"Freezing the Movement:

Posthumous Notes on Nuclear War" (1983)

George Caffentzis

Preface (2003)

I found the following set of “posthumous notes” recently while I was cleaning up a closet. They were written, on the basis of memory and textual evidence, in the spring of 1983, right before I left the US to live and teach in Nigeria. Some of the material in these notes went into a couple of articles that were published then. One was in the "Posthumous Notes" (1983) issue of Midnight Notes and the other was in a piece entitled “The Marxist Theory of War” in the Radical Science Journal issue on the anti-nuclear war movement (1983). But they have since been unread and untroubled. My rediscovery of these notes puts them and me in a tight logical spot. I was supposed to have been dead (and reborn) according to these notes…but I clearly am neither. So their circulation now immediately falsifies them. Self-negating or not, I am hoping that these notes from the dead might be of use to the living at a time when nuclear war is again on the agenda. Anyway, please receive these notes as a gift on the Day of the Dead. -- November 2, 2003

A Lamentation

Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people and go from here! for they be all adulterers, and assembly of treacherous men. -- Jeremiah, Lamentations 9:2

"The existence of the bomb paralyzes us. Our only motion a gigantic leap backward in what we take to be the minimal conditions of our existence whereby all desires, demands, struggles vanish; only our biological existence appears a valid cause. Don't kill us, exterminate us, burn us alive, make us witness the more most horrid spectacle the mind can imagine (?????), lived thousands of times in our fears watching the 7:00 News, reading the "scientific medical reports." Please let us live, that's all we ask, forget what this life will be like, forget about our now seemingly utopian dreams..."

But isn't this declaring we're already dead? Isn't this admitting the explosion has already worked, that we've already been blown to pieces hundreds of times when, of all our needs and struggles, only the will to survive remains? Worse yet. Isn't this declaration a most dangerous path? For when only people on their knees confront the powers that be, these powers feel godlike and justified, not restrained by the fear that should they dare so much, whoever of us will be left will make life impossible for them as well.Why a freeze then? Freezing what? Just our brain it seems, in the false assumption that the status quo may hold at this moment any guarantee for us. Freeze is accepting to live with the blackmail of the bomb. Accepting to bring children into a world threatened by a nuclear explosion. Freeze is to allow them to periodically toy with the threat of blowing us up. Are we so mad that we can watch on TV a discussion of our future disposal as if the Jews had been allowed to witness the plans for the construction of the gas chambers. Are we going to bargain -- ask for 10 instead of 100 or 1000 crematory ovens -- debating on their size, expediency and efficiency? Shall we ask how many people will they put to work or out of work? Or do we harbor the secret hope that they are readied for somebody else -- perhaps in Europe, more likely the Middle East...

Reflections on a Summer of Peace

They that were brought up in scarlet embrace dungheaps. -- Jeremiah, Lamentations 4:5

One of the pleasures of the posthumous state is that we are free, finally, of compromise, self-deception, all the tricks of exchange. Without myself, what is there to exchange? Let us share the posthumous state for a while to discover the refreshing breeze of the last judgment before we part company. Flip out of our body; hovering over our mythical blast shadow, reflecting on the debris, it is time now for positing reasons for all this.

Certainly we go to haunt the assorted generals, capitalists and consultants cowering in their bunkers, but are they reason enough? It is time now perhaps to remember ourselves...

It was a summer of extraordinary peace. In the midst of the deepest period of unemployment, bankruptcy and social wage cutbacks since the Great Depression, the only movement in the streets was the "Peace" Movement.

The summer began on June 12th, 1982 with the largest demonstration in memory gathered in NYC before the disarmament sessions at the UN. The demonstration took many months to plan in Washington and NY and many others throughout the country obviously made it the focus of their political and creative efforts. Almost one million people for all over the US (with other marches in the west) converged on the city. Writes one observant marcher:

The spectacular aspects of the march were the most powerful and even now, a month later, they are still vivid in my mind's eye. I suppose you have seen some of the floats: a blue whale a hundred feet long with a slogan on its side: SAVE THE HUMANS. A white dove actually fabricated from huge bolts of white cotton that was elevated by poles and which the afternoon breeze animated into a floating life high above the people along Fifth Avenue. The puppets I think were seen by millions -- earthy, peasant and fantasy-life figures of women and children that glided fifteen and twenty feet into the air. Banners of all kinds. Absence of uniformity of slogan, poster or placard -- a big difference with the Solidarity Day March in Washington.

Indeed, the contrast to the other events of the summer [of 1982] was remarkable. From the traditional unionized working class profound peace, perhaps the silence of the grave, with only a few desperate exceptions like the Iowa Beef strike. It was long and bitter and led to the calling of the National Guard with guns drawn and weapons carriers in the streets, assisting scabs to the plant. The strike was bitter because it was held in the midst of the lowest strike activity since WWII and also, characteristically, because it was over not how much the wage increases were at stake, but how much the "give backs" would be! Only the professional baseball players could strike and win that summer.

With the "unwaged" part of the working class, there was the same peace. It was the beginning of the "riot summer" in the US ghettos, and not a riot was to be found in the face of the most direct attacks on the social wages of Blacks and Hispanics. The silence was so noticeable that the NY Times, at the end of the summer, could editorialize with a sigh about it and the Wall Street Journal sent an investigative report team in to find out about the non-existent. Even the most "activist" black groups went on vacation that summer!

Thus in 1982, the most direct "observable" protest movement in the Reagan period was neither to be found in the factories nor in the ghettos, but in Central Park, Fifth Avenue, and UN Plaza. The two old centers of insubordination and revolt were apparently paralyzed.

