Harry Targ
And here let me emphasize the fact and it cannot be repeated too often that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die. Eugene V. Debs, June 16, 1918, Canton, Ohio.
Somehow this madness must
cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering
poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes
are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of
America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and
corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it
stands aghast at the path we have taken. Dr. Martin Luther King,
April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York.
The Capitalist System is
a War System
Marx and Engels declared
in their famous 1848 manifesto that capitalism was a world system. Due to
cutthroat competition every corporation, every bank, every small business would
need to expand or it would be defeated in the marketplace by more successful
competitors. Therefore, competition would lead to consolidation, a shift from
many economic actors to declining numbers of them. This process of capital
accumulation extended to the entire globe.
Lenin argued that by the
dawn of the twentieth century, competition had led to monopolies within
countries. States driven by monopolies expanded all across the globe. Competing
states often engaged in war. Their expansion also generated resistance,
rebellion and revolution around the world. In sum, the capitalist system by its
very nature was a war system.
In addition, capitalist
economies, particularly imperial powers such as the United States, required
natural resources, cheap or slave labor, land, customers for products, and
opportunities to invest accumulated profits in overseas corporations, and
banks. In the post-World War II period, capitalist expansion even required the
establishment of a global debt system that would increase the possibility of
penetrating the economies of countries that incurred debts.
The realities that Marx
identified in the nineteenth century are relevant today in two ways. First,
given technological advances, what economists call neoliberal globalization is
the logical extension of his insight that capitalism needs to “establish
connections everywhere.”
Second, given episodes of
resistance to capitalist expansion, conflict and violence in the global system
are likely to occur from time to time among capitalist states (each seeking to
enhance their own monopolies), between capitalist states and emerging socialist
states that reject the very premises of capitalist economics, and between
capitalist states and marginalized people who rebel against
capitalist/imperialist intrusion.
In the twentieth century
hundreds of wars and covert interventions resulted in deaths exceeding 100
million people. Between 1945 and 1995 the United States alone was involved in
wars, civil conflicts, and covert operations that cost more than 10 million deaths.
Most of this violence was justified as a response to a “demonic” Soviet Union
and “international communism” threatening “the free world.” The defense of the
“free world” usually was fought out in the Global South. In fact, in the
twentieth century the vast majority of victims of the capitalist war system
were people of color, primarily non-combatants. And adding to the direct human
cost have been the devastation of the land, the extraction of basic resources,
and the destruction of viable communities and self-sustaining social systems.
Impacts of the Capitalist
War System in Imperial States
Foreign policy has always
been inextricably connected to the struggles for social and economic justice;
including worker and human rights. And, as a consequence, foreign policy has
always been used as a tool to distract, divide, and cloud the consciousness of
working people everywhere. Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party and
four-time candidate for president of the United States, was jailed for his
speech in Canton, Ohio decrying United States participation in World War I
because of its profoundly negative consequences for the working class at home.
Debs pointed out that
American “democracy” allowed no real opportunity for workers, the people who
fought its wars, to determine whether to go to war or not. Workers were not
allowed to hear and read all about the consequences of military participation.
Before and during World War I, the United States government created a
propaganda arm, The Committee on Public Information, to disseminate information
to the citizenry promoting the United States entry into the war in Europe.
Opponents of the war, such as Debs, were silenced. It was during the war that
the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and began to establish an alternative to
the capitalist war system. President Wilson and his Secretary of State Robert
Lansing warned of the danger of this threat to “democracy” and “freedom.”
As Debs implied, the
capitalist war system needed impressionable military recruits to fight the wars
in the name of a higher good while banks and corporations expanded their presence
on a worldwide basis. But the capitalist war system which recruited foot
soldiers also required the accumulation of money capital to pay for the wars
and the capacity to develop “connections everywhere.” And after the second
world war, during the Cold War, trillions of dollars have been wasted on the
establishment of a worldwide network of military bases and outposts; troop
deployments; space, drone, aircraft, and nuclear technologies; and a security
apparatus that has its electronic and personnel tentacles in virtually every
other country.
