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10. The Logical Bipartisan Insanity of Endless War

The Logical Bipartisan Insanity of Endless War
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-logical-bipartisan-insanity-of-endless-war/

War Pays for Some: “A Hunt for Cash”

That’s something for the leading liberal pundit, partisan Democrat, and converted Obama fan Paul Krugman to reflect on. “War,” Krugman informed New York Times readers last August, “doesn’t pay” anymore, if it ever did for “modern, wealthy nations.” This is particularly true, Krugman feels, in “an interconnected world” where “war would necessarily inflict severe economic harm on the victor.”

There’s truth in his argument if by “war” we mean only major military conflicts between large and industrialized states. Such conflagrations are more than unlikely in our current “ultra-imperialist” (Karl Kautsky’s term) era marked by massive cross-national capital investment and global market inter-penetration.

More on Karl Kautsky:

Marxian, Liberal, and Sociological Theories of Imperialism Author(s): E. M. Winslow Reviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 39, No. 6 (Dec., 1931), pp. 713-758

To Hilferding imperialism is a policy of capitalism and not a stage of capitalism itself. Kautsky also held this view, but he differed with Hilferding in regarding imperialism as a policy of industrial (albeit a "highly developed&quot capitalism rather than of financial capitalism. From the policy viewpoint, regardless of how it expresses itself, capitalism conceivably possesses the power to turn competitive imperialism into a cooperative economic internationalism. Kautsky, indeed, came to the conclusion during the war that imperialism is not inevitable or unalterable under capitalism but may yet attain a still higher synthesis, an "ultra-" or "super-imperialism," under which a peaceful policy may be adopted as in the days of Manchesterism, as the best means of eliminating the wastes of competitive warfare and of insuring uninterrupted profits.36 Hilferding likewise thought such an eventuality possible economically but not politically, because of antagonistic interests between the powers.37

Turning to the radical communist representatives of Marxian thought, we find very little originality, but a vast amount of polemical criticism of the theories of imperialism held by Kautsky, Hilferding, and all center and right-wing socialists. The outstanding example of this sort of criticism is found in Lenin's Imperialism.38 Embittered and disillusioned, particularly by the failure of Kautsky, so long regarded as Marx's direct successor, to go the whole way with violent revolution, Lenin makes him the scape-goat for all revisionist "renegades" from true Marxism.

Lenin and the communists generally are hostile to the notion that capitalism is capable of adopting a peaceful policy, even temporarily. The fact that capitalism once went through a peaceful stage is regarded as a mere episode in its development.39 Lenin identifies imperialism with the monopoly stage of capitalism and scornfully rejects the view that it is a mere external policy. He looks upon imperialism as "a tendency to violence and reaction in general,"40 and he brands any suggestion that it is otherwise as the talk of bourgeois reformers and socialist opportunists which glosses over the "deepest internal contradictions of imperialism."4I Granting, says Lenin, that capitalist nations should combine into such an "ultra-imperialism" or world-alliance as that visualized by Kautsky and others, it could be no more than temporary, for peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars.42

But many elites in rich nations, the US (the world’s sole military superpower) above all, still and quite reasonably see an economic payoff in undertaking military engagements in mostly poor and “pre-modern” but resource-rich nations and regions. In a more classically national-imperialist vein, Washington remains committed to the use of military force in pursuit of the control of Middle Eastern oil (and other strategic energy concentrations around the world) because of the critical leverage such control grants the US over competitor states.

The biggest flaw in Krugman’s argument is his failure to make the (one would think) elementary distinction between (a) the wealthy Few and (b) the rest of us and society as whole when it comes to who loses and who gains from contemporary (endless) war, As the venerable U.S. foreign policy critic Edward S. Herman asks and observes:

“Doesn’t war pay for Lockheed-Martin, GE, Raytheon, Honeywell, Halliburton, Chevron, Academi (formerly Blackwater) and the vast further array of contractors and their financial, political, and military allies? An important feature of ‘projecting power’ (i.e., imperialism) has always been the skewed distribution of costs and benefits…The costs have always been borne by the general citizenry (including the dead and injured military personnel and their families), while the benefits accrue to privileged sectors whose members not only profit from arms supply and other services, but can plunder the victim countries during and after the invasion-occupation.”