Composition, Organization and Divisions in the Peace Movement

For the sins of her prophets, and the iniquities of her priests, that have shed the blood of the just in the midst of her. They have wandered as blind men in the streets, they have polluted themselves with blood, so that men could not touch their garments. -- Jeremiah, Lamentations, 4: 13,14.

Who were those who brought their multitudes into the streets of the city that summer? They have a past, indeed, immediate predecessors in the angels of the anti-nuclear energy movement. The Peace movement is a generalization of the anti-nuclear energy movement that began to homogenize the "new working class" in the period between the spring of 1977 through the spring of 1980, the first boom of the Crisis, with so much effect. In fact, the previous mass demonstration in NYC in September 1979 was an anti-nuclear energy demonstration and concern that drew more than a quarter of a million people and was the biggest such demo of the movement in that period. The intervening three years have lead to a "broadening" of the numbers of people involved; on the other side, it has lead to a "shallower" movement. If anything, we now reach the limit that the anti-nuclear energy movement was hunting for, beyond it lies the uncharted social seas.

But in going to the limit, there is a stark and qualitative change that makes one almost nostalgic for the "good old days" of 1979! This can be seen on three counts: the "grass roots" organization, the tactics and the leadership groupings.

For all the possible critiques that one might have had about the anti-nuclear energy movement, one thing must be singled out as important; its creation of new social configurations on the microscopic social level that brought together people from radically different layers of the division of labor, inhabited by the non-industrialized worker (although excluding the black or Hispanic ghetto dweller). The "affinity group" filled the need for a new mix-master that the party and union increasing could not fill in the late '70s. Thus he had the Hard Rains, the Shads, the Tomatoes, the Clams, the Abalones, etc. On the contrary, we find the peace movement organized along occupation, party or church lines. Consider the following list:

Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Disarmament

Artists for Nuclear Disarmament

Writers for Nuclear Disarmament

Communicators for Nuclear Disarmament

Computer Programmers for Nuclear Disarmament

Educators for Social Responsibility

Psychologists for Social Responsibility

Architects for Social Responsibility

Nurses for Social Responsibility

United Campuses to Present Nuclear War

etc.

Oh, let us not forget Business Alert to Nuclear War! As well as the church groupings from the Quakers to the Catholics and the Democratic Party fronts -- let's not forget the CP fronts too. In going to the limit the "new working class" is attempting to define itself on a work basis or in a representational form (through political or theological representation), but as a consequence the movement becomes congealed before it can find some possible new social level or "strange loop."



Second, the leadership structure is quite different. The anti-nuke movement had a mythology of "no leaders" which was quite delusive; however, its leadership cadres were relatively diffuse. This is not so for the Peace Movement, whose evident center is in Washington, D.C. in the "neo-liberal" [an anachronistic sic here!] think tanks and the halls of Congress. Though the Left attempts to not do just the dirty work, the real initiatives have come directly from the Capital.



Third, the median tactic (i.e., the action form that typifies a movement, from which it can escalate or descend) of the anti-nuclear energy movement was "civil disobedience," which we in another life (in "Strange Victories") analyzed as an attempt to use human capital against high-organic composition capital to "shame" the latter with the degradation of the former. The Peace Movement's median tactic is the vote and the "tribute" relation with its adherents. For example, the Freeze Movement defines itself in a purely representational way: qua referenda, the winning of congressional seats, and legislation immediately. Further, it relates the movement's masses in the same representational form. It asks (like CISPES, from which it has learned much) a sort of movement "tax" or "tribute" from the base in order to do the movement's work. There is a presumption that the "average person" is too busy for direct political participation and that therefore s/he should pay a tax to have this work done for them. This tax is levied as bodies in a weekend demo or in funds for organizers.



But getting to the limit is not all, because the limit of the type of worker currently involved in the Peace Movement is still not wide enough. And so it becomes crucial to deal with other class elements. The first elements were the blacks who formed a part of the movement in the demos throughout the country in a way that was not true of the anti-nuke energy movement's demos (which shows that the previous movement still had some time to go before it reached its barriers). The tangled story of the "difficult relations" between blacks and the anti-nuke war movement can be seen in the preparation of the June 12th demo, which started in the fall of 1981. The first black groups, however, were approached only in January 1982, at least in NYC. One of the participants writes that the points agreed to on January 29, 1983 in the National Coordination Committee were the following: "all campaign literature would include paragraphs linking the arms race with US interventionism in the Third World and with racism at home; that at least one third of the members of each leadership body of the Campaign would be Third World, and that a caucus of Third World Organization would choose who would represent them on the leadership bodies."



But by March 8, 1982 the "main stream" groups moved to form a "corporation to produce the June 12th event." A number of "main stream" groups (including the Riverside Church Disarmament Program, American Friends Service Committee, the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign and SANE) sent a letter to the "centrists" (including Mobilization for Survival, War Resisters League, US Peace Council, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the NY Public Interest Research Group) arguing for the new approach which would make the agreements with the black and Third World groups null-and-void. The object of the exclusionary effort was the Black United Front and a variety of white Left-wing party groupings. So as the Spring progressed the splits between the mainstream groups, the mediating while left groups and the black left parties grew and festered, until finally the threat of having a separate demonstration forced the mainstream groups to opt for some sort of "harmony" and they allowed the "Third World Leadership" in the June 12th Rally Committee. The tension, however, was so intense that there rumors of fist-fights behind the stage, while Bruce Springsteen played for the gathered million, between black speakers and the organizers who were arguing for more minutes for "the Boss."



