              D.8 What causes militarism and what are its effects?

   There are three main causes of capitalist militarism.

   Firstly, there is the need to contain the domestic enemy - the
   oppressed and exploited sections of the population. As Emma Goldman
   argued, the military machine "is not directed only against the external
   enemy; it aims much more at the internal enemy. It concerns that
   element of labour which has learned not to hope for anything from our
   institutions, that awakened part of the working people which has
   realised that the war of classes underlies all wars among nations, and
   that if war is justified at all it is the war against economic
   dependence and political slavery, the two dominant issues involved in
   the struggle of the classes." In other words, the nation "which is to
   be protected by a huge military force is not" that "of the people, but
   that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the
   masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave." [Red
   Emma Speaks, p. 352 and p. 348]

   The second, as noted in the section on imperialism, is that a strong
   military is necessary in order for a ruling class to pursue an
   aggressive and expansionist foreign policy in order to defend its
   interests globally. For most developed capitalist nations, this kind of
   foreign policy becomes more and more important because of economic
   forces, i.e. in order to provide outlets for its goods and capital to
   prevent the system from collapsing by expanding the market continually
   outward. This outward expansion of, and so competition between, capital
   needs military force to protect its interests (particularly those
   invested in other countries) and give it added clout in the economic
   jungle of the world market. This need has resulted in, for example,
   "hundreds of US bases [being] placed all over the world to ensure
   global domination." [Chomsky, Failed States, p. 11]

   The third major reason for militarism is to bolster a state's economy.
   Capitalist militarism promotes the development of a specially favoured
   group of companies which includes "all those engaged in the manufacture
   and sale of munitions and in military equipment for personal gain and
   profit." [Goldman, Op. Cit., p. 354] These armaments companies
   ("defence" contractors) have a direct interest in the maximum expansion
   of military production. Since this group is particularly wealthy, it
   exerts great pressure on government to pursue the type of state
   intervention and, often, the aggressive foreign policies it wants. As
   Chomsky noted with respect to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq:

     "Empires are costly. Running Iraq is not cheap. Somebody's paying.
     Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the
     corporations that are rebuilding it. in both cases, they're getting
     paid by the U.S. taxpayer. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayers to
     U.S. Corporations . . . The same tax-payers fund the
     military-corporate system of weapons manufacturers and technology
     companies that bombed Iraq . . . It's a transfer of wealth from the
     general population to narrow sectors of the population." [Imperial
     Ambitions, pp. 56-7]

   This "special relationship" between state and Big Business also has the
   advantage that it allows the ordinary citizen to pay for industrial
   Research and Development. As Noam Chomsky points out in many of his
   works, the "Pentagon System," in which the public is forced to
   subsidise research and development of high tech industry through
   subsidies to defence contractors, is a covert substitute in the US for
   the overt industrial planning policies of other "advanced" capitalist
   nations, like Germany and Japan. Government subsidies provide an
   important way for companies to fund their research and development at
   taxpayer expense, which often yields "spin-offs" with great commercial
   potential as consumer products (e.g. computers). Needless to say, all
   the profits go to the defence contractors and to the commercial
   companies who buy licences to patented technologies from them, rather
   than being shared with the public which funded the R&D that made the
   profits possible. Thus militarism is a key means of securing
   technological advances within capitalism.

   It is necessary to provide some details to indicate the size and impact
   of military spending on the US economy:

     "Since 1945. . . there have been new industries sparking investment
     and employment . . In most of them, basic research and technological
     progress were closely linked to the expanding military sector. The
     major innovation in the 1950s was electronics . . . [which]
     increased its output 15 percent per year. It was of critical
     importance in workplace automation, with the federal government
     providing the bulk of the research and development (R&D) dollars for
     military-orientated purposes. Infrared instrumentation, pressure and
     temperature measuring equipment, medical electronics, and
     thermoelectric energy conversion all benefited from military R&D. By
     the 1960s indirect and direct military demand accounted for as much
     as 70 percent of the total output of the electronics industry.
     Feedbacks also developed between electronics and aircraft, the
     second growth industry of the 1950s. By 1960 . . . [i]ts annual
     investment outlays were 5.3 times larger than their 1947-49 level,
     and over 90 percent of its output went to the military. Synthetics
     (plastics and fibres) was another growth industry owning much of its
     development to military-related projects. Throughout the 1950s and
     1960s, military-related R&D, including space, accounted for 40 to 50
     percent of total public and private R&D spending and at least 85% of
     federal government share." [Richard B. Du Boff, Accumulation and
     Power, pp. 103-4]

