, if there are no clearly defined war aims and threat scenarios too obviously amount to constructions of the enemy?
Good for capital accumulation
In the past, the answer to this question was simple. When the undercutting of the prices of goods produced locally within the framework of imports from emerging capitalist countries as well as the loans and credits of these same countries were not enough to conquer new markets, to remedy this the force of arms was used . This was good for the arms industry, but it also created markets for the acquisition of raw materials and the sale of industrial products to emerging countries, fields of investment for capital and areas of settlement for the surplus population which, following progressive accumulation in the capitalist centers, had lost its own means of production, particularly land, but which was not needed in the active army [au sens économique tel que développé dans Marx dans le Livre premier du Capital, VIIe section: Accumulation du capital] or in the industrial reserve army.
In other words, Europe’s wars of world conquest were beneficial for capital accumulation. But they also led to crises and stimulated the development of socialist workers’ movements. It remains to be seen whether the parties, unions, cooperatives, cultural and sporting associations which were part of it were subversive. But their mere existence and the possibility of revolutionary movements have destabilized the ruling classes. Even more war, even more conquest of the world was to free them from their embarrassment. In the words of British entrepreneur and politician Cecil Rhodes [1853-1902, premier ministre de la colonie du Cap en Afrique du Sud]: “If they don’t want civil war, they must become imperialists.”
At the end of the 19th century, driven by the search for markets, fields of investment and areas of settlement, as well as by the fear of socialism, political conquests far outpaced capitalist penetration of conquered territories. The additional profits made remained below expectations. Only a few proletarians managed to access the working aristocracy. And they too were immediately sent into the battles fought by the colonial powers to share their conquests. It was only after two world wars, the end of which coincided with the replacement of exhausted European colonial powers by Washington and Moscow as the centers of two competing social systems, that social imperialism [Etats qui sont «socialistes dans les mots et impérialistes dans les actions», Lénine, L’Etat et la révolution] transformed from a strategy into a Western characteristic of the US-led capitalist West.
Neocolonial exploitation of the South, combined with internal land grabbing and the Third Industrial Revolution, enabled wage increases that did not immediately weigh on profit rates. The arms race and military Keynesianism have stabilized the economy and employment without creating new production capacities. The trend towards crises of overproduction was thus initially curbed. In addition to proxy wars in the South, the arms race contributed to the exhaustion of the Soviet Union, whose industrialization had only begun in the 1930s and was massively delayed by World War II.
Margarine instead of butter
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its vassal states under the pressure of external competition and the internal burden of their bureaucratic dictatorship, American elites seemed to see the ideas they had long harbored about a functioning global capitalism come to fruition. according to American rules. The arms race between East and West was replaced by an American military machinery whose firepower and range far exceeded those of the armies of every other country in the world, but whose power was and remains limited .
The United States has not been able to achieve the nuclear superiority it has aimed for since the start of the arms race with the Soviet Union, even against today’s Russia. This is despite Russia being unable to maintain the Soviet Union’s position as a world power economically and despite the fact that the United States invests eight times more money in arms than Russia. The war on terrorism showed that the United States military could overthrow unpopular regimes, but not establish favorable regimes at will. The war against Iraq further showed that even the Western European allies are not ready for unconditional war.
From a purely economic point of view, the experience of the limited power of a numerically very superior army argues in favor of a policy of disarmament and diplomatic balance rather than a new wave of militarism. The fact that a consensus in favor of the new militarism has nevertheless formed within the elites of the United States, despite partisan quarrels and tensions between the different fractions of capital, can be explained by overall economic developments and their social consequences.
In reaction to militant class struggles from below, the exhaustion of productivity gains linked to the third technological revolution and the overcapacities that emerged despite Keynesianism, including the permanent arms economy, capital in the centers had already broken the class compromise with wage labor in the 1970s. In the future, neocolonial exploitation was to serve the stabilization of profits in the centers and no longer for social balance. This has not changed until today.
Hopes that global land occupation after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn to the global market by Chinese communists would lead to lasting prosperity in the West have not been realized. Even if the great Chinese boom seems to be running out of steam, China has been the winner of US-led globalization. Because the Chinese elites do not allow themselves to be politically manipulated like the old bourgeois compradores of the South or the new compradors of Eastern Europe, the elites of the United States have declared this country as their main enemy. Although it is not clear whether they fear a “communist challenge” or capitalist competition.
The elites of old Europe, who once dreamed of the European Union as a social and peaceful alternative to the America of market radicalism and militarism, are so divided among themselves that they submit individually to the new marching orders from Washington. Added to the pressure of competition for increasing rates of surplus value, known since the beginnings of globalization, are the financing requirements of the new militarism. The “social-imperialist” promise of putting butter in the proletarian spinach by dominating the world has been exhausted. Images of Russia and China as enemies should distract attention. And remember that in times of war, you can consider yourself lucky to still have margarine on your bread. (Article published on the German website Analysis & Kritik, Zeitung für linkede Debatte & Praxis, April 2024; translation writing Against)
Ingo Schmidt is a Marxist economist (Canada-Germany).