Such are the soap operas of a movement that is trying to overcome its class limits, so goeth the adulteries, the marriages and murders. Indeed, the road of reconciliation with the black movement was so rough that it quite possibly was the reason for the peculiar silence after June 12. For there was no set of "local" initiatives that spread a kind of "anti-nuke" small pox across the land. After June 12 there was peace too from the peace movement. And this was inevitable; for it learned that to be able to keep its class composition in order, it can allow for very little movement. By going to the limit, it must Freeze itself.

Paradoxically, the very working class vacuum of 1982 gave this movement an enormous relative momentum: it couldn't stand still. It could even consider itself and its cadres, drawn from the social and electronic technologists thrown up by the Crisis, as prophets of a New, New Deal. For all their hesitancy, their timidity and haste for compromise they saw in the emptiness the ability to bargain the fate of the class relation. But to do this the Freeze captains had to go out in search of the Moby Dick of the proletariat, the Great White Worker. In order to find him let us chart the seas.

The Peace Movement and the U.S. Class War in the 1970s

All thine enemies have opened their mouth against them: they hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up; certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it. The Lord hath done that which he devised -- Jeremiah, Lamentations 2: 16, 17

And in an instant I remembered everything. I saw the profits of Capital decline from 1965 through 1973 heading to the node of euthanasia, under the continual assault of riot, strike, sit-in, mutiny, refusal to work, to fuck, to not fuck, etc. And before me came the image of the Great Beast of Reaction: the Energy and Money Crisis.

This Crisis changed the very organic physiognomy of capital itself. The mass assembly lines, the steel and rubber plants slowed and, at times, halted altogether. While the lay-offs continued, there was an enormous expansion of the poles of the economy; on the one side, the capital-intensive "high-tech" information and energy industries and, on the other, by the labor-intensive "reproductive" and "service" sectors of the economy. Whole new industries (like software programming and bio-genetic engineering) found billions of dollars of investment available on the basis of a "good idea" while dinosauric meat-packing plants and archaic steel mills were palmed off on their workers, prone to cardiac arrest, for suicidal wages and self-managed drudgery.

I saw the very body of the working class transformed. No more muscles and beer bellies. The waged workers have become both feminized and alien, through a rapid increase in legal and illegal immigrants at the bottom of the labor market, while on the top we find the white-male-technocrats of the social or computational machines. The tendency for the homogenization of wages which reached its peak in 1968 was definitely broken in the 1970s and the wage gaps between different branches of industry and sectors of the working class are reaching historical peaks.

And the very land did change. Cities that were the traditional centers of working class power were systematically depopulated and the Black's tactical hold on the centers was broken. It was a period of exile, wandering in the desert, transport and, for the recalcitrant, internment.

The wage struggle was demobilized and profits rose with a sigh in the post-1973 period. The Black movement was not only destabilized geographically but also, through the impact of immigration, new divisions have been introduced into the lowest waged and unwaged part of the class; the Women's movement found itself immediately in struggle against the traditional white unionized workers and the blacks in an ever tightening labor market. These division and tensions intensified by the depressions of 1974-1976 and the 1980-1983 exhausted much of the initiative of these movements so that real wages fell for over a decade for the first time since the 1920s.

The Crisis did what it was devised to do, but at the cost of enormous instability; so now the time had come to decide more coherently for a model of accumulation of capital that could last into the next century, past the second millennium. To envision the possibilities think of the production of values and the reproduction of labor powers.

In the realm of value production. The first is a revival of the old post-WWII "Keynesian" form of production pivoted on assembly line production, though this time undoubtedly under a new form of "social contract" in which a chastened working class would accept lower wages in return for job security in an "export" oriented economy. The second model would be an intensification of the physiognomy of capital in the crisis: wiping out the last vestiges of "old capital," investing in the informational-computational-anti-entropic industries and creating special reservation of low-capital/high labor, verities with a new humbleness or a more risky and more polarized economy: "re-industrialization" or "post-industrialization."

But to produce value you must reproduce its producer, labor power. And again two models or Ideas dominated. On the one side, the "patriarchal traditionalist" family model which would attempt to return the male to the center of the reproduction problematic; it would be pro-natalist hence anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-feminist. It signals a yearning for a return to the most Protestant mortification in defense of bourgeois family units. The second model is the "freedom of choice" model that insists on an equally hoary bourgeois demand: autonomy of the individual as the route of reproductive efficiency. It is Filmer versus Locke all over again, but now Locke has become a gay, sex-changed single demanding an abortion!

When these dichotomies cross, a matrix is formed that locates the four pure types of capitalist politics of the future. It is upon these types that deals with the class can be made as well as compromises within capital can be coordinated. Let us review each for the moment

Post-industrialization Re-industrialization Freedom of A11 A12
Choice

patriarchal A21 A22

A11: this is the utopia of computer freaks and scientistic production embedded in an environment of alternative "life styles" from clean living to S&M prowlers.

A12: this is the utopia of the Left, a good day's work at the plant producing "useful" materials, and a free, "socialized" form of housework.

A21: this is the image of the '50s, if there were no '60s and '70s, crew-cut tech daddy returns to the happy family, no incest and no dildoes.

A22: here the factory worker returns home, the wife and kids shut up, while the Jews and Blacks weep.

Am I being facetious? Perhaps. Let the dead have their fun, I think you get my point, anyway. But the Freeze Movement arises exactly during the moment when historic choices must be made among the ideal types, more precisely it arises as part of the process of choice. It constitutes the military policy of the social struggle that is pushing for a form of production to be found in the upper right portion of the matrix. If it is to win, the Great White Leviathan must be lure or snared near A12. But why is the military policy necessary? In order to see this we have to take a trip down a dark tunnel where we can hear the voices of past friends.