   As another economist notes, it is "important to recognise that the role
   of the US federal government in industrial development has been
   substantial even in the post-war period, thanks to the large amount of
   defence-related procurements and R&D spending, which have had enormous
   spillover effects. The share of the US federal government in total R&D
   speanding, which was only 16 per cent in 1930, remained between
   one-half and two-thirds during the postwar years. Industries such as
   computers, aerospace and the internet, where the USA still maintains an
   international edge despite the decline in its overall technological
   leadership, would not have existed without defence-related R&D funding
   by the country's federal government." Moreover, the state also plays a
   "crucial role" in supporting R&D in the pharmaceutical industry.
   [Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder, p. 31]

   Not only this, government spending on road building (initially
   justified using defence concerns) also gave a massive boost to private
   capital (and, in the process, totally transformed America into a land
   fit for car and oil corporations). The cumulative impact of the 1944,
   1956 and 1968 Federal Highway Acts "allowed $70 billion to be spent on
   the interstates without [the money] passing through the congressional
   appropriations board." The 1956 Act "[i]n effect wrote into law the
   1932 National Highway Users Conference strategy of G[eneral] M[otors]
   chairman Alfred P. Sloan to channel gasoline and other motor
   vehicle-related excise taxes into highway construction." GM also
   bought-up and effectively destroyed public transit companies across
   America, so reducing competition against private car ownership. The net
   effect of this state intervention was that by 1963-66 "one in every six
   business enterprise was directly dependent on the manufacture,
   distribution, servicing, and the use of motor vehicles." The impact of
   this process is still evident today -- both in terms of ecological
   destruction and in the fact that automobile and oil companies are still
   dominate the top twenty of the Fortune 500. [Op. Cit., p. 102]

   This system, which can be called military Keynesianism, has three
   advantages over socially-based state intervention. Firstly, unlike
   social programmes, military intervention does not improve the situation
   (and thus, hopes) of the majority, who can continue to be marginalised
   by the system, suffer the discipline of the labour market and feel the
   threat of unemployment. Secondly, it acts likes welfare for the rich,
   ensuring that while the many are subject to market forces, the few can
   escape that fate - while singing the praises of the "free market". And,
   thirdly, it does not compete with private capital -- in fact, it
   supplements it.

   Because of the connection between militarism and imperialism, it was
   natural after World War II that America should become the world's
   leading military state at the same time that it was becoming the
   world's leading economic power, and that strong ties developed between
   government, business, and the armed forces. American "military
   capitalism" is described in detail below, but the remarks also apply to
   a number of other "advanced" capitalist states.

   In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned of the danger
   posed to individual liberties and democratic processes by the
   "military-industrial complex," which might, he cautioned, seek to keep
   the economy in a state of continual war-readiness simply because it is
   good business. This echoed the warning which had been made earlier by
   sociologist C. Wright Mills (in The Power Elite), who pointed out that
   since the end of World War II the military had become enlarged and
   decisive to the shape of the entire American economy, and that US
   capitalism had in fact become a military capitalism. This situation has
   not substantially changed since Mills wrote, for it is still the case
   that all US military officers have grown up in the atmosphere of the
   post-war military-industrial alliance and have been explicitly educated
   and trained to carry it on. Moreover, many powerful corporations have a
   vested interest in maintaining this system and will be funding and
   lobbying politicians and their parties to ensure its continuance.

   That this interrelationship between corporate power and the state
   expressed by militarism is a key aspect of capitalism can be seen from
   the way it survived the end of the Cold War, the expressed rationale
   for this system:

     "With the Cold war no longer available, it was necessary to reframe
     pretexts not only for [foreign] intervention but also for
     militarised state capitalism at home. The Pentagon budget presented
     to Congress a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall remained
     largely unchanged, but was packaged in a new rhetorical framework,
     presented in the National Security Strategy of March 1990. Once
     priority was to support advanced industry in traditional ways, in
     sharp violation of the free market doctrines proclaimed and imposed
     on others. The National Security Strategy called for strengthening
     'the defence industrial base' (essentially, high-tech industry) with
     incentives 'to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in
     research and development.' As in the past, the costs and risks of
     the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialised,
     with eventual profits privatised, a form of state socialism for the
     rich on which much of the advanced US economy relies, particularly
     since World War II." [Failed States, p. 126]

   This means that US defence businesses, which are among the biggest
   lobbyists, cannot afford to lose this "corporate welfare."
   Unsurprisingly, they did not. So while many politicians asserted a
   "peace dividend" was at hand when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, this has
   not came to pass. Although it is true that some fat was trimmed from
   the defence budget in the early 1990s, both economic and political
   pressures have tended to keep the basic military-industrial complex
   intact, insuring a state of global war-readiness and continuing
   production of ever more advanced weapons systems into the foreseeable
   future. Various excuses were used to justify continued militarism, none
   of them particularly convincing due to the nature of the threat.

