The economic necessity of war: How capitalism uses conflict for exploitation

“ War, however necessary it may sometimes be, must always remain a survival of brute or unintelligent force. Commerce, however restricted by the lack of intelligence among legislators, is yet an evolution of mental force, by which it is directed and by which it will ultimately dominate brute force. War is destructive: commerce is constructive. Every phase of war is of necessity conducted by methods which have no defense in morals. ”

“ These three phases of competition are accompanied by three forms of war—the economic war, the class war and international wars.
All three forms of war have an economic background. The economic war is the contest for resources, trade, markets, monopolies and investment opportunities. The class war [Pg 155] between the exploiter and the exploited, grows out of the economic relations existing between the owner and the worker. International wars are fought for economic advantage—for resources, trade, markets. ”

“ Relaxation of right in order to avoid war—particularly penalties—Self-preservation motive for forbearing hostilities—Prudential rules in the choice of advantages—Peace preferable to the extermination of hostile powers—Forbearance prudent in inferior powers—War not to be undertaken, but from necessity. ”

“ Hence the need for foreign markets, for fields of exploitation and “spheres of influence” in “undeveloped” countries whose virgin resources are exploited in their turn after the capitalist fashion. But, since every industrial nation is seeking the same outlet for its products, clashes are inevitable and in these clashes beaks and claws—armies and navies—must come into play. ”

“ Then follows a history of the fall of feudalism, leading to a description of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary force "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part." "For exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe." ”

“ War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate source of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the source of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long as society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace be an incessant struggle—for more wealth with the privileged classes; for existence with the exploited masses—and war will be, as it has always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. ”

“ War inevitably means for the time the predominance of man over woman, the predominance of the soldier over the industrial, the predominance of reaction over democracy. It is significant that the stress of war was quickly seized as a pretext for suspending the protection of industrial workers by the State, and for relaxing the Education Acts which normally interpose some hindrance to the exploitation of children by the capitalist employer. ”

“ Brother, you may indeed be a “brave boy,” and a 187“good shot,” and you may have heroically stained your hands in other men’s blood; but, really, the “upper class” have marked you as an easy victim, a useable cheap “guy” of the “lower class.”
(20) John Ruskin keenly appreciated the capitalist’s craftiness and the workingman’s buffoonery in “a war for civilization.” He wrote: [212]
“Capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money, persuade the peasants that the said peasants want guns to shoot each other with. ”

“ But the intellectuals whom the crisis has crystallized into an acceptance of war have put themselves into a terrifyingly strategic position. It is only on the craft, in the stream, they say, that one has any chance of controlling the current forces for liberal purposes. If we obstruct, we surrender all power for influence. If we responsibly approve, we then retain our power for guiding. We will be listened to as responsible thinkers, while those who obstructed the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall be cast into outer darkness. ”

“ An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! ”

“ The results of war on the intellectual class are already apparent. Their thought becomes little more than a description and justification of what is going on. They turn upon any rash one who continues idly to speculate. Once the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a [42] cog in the great wheel. There is no good holding back. We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work. Not only is every one forced into line, but the new certitude becomes idealized. ”

“ But nations, of course, are not rational entities, and they act within their most irrational rights when they accept war as the most important thing the nation can do in the face of metaphysical menaces of imperial prestige. What concerns us here is the relative ease with which the pragmatist intellectuals, with Professor Dewey at the head, have moved out their philosophy, bag and baggage, from education to war. So abrupt a change in the direction of the national enterprise, one would have expected to cause more emotion, to demand more apologetics. ”

“ War—PREPARATION for war on the huge scale of the present day—furnishes a market for an enormous amount of commodities for sale by the capitalist class, such as steel, clothing, leather products, lumber, food products, horses, and the like. ”