The Pure Theory of War

He hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow. He hath caused the arrows of his quiver to enter into my reigns. I was a derision to all my people, and their song all the day. He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath mad me drunken with wormwood. He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, he hath covered me with ashes. And thou hast removed my world far from peace; I forgot prosperity. -- Jeremiah, Lamentations 3:12-17

War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the read to survival or ruin, it is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied. -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There are three stages down the tunnel of war before we come to the light. First we hear the classic accents of Marx and Engels, then in imperialist voice, the dialectics of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Hilferding, and finally the living voices of Sweezy, O'Connor and Vietnam vets talking Keynesian Marxism. They give us the three moments of the Marxist theory of War: the relation between violence and production.

Marx and Engels developed their theory of War in the middle of a century of capitalist peace in Europe between 1814 and 1914. (I'd wager that more people were killed on the barricades of Paris and in the massacres of workers in mining and industrial towns than in the official wars fought on the European soil of that century.) The classical bourgeois political mercantilist policy of military intervention and power as an essential element of the process of accumulation. After the Napoleanic wars, these theorists dominated the strategy of the system of European national capital arguing for a homeostatic market mechanism to dominate interstate affairs while emphasizing internal class management: a shift from army to police, for war to class struggle. Hence there developed an ongoing bourgeois critique of military spending and "waste" through the nineteenth century.

This context, of course, shaped Marx's and Engel's theory of war not only because of their appreciation of capitalist strategy but also due to internal debates within the workers' movement. Proudhonists, socialist quacks like Duhring and anarchists continually argued that capitalist production was fundamentally illegitimate since property is "theft," a system built on violence and armed expropriation. One consequence of the debate was a life-long dispute over the tactics of working class insurrection, especially of the efficiency of wage struggle and legal reform. For surely, many argued, if Capital lives by the sword, it must die by the sword. But Marx argued that violence and conquest form only an efficient cause for the eventual development of a mode of production, they did not determine it. This is true even in the most extreme instances:

The Mongols with their devastations in Russia for example, acted in accordance with their system of production, for which sufficient pastures on large uninhabited stretches of country are the main prerequisite....There is a prevalent tradition that in certain periods robbery constituted the only source of living. But in order to be able to plunder, there must be something to plunder, i.e., there must be production. And even the method of plunder is determined by the method of production. A stock-jobbing nation, for example, cannot be robbed in the same manner as a nation of shepherds.

This piece was written in the context of a critique of Proudonist economists to be found in the Grundrisse and the Critique of Political Economy in 1857. Twenty years later, in an attempt to correct a pacifist line in the German Social Democratic Party being proposed by Duhring, Engels went on the attack. He pointed out that Duhring's phrase, "property founded on force," is wrong, since property "already existed, though limited to certain objects; in the ancient primitive communes of all civilized peoples." He concluded:

The role played in history by force as contrasted with economic development is therefore clear. In the first, all political power is originally based on an economic, social function, and increases in proportion as the members of society, through the dissolution of the primitive community, become transformed into private producers, and thus become more and more divorced from the administrators of the common functions of society. Secondly, after the political force has made itself independent in relation to society, and has transformed itself from its servant into its master, it can work in two different directions. Either it works in the sense and in the direction of the natural economic development, in which case no conflict arises between them, the economic development being accelerated. Or it works against economic development, in which case, as a rule, with but few exceptions, force succumbs to it.

This complex dialectic of emphasizing and then de-emphasizing the importance of force has its tactical dimension since Comrades Marx and Engels were continually attempting to steer the worker's movement between Blanquist insurrectionism and social pacifism. For ultimately they tell the movement that it is pointless to employ force unless economic development is already taking society to the brink of breakdown. Though in actual practice, the message is ambiguous, as Marx's flip-flops on the Paris Commune showed.

But Marx's economic analysis of military expenditures was much more consistent with, in fact, the bourgeois consensus of that period. That is, he agreed with Smith, Ricardo, and Mill that "the whole army and navy are unproductive labourers" paid out of the revenue and not in any way productive of capital. Certainly Marx never committed any ideological stupidity on this matter, as his beautiful critique of the "grasshopper and ant" theory of primitive accumulation demonstrates:

But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant is the one thing fit for all ages and all stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and "labour" were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

Capital "comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" but the producers of this blood, the soldiers and sailors, and the instruments of this production, the Krupp guns and Mauser rifles, are "incidental expenses of production." Marx's discussion of military expenditures arises in the debate with the "vulgar economists" who argue, contra Smith and Ricardo, that often cannot distinguish between productive/unproductive labor since servants, senators, sergeants, saxophonists and sex workers do produce services (spiritual or material) that can be as essential as steel mills. True, Marx retorts, but what constitutes productive labor from capital's point of view is not whether it produces pleasures but whether the expenditures for that labor produce profits (surplus value).

Although Marx's discussion is rather sloppy, fragmentary and, at times, genuinely confused and inconclusive, it does come out quite clear on the question of war and military expenditures. Marx does this in this discussion of Nassau ("Last Hour") Senior's claim that a soldier who, because of the unsettled state of country, must stand guard over the fields is as productive as the farmers that sow and reap. The soldier is as crucial as the stoop laborer, his gun is as essential as the hoe, Senior claims as the Sam Huntington of his day. Now it might be true that you can't dig coal with bayonets, but what if it were the case that you cannot dig coal without them, wouldn't bayonets and their wielders be as productive as shovels and coal miners? Senior wrote:

There are countries where it is quite impossible for people to work the land unless there are soldiers to protect them. Well, according to Smith's classification, the harvest is not produced by the joint labour of the man who guides the plough and of the man at his side with arms in hand; according to him, the ploughman alone is a productive worker, and the soldier's activity is unproductive (Marx 1963: 288).