   The first Gulf War was useful, but the quick defeat of Saddam showed
   how little a threat he actually was. The Iraq invasion of 2003 proved
   that his regime, while temporarily helpful to the Pentagon, was not
   enough of a menace to warrant the robust defence budgets of yore now
   given that his military machine had been smashed. This did not, of
   course, stop the Bush Administration spinning the threat and lying to
   the world about (non-existent) Iraqi "Weapons of Mass Destruction"
   (this is unsurprising, though, given how the Soviet military machine
   had also been hyped and its threat exaggerated to justify military
   spending). Other "threats" to the world's sole super-power such as
   Cuba, Iran, Libya and North Korea are equally unconvincing to any one
   with a firm grasp of reality. Luckily for the US state, a new enemy
   appeared in the shape of Islamic Terrorism.

   The terrorist atrocity of 9/11 was quickly used to justify expanding US
   militarism (and expanding the power of the state and reducing civil
   liberties). In its wake, various government bureaucracies and
   corporations could present their wish-lists to the politicians and
   expect them to be passed without real comment all under the guise of
   "the war on terror." As this threat is so vague and so widespread, it
   is ideal to justify continuing militarism as well as imperial
   adventures across the global (any state can be attacked simply be
   declaring it is harbouring terrorists). It can also be used to justify
   attacks on existing enemies, such as Iraq and the other countries in
   the so-called "axis of evil" and related states. As such, it was not
   surprising to hear about the possible Iranian nuclear threat and about
   the dangers of Iranian influence even while the US military was bogged
   down in the quagmire of Iraq.

   While the Bush Administration's doctrine of "pre-emptive war" (i.e.
   aggression) may have, as Chomsky noted, "broken little new ground" and
   have been standard (but unspoken) US policy from its birth, its does
   show how militarism will be justified for some time to come. [Op. Cit.,
   p. 85] It (and the threat of terrorism which is used to justify it)
   provides the Pentagon with more arguments for continued high levels of
   defence spending and military intervention. In a nutshell, then, the
   trend toward increasing militarism is not likely to be checked as the
   Pentagon has found a sufficiently dangerous and demonic enemy to
   justify continued military spending in the style to which it's
   accustomed.

   Thus the demands of US military capitalism still take priority over the
   needs of the people. For example, Holly Sklar points out that
   Washington, Detroit, and Philadelphia have higher infant death rates
   than Jamaica or Costa Rica and that Black America as a whole has a
   higher infant mortality rate than Nigeria; yet the US still spends less
   public funds on education than on the military, and more on military
   bands than on the National Endowment for the Arts. ["Brave New World
   Order," Cynthia Peters (ed.), Collateral Damage, pp. 3-46] But of
   course, politicians continue to maintain that education and social
   services must be cut back even further because there is "no money" to
   fund them. As Chomsky so rightly says:

     "It is sometimes argued that concealing development of high-tech
     industry under the cover of 'defence' has been a valuable
     contribution to society. Those who do not share that contempt for
     democracy might ask what decisions the population would have made if
     they had been informed of the real options and allowed to choose
     among them. Perhaps they might have preferred more social spending
     for health, education, decent housing, a sustainable environment for
     future generations, and support for the United Nations,
     international law, and diplomacy, as polls regularly show. We can
     only guess, since fear of democracy barred the option of allowing
     the public into the political arena, or even informing them about
     what was being done in their name." [Op. Cit., p. 127]

   Finally, as well as skewing resource allocation and wealth away from
   the general public, militarism also harms freedom and increases the
   threat of war. The later is obvious, as militarism cannot help but feed
   an arms race as countries hurry to increase their military might in
   response to the developments of others. While this may be good for
   profits for the few, the general population have to hope that the
   outcome of such rivalries do not lead to war. As Goldman noted about
   the First World War, can be, in part, "traced to the cut-throat
   competition for military equipment . . . Armies equipped to the teeth
   with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder backed by
   their military interests, have their own dynamic functions." [Op. Cit.,
   p. 353]

   As to freedom, as an institution the military is based on the
   "unquestioning obedience and loyalty to the government." (to quote, as
   Goldman did, one US General). The ideal soldier, as Goldman puts it, is
   "a cold-blooded, mechanical, obedient tool of his military superiors"
   and this position cannot be harmonised with individual liberty. Indeed,
   "[c]an there be anything more destructive of the true genius of liberty
   than . . . the spirit of unquestioning obedience?" [Op. Cit., pp. 52-4]
   As militarism becomes bigger, this spirit of obedience widens and
   becomes more dominant in the community. It comes to the fore during
   periods of war or in the run up to war, when protest and dissent are
   equated to treason by those in power and their supporters. The war
   hysteria and corresponding repression and authoritarianism which
   repeatedly sweeps so-called "free" nations shows that militarism has a
   wider impact than just economic development and wasted resources. As
   Bakunin noted, "where military force prevails, there freedom has to
   take its leave -- especially the freedom and well-being of the working
   people." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, pp. 221-2]
