Capitalism Is War

If you've read my post about the Perpetual War, or if you are even remotely interested in the politics and economics that shape the modern-day human condition, you're aware of the fact that war is a feature, and not a bug, of the capitalism paradigm.

A general whose name I can't recall, once said that war is the continuation, on another level and with different means, of politics. And since there is no real divide between the economy and government, one might say that in in our time that means continuation of the politics of preservation and growth of capital; economy is war by other means, war is politics by other means. The drive to war is not accidental, nor is it, as many would have you believe, the natural state of human existence or cultural evolution, but instead it is inherent in the logic of capitalism. We have largely dismissed this notion because how could our water be polluted in this way? Nah, that's ridiculous... We sought to put an end to war by trying to convince the ruling classes to behave differently, more peacefully, and to this end we've managed to sign a slew of international agreements in which our leaders all swear to do everything possible to avoid large scale armed conflicts. After all, how could war, with its large scale destruction of property and life, be in the interest of the free market economy?

Marx saw capitalism for what is was and is, and he once wrote: "The leading ideas of any age, are the ideas in the leaders of that age." He alse knew that those leaders were, and still are, the capitalists, the owner class that has control over the four main factors of the capitalist mode of production: entrepreneurship, capital goods, natural resources, and labor. "Entrepreneurship" is a more romantic way of expressing capitalism's central characteristic of capital accumulation; successful capitalists start as entrepreneurs, but with the ultimate goal of accumulating more capital, a profit, growth. Bezos and Gates are entrepreneurs no more, and many in their class never even started as one. At its heart, capitalism incentivizes competition and self-interest. We so often have heard a version of the story of the noble entrepreneurial baker, who bakes and sells bread to accumulate enough capital to increase the living standard and happiness of himself and his loved ones, but provides a great service to the larger community by providing that bread. In this ideology, selfishness, being greedy even, is seen as a good thing, a positive trait. We believe this to be true, as expressed throughout popular culture; the "greed is good" speech in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street", the hilarious "show me the money" scene in "Jerry Maguire", and even the Whitney Houston song "The Greatest Love Of All" that says that love for one's self is the greatest love of all, are but a few cultural symptoms to attest to that fact. The leading idea of our age that the individual, individual rights, individual property and individual freedom trumps anything that's common or shared, is the idea that's in heads of the leaders of our age.

"The sheer scale of production in the industrialising nations could no longer be contained within the geographical boundaries of the state and had to reach out beyond those limits. The interests of these large firms are increasingly merged with the state — and it backs them up politically and militarily in the name of the national interest. It builds up armies and weapons, invades countries where necessary to grab resources or to safeguard trade routes and markets, establishes spheres of influence and alliances — and it will go to war against other powers to defend any of these things."
_{source: Socialist Review}

Capitalism is war, on all scales, and the competition at its heart inevitably leads to the elimination of the losers in that game, and the losers' capital to be added to that of the winners. Competition and elimination in an everlasting quest for growth; that's basically what capitalism is. The noble baker isn't so noble anymore when another baker encroaches on his segment of the marketplace; from that moment on, it's a fight to the end. Competition on small scales leads to trade wars, and eventually real wars on larger scales. When the bakery, through the "natural" process of elimination and incorporation, has grown to become "International Foods Incorporated", the intimate marriage between politics and the economy is expressed more openly, to the point that it's now obvious to anyone that government rules at the behest of the nation's largest industries and financial institutes. Some tend to forget that the bakery, when it just became the largest bakery in town, years ago, it already had great sway over the town's local government; politics is just the face put on the power relationship, the power imbalance between the capitalist class and the rest of us. It's only to be expected that we see international diplomacy and international treaties as the alternative to armed conflict, and diplomacy is certainly to be preferred over war. And it is true, as I've said myself so many times, that people never get into war over silly ideas like religion or socioeconomic ideologies, but that war is always our leaders fighting each other over something they think should be theirs; land, resources, cheap labor or to safeguard trade-routes. But in the end it's just capitalist competition and growth that on large scales translate into imperialist wars of expansion. Not in the last place the expansion of the idea that capitalism is good, the idea that's in our warring leaders' heads...

To close, here's an optimistic message, despite the title, about how we could evolve toward a post-capitalist society, a "system that will emerge if we suppress monopolies, and let prices of information and things fall, and if we radically de-link work from wages, and if we then nurture that part of the economy where free, shared and socially produced things are replacing money and market forces."

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