Marx's retort to this critique of Smith displays one of his great failures of categorization which was characteristic of much of his work in the field of productive and unproductive labor: "The soldier belongs to the incidental expenses of production, in the same way as a large part of the unproductive labourers who produce nothing themselves, either spiritual or material, but who are useful and necessary only because of faulty social relations -- they owe their existence to social evils" (Marx 1963: 289). If the "faulty social relations and evils" disappeared "the material conditions of production, the conditions of agriculture as such, remain unchanged." We could remain for much time here within the tunnel, wrangling over these passages. For examples, is it because military presence is not part of the "normal conditions of production" and so it does not effect the "labor-time social necessary" which determines the value of the commodities produced under the shadow of the gun, that military expenditures (e.g., the wages of the soldier and the cost of his M-16) are incidental? But before we do, it is worth noting that Marx's categorization of military expenditures as unproductive, hence on par with the wages of parsons and tax clerks, led to a critique of colonialism that was quite in line with the classical 19th century liberalism of J.S. Mill. In his articles during the 1850s for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx continuously drummed on the "waste" and "inefficiency" of the British rule in India on purely cost-accounting grounds. He concludes one of his articles with the following:

It is thus evident that individuals again largely by the English connection with India, and of course their gain goes to increase the sum of the national wealth. But against all this a very large offset is to be made. The military and naval expenses paid of out of the pockets of England or Indian account have been constantly increasing with the extent of the Indian dominion. To this must be added the expense of Burmese, Afghan, Chinese and Persian wars.... Add to this career of endless conquest and perpetual aggression in which the English are involved by the possession of India, and it may well be doubted whether, on the whole, this dominion does not threaten to cost quite as much as it can ever be expected to come to.

That is, the incidental expenses of producing poppies in the fields of Bengal, processing them into opium and transporting it from Calcutta (which constituted more than a half of all Indian exports in dollar terms) far outweighed the income generated. But since the income was private while the expenses were public, Marx suggested, the lack of "surplus" was tolerated by the British state, and indeed it was a way of taxing the English working class for the benefit of capital.

The final position of Marx and Engels on war is not at all straight-forward but perhaps in summing together the social and economic analysis we can get this picture: war is absolutely essential in the period of "primitive accumulation" in order to create the conditions of accumulation (especially the expropriation the expropriation of laborers from the land) but with the establishment of a capitalist mode of production war-related expenditures become increasing antithetical to the accumulation process.

The Marxist theory of war underwent a profound change with the rise of capitalist "Imperialism" in the midst of the Great Depression (1873-1896). Instead of expanding the "free trade" ideology of 19th century liberalism there followed the "scramble for Africa," the re-division of China, the Rough Riders, etc. War, invasion, and massacre become the order to the day along with a dramatic increase in military investments, e.g., in Britain consider the growth of military expenditures both absolutely and relatively:

Total expenditure of govt Military M/T
1820 50 12.5 .25

1850 50 10 .20

1880 80 30 .37

1900 120 60 .50

in millions of £

The theorists of the Second International attempted to explain the rise of Mars over Mammon (apparently) by postulating aspects of capital that Marx did not recognize or did not foresee adequately. We shall only stop to speak of Luxemburg, Hilferding and Lenin but in them we see the growing shift in the evaluation of military expenses: increasingly they appear to enter into the accumulation process as essential components rather than incidental expenses.

For Red Rosa, Marx erred because he did not see that capitalism could not both be accumulating and reproducing on an extended scale and be a closed system of capitalists and workers. If it were closed, then who would there be to sell the surplus commodities which are the product of expanded reproduction? Her answer: the realization of surplus value must require non-capitalist consumers outside the system of direct capitalist relations, i.e., those in the world who still live on the level of simple commodity production. They are the fresh blood the system absolutely needs for continued accumulation, hence the imperialist scramble to divide up the remaining and dwindling non-capitalist parts of the planet. In this battle of the vampires, a form of reverse Malthusianism, war and the instrumentalities of violence are essential conditions for the realization of surplus. Military policy becomes fundamentally aggressive, but not as a matter of "choice" or "opportunity." It is now war or death which, according to her model, mathematically intensifies as the remaining non-capitalist areas diminish until, no doubt, the holocaust ignites over the last non-capitalist peasant in Borneo!

Though Hilferding's explanation of Imperialism was quite different from Luxemburg's he also agrees that the character of war and war preparation dramatically shifted between the middle and the end of the 19th century. In his analysis the cause is the rise of Finance Capital, i.e., the enormous concentration of capital brought about the stock-corporation which made it possible for the banking system to coordinate large parts of industrial capital in the form of cartels and trusts, But the formation of national monopolies forces the monopolist to seek outside investment outlets as the only source expansion in markets not dominated by domestic monopolies; this simultaneous search in the context of a finite world immediately leads to national conflict and annexation. It is a zero-sum game, with more players joining every year (in the form of newly industrialized capitalist societies like Japan, Germany, Italy, etc.) and not the pot fixed by the geographical limits of the planet. Hence the inevitability of, and necessity for, war. Hilferding writes:

Finance capital, finally, needs a state which is strong enough to carry out a policy of expansion and to gather new colonies. Where liberalism was an opponent of state power politics and wished to insure its own dominance against the older power of aristocracy and bureaucracy, to which end it confined the state's instruments of power within the smallest possible compass, there finance capital demands power politics without limit; and it would do so even if the outlays for army and navy did not directly assure to the most powerful capitalist groups an important market with enormous monopolistic profits.