In addition, the
development of a military capability to maintain and expand the capitalist
system became a profitable business in its own right. What President Eisenhower
called “the military-industrial complex” is a dense network of profitable
connections between huge corporations, banks, universities, think tanks, and
manufacturing facilities in virtually every city, town, state, and most
importantly, Congressional District. The United States after World War II created
what Andrew Bacevich, international historian, called a “permanent war
economy.”
Economic Consequences of
the Capitalist/War System
Dr. Martin Luther King,
in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, spoke of the
devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the
poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the
targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also
misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.
Every health and welfare
provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by
resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation,
jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism,
homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and
technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising
military expenditures. Over half the US federal budget goes to military
spending past and current. And the irony is that the money that is
extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to
military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the
population who profit from the war system as it exists.
“I speak for the poor of
America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and
corruption in Vietnam.” Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would
surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in
Central America and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. and the
more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are
fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between
rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some
twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined
poverty lines.
The Meaning of the
Capitalist/War System for Today’s Progressive Movements: Bringing the Peace
Movement Back In
Paradoxically, the left
and progressive forces in the United States are intuitively aware of the points
long ago proclaimed by Marx, Debs, and King. Libraries are full of analyses and
data that corroborate the basic arguments made above. But the recent resurgence
of a new socialist left and an energized progressive majority, have not
developed analyses and programs that make the necessary connections between
capitalism and human misery at home and the war system abroad.
First, discourse on the
left has been derailed by an overzealous concentration on alleged connections
between Russia and the outcome of the US election. Mountains of hyperbolic
allegations about the alleged source of evil, Vladimir Putin, have led the
media (and many progressives) to channel foreign policy discussion away from
military budgets, bombings of Syria, sending more troops to Afghanistan, covert
operations in Latin America, reversing steps toward normalization of relations
with Cuba, to a renewed Cold War with the successor state to the Soviet Union.
Second, many grassroots
activists, seeing the need to target their energies to local and state
politics, and single issues nationally, have taken the view that adding foreign
policy to the agenda, complicates movement building. In fact, the exciting
campaign of Bernie Sanders also dealt only marginally with foreign policy. And
Sanders mostly spoke of foreign policy when his opponents, including the
Hillary Clinton campaign, raised questions about his visits to Nicaragua and
Cuba in the 1980s. In retrospect, it seems obvious that progressives should
link the possibility of a financially sustainable health care system or free
tuition for college to reductions in military spending.
Third, progressives have tactically
avoided pressing and necessary conversations about the past and present, and
how a progressive United States government could participate in the future
international system. For example:
-There needs to be a
serious discussion of twentieth century socialism: both governments and
movements. Sectors of the left in the United States have been unwilling to have
a textured analysis of the strengths as well as the weaknesses of socialist
regimes, what some refer to as “really existing socialism,” and how distortions
of those systems were connected to US imperialism.
-There needs to be a
serious conversation about twenty-first century developments in Cuba, Vietnam,
China, the state of Kerala in India, and what remains of the Bolivarian
Revolution in Latin America. As long as such conversations are avoided, the
progressive base will be diverted by the twentieth century trope about the
“evils of communism.”
-There needs to be
detailed analyses of military spending. Much of that work is being done by the
War Resisters League, The Cost of War Project, and others, but little of it
finds its way into grassroots campaigns for progressive politicians or
campaigns in support of single-payer health insurance.
-Finally, there is a need
to address important questions not often discussed. Two stand out: first the
doctrine of the inevitability of war which cripples everyone’s political
consciousness; and second, the celebration of grotesque violence in popular
culture. These are not abstract issues that belong only in the classroom or the
church sermon. They need to be highlighted. And the writings and speeches of
Marx, Debs, and King would support the view that assumptions about the
inevitability of war and the glories of violence are intimately connected to
the capitalist/war system.
In short, the emerging
socialist movements, the burgeoning progressive campaigns, and the peace
movement must reconnect in fundamental ways: theoretically and practically. As
Marx and Engels warned in 1848 and those who followed them elaborated; war,
the preparation for war, and human misery everywhere are inextricably
connected.
