[Marxism] Wars (was surplus capital)

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Renato,

I don't know if you read the CEO survey on ethics I posted, but they asked
the CEO's " If a movie were made of your job right now, with you starring,
which would it be?" and  54.55 % of them answered "Gladiator". Which is to
say that modern business is a permanent war of sorts, an endless
competition.

In the Marxist lexicon, military war is the continuation of politics by
violent means. In the last century, there hasn't been any year in which
there were no wars somewhere on the planet. The only thing that fluctuates
is the scope and intensity of the conflicts. The main concern of the polity
is, to limit and contain the scope of the conflicts, "localize wars" if you
like, stop them from escalating uncontrollably.

As I have tried to show in other posts, the world is in reality armed to the
teeth - there's now one smallarm for every 9 or 10 people on the planet,
military expenditure is a trillion-dollars-a-year business, and it creates
plenty potential for violent wars. After all, the more weapons are produced,
the greater the likelihood that they will be used. However, the biggest
problem of the military endeavour is whether anything significant can be
actually won through military violence. You might win the battle, but lose
the war, because you have the people against you. You can see this clearly
in Iraq and Israel.

If military war is the continuation of politics by violent means, then you
first have to win the people to your side, and then fight the war, not the
other way round. But basically the ruling class fights military wars,
because it cannot win the people over, at best they can win over the people
in their own country, in the sense of supporting the war as a just cause.

Wars are costly, but that means they also generate big profits; they are a
bad thing insofar as they obstruct a stable investment climate around the
theatre of war, but they also stimulate investments. To understand the
mentality, let me repeat an example which I have posted before. In June
2004, the Iraqi Stock Exchange was back in session and the chairman of the
Iraqi stock exchange, Talib al Tabatabaie, commented literally that "We were
selling and buying and around us they were fighting and bombs and explosions
and nobody cared, nobody gave it a second thought".

The widest political impact of the war in Iraq I think has not been in Iraq,
but in the United States itself, because it creates a culture of fear, which
permits the regimenting of the population, and the consolidation of a social
order. If 1,000 US soldiers die in Iraq, that's peanuts in the scales of
history - it isn't peanuts obviously if it happens to be your husband or
your son, that's devastating, but in the scales of history it's peanuts.
Louis posted this article about Stanley Milgram, and that is exactly what
this is all about - getting people to obey, and do as they are told. That is
what class power is made of. In a sense, the gruesome war in Iraq is a
postmodern spectacle in world society, but  a spectacle which aims to show
people who is the boss, and what happens if you don't toe the line.

However, if you do the stats and think objectively, you will easily see that
far more people have died and are dying directly from preventable diseases,
epidemics, malnutrition and famine, than die from acts of military violence.
This is true even in Iraq. In the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq suffered 375,000
casualties, but now think of the 500,000 Iraqi kids who died through the
sanctions regime. That is to say, the media perception of wars tends to be
rather warped, it focuses heavily on the immorality of violence, but if
people die like flies from hunger and disease, then it is portrayed as a
natural calamity, about which little can be done, it is just "tragic". It
appears as a natural calamity, because it is difficult to point the finger
and blame anybody in particular. Nevertheless that is the real war.
Correctly considered, military wars are usually only the "tip of the
iceberg" as it were.

Which leads me to my last point, one of the most favourite Marxist words is
"struggle". I don't like to use it much, but why this word "struggle"?
Essentially, and leaving rhetoric aside, because for most people on the
planet life really is a struggle, or at the very least that is how they
perceive it. That is to say, war is all around if you care to look, and no
uniformed soldiers need to be involved. Military wars are only a transition
from what is already there.

"The bourgeois friends of peace are endeavouring - and from their point of
view this is perfectly logical and explicable - to invent all sorts of
"practical" projects for gradually restraining militarism, and are naturally
inclined to consider every outward apparent sign of a tendency toward peace
as the genuine article, to take every expression of the ruling diplomacy in
this vein at its word, to exaggerate it into a basis for earnest activity.
The Social Democrats, on the other hand, must consider it their duty in this
matter, just as in all matters of social criticism, to expose the bourgeois
attempts to restrain militarism as pitiful half-measures, and the
expressions of such sentiments on the part of the governing circles as
diplomatic make-believe, and to oppose the bourgeois claims and pretenses
with the ruthless analysis of capitalist reality." - Rosa Luxemburg, Peace
Utopias, 1911.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1911/05/11.htm

Jurriaan






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