Hilferding dismisses the usual liberal critique of military expenditures as the product of conspiracy and corruption between military contractors and government official. Military power is necessary for accumulation, it enters into the very conditions of the capitalist mode of production. Outlays for the army and navy are no more discretionary and incidental, they are part of doing business in the reign of Finance Capital.

Lenin develops Hilferding's theory of Finance Capital with special emphasis on the question of War, i.e., the burden of Lenin's argument in his 1916 pamphlet on Imperialism is to show that the development of monopoly capital (whose details he derives from Hilferding) inevitably leads to war. It is a polemic against and others who argued that international cartels prefigure a period of "ultra-imperialism" when the different national monopoly capitals will join together in a peaceful "joint exploitation of the world." In the middle of the First World War, you can excuse Lenin's bile! His argument is quite straight-forward: the only conceivable basis for this "ultra-imperialism" is a mathematical equality of different national capitals with respect to their "strength" and that all changes in these strengths will be even. This is impossible, Lenin points out. Indeed, this is where he introduces his theory of war; military power is the form of the economic content of monopoly capitalism, and this form expresses itself during the period of instability:

Finance capital and the trusts are increasing instead of decreasing the differences in the rate of development of the various parts of the world economy. When relation of forces is changes, how else, under capitalism, and the solution of contradictions be found, except by resorting to violence? (Lenin's italics)

Content, Form and Force are Hegelian categories that undoubtedly arise from his reading both of Hegel's Science of Logic and the Hegelian military theorist, Clausewitz. Lenin takes as his theme, "War is a continuation of policy by other means," and he applies it to the era of imperialism, an era of "bad infinities" of war and "peace":

"Inter-imperialist" or "ultra-imperialist" alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all of the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a "truce" in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one is the condition of the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peace and non-peaceful struggle out of one and the same basis of imperialist connection and the relations between world economics and world politics. (Lenin's italics)

War and military expenditure become essential and necessary for the capitalist mode of production, and so, in contradistinction to Marx's notion of "incidental expense of production," Lenin commits himself to a radically different relation of value to "force." Marx is quite right when he points out that the corn grown under the shadow of a gun tastes the same and has the same value (i.e., incorporates socially necessary labor time) as the corn grown in unguarded fields; the wages of the soldier and the cost of his/her gun are extras that might be made up because, say, of the extraordinary "fertility" of the field. But what if all fields must be guarded? This appears to be the case with the scramble to divide and re-divide the world by the imperialist powers. Does the military expense become part of the "normal conditions of production"? Apparently so; hence these expenditures in part determine the value of commodities. Here, as in much else in Imperialism we find Lenin to be quite the revisionist renegade! With that, he vanishes in disgust as we are drawn further down the tunnel.

Paul Baran appears, to speak for himself and the living Sweezy and O'Connor. Hiroshima and the entrance of the Red Army into Berlin ended the nauseating alternating circuit of imperialist war; however, another nausea developed. The US emerged as the dominant capitalist power, "inter-imperialist" war ended by the US entered into innumerable anti-insurrectionist wars either directly or through client regimes in the "Third World" and it carried on "virtual" nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Immense sums went into military expenditures. Given the extra-terrestrial powers of nuclear weapons, no satisfactory explanation based on the notion of "national defense" is possible. Then why war? A new explanation arose that quite different from the Imperialist-analysts of the early 20th century. Baran and Sweezy defined this approach on the basis of a new "law" of capitalist development to be found with the establishment of monopoly capitalist: the law of rising surplus, i.e., the growing gap between "what a society produces and the costs of producing it." This was to express the increasing contradiction between the productive capacities of industrial technique and the social limits of capitalist accumulation; a conflict ultimately between use-value and exchange-value. In a few words, the Baran and Sweezy argument is that the normal operation of capitalist enterprise produces much more than is necessary for the reproduction, on a profitable basis, of constant and variable capital and so some way must be devised for this surplus to be "absorbed" without violating the basic principles of capitalist social relation. A corollary of this argument is a new theory of war: war expenditures, aside from their lingering imperialist uses, are the best way to absorb the surplus. They write:

Here at last monopoly capitalism had seemingly found the answer to the "on what" question: on what could the government spend enough to keep the system from sinking into the more stagnation? On arms, more arms, and every more arms.

This argument, reminiscent of J.S. Mill's critique of government spending in the 1860s appears to reinvoke Marx's distinction between productive/unproductive labor, but it does it with a twist. The "unproductive" worker qua lathe operator in a missile plant is essential for the existence of capitalist production, s/he is only unproductive for a "rational society's" point of view. There is a real charm in this picture of war, for in a period of the production of the most devastating weapons imaginable, Baran and Sweezy tell us the are ultimately capital's toys, the "conspicuous consumption" of monopoly capital! and further, that the working class in the US are passive accomplices to this fundamental fraud who "rationalize" their submission to the needs of monopoly capital with anticommunist ideology.

Baran and Sweezy's work reflected the "war" Keynesianism of the immediate post WWII years, the class struggle appeared to be channeled into collective bargaining rituals of the mass industries. But between 1965 through 1973 the "union-management" formulation of struggle broke down both in the factory proper (through the "wildcat") and especially in the "social factory" (the ghettos, universities, army and "home"). The immediate response by the state was to both increase military expenditures as well as "welfare" funding ("Vietnam" plus "the Great Society"). James O'Connor attempted to extend Baran and Sweezy's theory of war to account for these developments. He argued that the capitalist state "must try to fulfill two basic and often contradictory functions -- accumulation and legitimation. Expenditures that fulfill accumulation functions are "social capital" while that fulfill legitimation functions are "social expenses," the first are productive (expanding surplus value) while the second are not. Military spending as well as "welfare" expenditures fall into the category of legitimating social expenses.