“ The American workers, as a part of the price of empire, will be compelled to produce surplus [Pg 265] wealth—wealth which they can never consume; wealth the control of which passes into the hands of the imperial ruling class, to be invested by them in the organization of the Empire and the exploitation of the resources and other economic opportunities of the dependent territory. ”

“ The dependence of a nation upon the continuation of foreign trade, including the necessity of obtaining new markets and new sources of supply, affects its strength. No State yet has complete autarchy. Thus, there is the necessity of obtaining from foreign sources certain of the raw materials which are indispensable to the war effort. As each belligerent may endeavor to deny sources of raw materials to the other, a portion of the fighting power may be required for trade protection.
(iii) Psychological Factors. The maintenance of a stable morale (page 72) at a high level is a primary concern. ”

“ The machinery of war, which can no longer be made profitable, exhausts, in its unnecessary perpetuation, what ought to be the surplus of production. It has become a system of disbursements without counterbalancing receipts, producing scarcity and want. ”

“ Hence the tendency of capital and labour toward international organization along the lines of economic interest is an extremely hopeful sign that the producing classes are beginning to realize that their major interests are not political but economic, and that the quarrels of Governments are injurious to those interests; that they are beginning to outgrow the [Pg 299] narrow nationalism which has facilitated their exploitation in the past, and made it possible to pit them against one another in the quarrels of rival exploiting classes. ”

“ In other words, history has not transformed the nation into a debating society solemnly voting the transition to the social revolution by a majority of votes. On the contrary, the violent revolution has become a necessity precisely because the imminent requirements of history are helpless to find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy. The capitalist bourgeois calculates: "while I have in my hands lands, factories, workshops, banks ”

“ Is it not obvious that these circumstances must create important alterations in the psychology of the working class, radically curing it of that hypnosis of legality which was created by the period of political stagnation? The propertied classes will soon, to their sorrow, have to be convinced of this. The proletariat, after passing through the school of war, at the first serious obstacle within its own country will feel the necessity of speaking with the language of force. 'Necessity knows no law,' he will throw in the face of those who attempt to stop him by laws of bourgeois legality. ”

“ From the capitalist’s point of view another war will, indeed, presently be necessary; another war becomes more and more imperatively necessary—and for a new and increasing reason.
The much plundered working people are beginning to think. Thought is revolutionary. A thought is a file, a keen saw, with which a soul may escape from the gloomy dungeon of prejudice. Thought is intellectual nitroglycerine for blasting the flinty mountains of prejudice. Thought utterly destroys mental rubbish. Thought kills what ought to die. Thinking slaves promptly become defiant and dare to do for freedom. ”

“ Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent,industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. ”

“ As implied in all that has been said, it is, however, upon morals that the effect of politics is the most deplorable. From the beginning of the discussion of the party platform and the nomination of the candidates to the induction of the successful combatants into office, the principles applied to the transaction of business play the smallest possible part. The principles observed are those of war. All the tactics needful to achieve success in the one are indispensable to success in the other. ”

“ Such a principle means war, means waste, means wide-spread social demoralization; and it must, if society is to endure, be succeeded at no distant day by some true principle of accommodation and harmony, in virtue of which it shall become the interest of the laboring classes to promote the creation of wealth by faithful and intelligent work, and the interest of the capitalist class to extend the fullest measure of justice to those whose labor fructifies their capital. ”

“ So, here, you see, is another form of war necessary to the way we live now, the war of class against class, which, when it rises to its height, and it seems to be rising at present, will destroy those other forms of war we have been speaking of; will make the position of the profit-makers, of perpetual commercial war, untenable; will destroy the present system of competitive privilege, or commercial war. ”

“ It is too early for any forecast to be made concerning the outcome of this attempt; but whether it succeeds or not, the Russian Revolution has already performed an inestimable service to the world in proclaiming that the nature of freedom is not political but economic, and in refusing, as a State-organization, to use its power for the maintenance of an idle, rent-consuming class, living by the exploitation of labour at home or in spheres of influence abroad. ”