The function of the welfare is not only to control the surplus population politically but also to expand demand and domestic markets. And the warfare system not only keeps foreign rivals at bay and inhibits the development of world revolution...but also helps stave off domestic economic stagnation. Thus we describe the national government as the warfare-welfare state.

The basic function of military spending, therefore, is to increase the capitalist state's "legitimacy," i.e., the "loyalty and support" for capitalism within the working class. While "welfare" is seen as something like bread to the "surplus" population, the military apparatus appears to be the circuses of the modern proletariat. Indeed, O'Connor's conception of a "surplus population" is not far from the riotous proletariat on the banks of the Tiber whose only function they would perform is the production of "prolis" (children) for the state. They too must be kept back from the revolutionary turmoil by the modern version of the lex frumentaria, e.g., AFDC and "food stamps," they too have their votes bought with "poverty programs" and the gladiatorial games and combats that provided the pleasures of violence, temporary omnipotence, the delights of distant terror all for free (as well as being an ongoing source of employment) is produced by the military. As Seneca described it:

In the morning they throw men to the lions; at noon they throw them to the spectators. The crowd demands that the victor who has slain his opponent shall face the man who will slay him in turn; and the last conqueror is reserved for another butchering...

So too the military, aside from its obvious imperialist purpose, provides the spectacle necessary for the legitimation process which, according to Habermas (a key influence on O'Connor), an "advanced capitalist state" needs:

The state apparatus no longer, as in liberal capitalism, merely secures the general conditions of production (in the sense of the prerequisites for the continued existence of the reproduction process) but is now actively engaged in it. It must, therefore -- like the pre-capitalist state -- be legitimated, although it can no longer rely on residues of tradition that have been undermined and worn out during the development of capitalism.

But how does the state "elicit generalized motives -- that is, diffuse mass loyalty" without eliciting "participation"? Surely the H-bombs, the laser-beamed "Star Wars" satellites, the Apocalyptic rumors and missiles have a "game" element (a huge, expensive technology built not to be used, supposedly!) They make you feel the power, the violence, and terror of the state, or at least they did...it is the nearest earthly thing to God, after all.

So O'Connor's theory of war goes somewhat further than Baran and Sweezy's, for besides recognizing the surplus absorbing character of military expenditures (they "stave off domestic economic stagnation") he adds the "legitimizing" element: a monstrous investment in a machine that produces mass feelings.

Baran smiled as we were drawn further down the tunnel and slowly there emerged a light that began to grow in intensity until it became a pure crystal, clear illumination, bright and radiant, but it didn't hurt my eyes. I emitted queries and questions in a gentle ironic voice:

Why is the working class so irrational that it put up with all capital does?
Is capital so self-limiting?
Why is the bulk of exchanges of "unproductive" commodities?
Where do the bodies for autopsies come from?
Was Hitler's extermination of "deviant" gays, the "mad," gypsies and Jews a product of bureaucratic irrationality or capitalist reproductive policy?

More and more questions flowed and heat began to build in me. And then I saw in a flash the huge amount of work that is required to produce the essence of all capital: Labor Power. And I saw how so much capital and the Left have kept it invisible, wageless, made of it a natural identity first of all for women, and maligned those who demanded wages for this work. Like an island rising out of the sea, reproductive work came into sight filled with unnamed animals, insects and plants wet with submarine obscurity breathing in the light!

Just as capitalist production only incidentally (though necessarily) creates use-values in order to produce value, so also in capitalist reproduction labor power is the object while the human animals that embody it are only created by the way. From capital's viewpoint these animals only are human if they embody labor powers and a set of such animals form a population only if they can become variable capital. But the transition from animal to human, from animal to capital, is by no means "natural." It requires work, and therefore is a, perhaps the, ground of struggle. The birth of an animal is by no means the birth of labor power and the death of an animal is by no means the death of labor power: the class struggle is not a struggle over birth and death, but more fundamentally a struggle over what is being born or being killed. Here we can know the reproductive function of war. Nassau Senior's example of the soldier guarding the field from bandits so that they don't take the produce is superficial, but then again so were Marx's comments on it. For what if the soldier's presence was necessary for the laborer to be there, what if it was an essential part of the labor power expended?

The theme of war, genocide and work is, of course, basic to the classical political economy through Malthus' "principle of population" that explains war as one of the great "checks to population" when the number of animals produced by the sexual vitality of the working class confronts inadequate space and food supplies leading to "those two fatal political disorder, internal tyranny and internal tumult, which mutually produce each other." Marx's relentless critique of Parson Malthus' "Principle" just shifts the causation of war from Nature to Capital:

The law of capitalist accumulation, metamorphosed by economist into a pretended law of Nature in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labor and every rise in the price of labor which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever-enlargening scale, of the capitalist relation. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the laborer exists to satisfy the needs of the self-expansion of existing values; instead of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the laborer.

A prime material vehicle in the eternal attempt to "exclude" any tendency to "seriously imperil" capitalist accumulation is clearly to be found in the "human slaughter industry" and its products: Corpses and Terror. Surely Hitler was not the first to note the importance of war in "demographic" policy, his originality lay simply in the objects of that policy (Europeans) and the era (the 20th century).

Therefore, the distinction between "warfare" and "welfare" expenditures made by many on the Left was superficial and tactical at best. For both are essential elements in the "reproduction, on an ever-enlargening scale, of the capitalist relation." As a former self preached to the deaf:

"War" and "defense" are an essential, though unrecognized part of the reproduction of labor power, which can dictate the death of millions of workers. Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsun were extermination factories whose product -- the suffocation and death of tons of bodies -- was an essential moment in capital's labor policy.... Moreover, "social welfare" spending by the state can be defense spending.

These two types of state expenditures were essential to the maintenance of a "proper" quantitative ratio between the laboring population and the social capital that set into motion. War and control of natality being mechanisms required to produce the "law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production." Thus, the class struggles around the state's war-making powers and its control of the uterus were the most basic and subversive. For if capitalism lost control of the ratio between the quantities of surplus labor (capital) and total labor, the system would be unable to reproduce itself. Capital was not a struggle of Death against Life, of Thanatos against Eros per se; for as any demographer could see, it had unleashed enormous sexual powers as well as cosmic immortal forces. No, it is a Law that correlated Eros and Thanatos, loving and killing, to produce accumulated values. The class struggle was then a struggle against capital's Law and Purpose, and not for Life (whatever that meant!)

But war was crucial not only for the determination of quantitative ratios, it was also part of the determination of the quality of labor power; war and its threat, i.e., Terror, could be used to control the general wage level as well as a given hierarchy of wages. The most obvious example of this was the direct control of wages and the composition of labor during the course of an officially declared war. But this is only the most superficial instance for the micro-application of army, police and para-military organization at points of "interface" between capital and working class during wage struggles is too common an experience to even document. Indeed, capital's theorists during peaks of wage struggle (e.g., Hobbes) simply identify the state as the social institution that must resort to violence in defense of property and the conditions of property production (work), i.e., the state as the famous "body of armed men." There was also, however, a global impact of war and Terror on the wage, the availability for work and the maintenance of wage hierarchies for the wage measures the value of labor power, i.e., the amount of labor-time necessary to re-produce a unit of labor power, and Terror (fear of death) can dramatically reduce this value (sic). True, there are limits to this Terror, as we dead know, but it is effective whatever the routes the worker believes the instruments will take to strike her/him down. Whether s/he believed their wage struggle would "weaken" Capital in their own state and so it would retaliate of that another state will "take advantage" and strike is irrelevant for the effect.

Further, the "human slaughter industry" was indispensable during any period or "primitive or original accumulation" of the working class. Surely all those here remember the violence that was necessary for capital to unleash in order to expropriate European from their fields, Africans from their continent and the Indians from their tribes in order to create an international proletariat "free" for exploitation. The need for this quantity of violence did not end with the 17th century, however, for two reasons. First, large pockets of potential labor power were left out of capital's initial inventory of the world's labor and further some sectors were able to "drop out" of the account book (e.g., Haiti for a part of the 19th century). Second, and even more important, during any epoch of capitalist development part of the working class manages to acquire means of subsistence that, though they may be compatible with an older mode of capitalism, must be destroyed in order to create a new mode of accumulation. There is a moment in every major change in capitalist development that can be described as the eternal return of primitive accumulation. The older ways must be destroyed, the proletariat must be "freed" from its past and the only way for this to occur is through the fire and blood of war and its violence. The Napoleanic wars that lead to the creation of European factory proletariat and the First and Second World Wars that led to the formation of the post-1945 "boom" are clear examples of the "echo" of original accumulation.

War was not only requisite for the creation, quantity and quality of the working class, it had been the laboratory, testing ground and factory for new forms of work organization. We need not chew on the old chestnut ("the model of industrial production was the army and the prison") nor need we re-image the correlation between the mass armies of the World Wars and the assembly lines of the US, Europe and Japan in the 1950s to get the point: military experience is the basic paradigm of capitalist cooperation. But here's a new chestnut: the use of women in the US Army during the post-Vietnam era (just before our death) was clearly a test of a new form of work that involved women's reproductive powers directly in the production process instead of, as in the previous period, indirectly. The difficulties of this integrated sexuality could be studied and manipulated with enormous ease in the bowels of the state. This was just the latest applications of the general "function" of War and Army as an area for the development of work productivity and new patterns of cooperation.

Finally, the military and police extirpate unproductive and anti-productive workers as well as increasing the efficiency of work relation. Indeed, these were not unrelated tasks. The most benighted knew that even, or especially, very productive employments of labor power created highly entropic human "wastes" that must be extracted from the production flow, killed and then dumped. The smoothest machine creates its share of "used up," "burnt out," "degraded" energies that must be expelled at the completing of every cycle or the next cycle will become extremely inefficient. This is true for variable capital as well as constant, and so even the most sophisticated capitalist society confronts its share of "criminals," "bandits," "guerrillas," "terrorists," "revolutionaries," "perverts," and "witches," who cannot be recycled. The trick is to find them, hence the need for detectors -- spies, agents and dossiers -- and then to destroy them. The long history of executions, assassinations, death squads, "antiterrorist" campaigns, and "counter-insurgency" warfare is a story not of "incidental expenses" arising from anomalous "faulty social relations." These things were as essential to capitalist production as a condenser is to a heat engine.

And so I saw before me the Pure Theory of War: the snakes of Annihilation, Terror, Expropriation, Discipline and Extirpation wet with blood and feces twisting and squeezing. The voice that called up this obscene crystal of War had vanished. I was left alone.

Alone with a sickness and a knowledge of the system I had escaped where war was essence. Alone with memories of the last days when those who claimed to bring peace hid new Machines of War in their cloaks and Armies in their minds.

[This essay continues in the comments box below.]