Global Militarism in now Capitalism’s greatest economic engine

Global Military Spending Is Now an Integral Part of Capitalism
by Richard Seymour – 7 March, 1014 – common dreans

China has embarked on a sequence of double-digit increases in defence spending. (Photograph: Chinafotopress/Getty Images)China’s surge in military spending gains headlines, partly because of the ominous implications regarding its regional contest with Japan, but it’s the deeper structures of military spending in general that are far more compelling.

There are few surprises about the distribution of military spending: for all the current focus on China’s growing military outlays – and it is significant that they have embarked on a sequence of double-digit increases as a percentage of GDP – the United States still accounts for 40% of such expenditures. However, the distribution is not the only thing that matters; it’s the sheer scale of such investment – $1.756tn in 2012. The “peace dividend” from the end of the cold war has long since bitten the dust. Global military spending has returned to pre-1989 levels, undoubtedly a legacy of the war on terror and the returning salience of military competition in its context. In fact, by 2011 global military spending was higher than at any year since the end of the second world war.

So, what is the explanation for such huge investments? Is it simply the case that states are power-maximising entities, and that as soon as they have access to enough taxable income they start dreaming war?

In a very general sense, militarisation could be seen as an integral aspect of capitalism. One of the central ambiguities of capitalism is that it is necessarily a global system, with production and exchange extending beyond national boundaries; yet at the same time, units of capital (corporations etc) tend to be concentrated within national states where they are afforded an infrastructure, a labour force, and a great deal of primary investments. Even the process of globalisation presupposes the investment and guidance of national states. The more deeply companies are intertwined with national states, the more they rely on those states to fight their competitive battles on a global stage. Maintaining a military advantage is arguably an intrinsic part of this.

However, once this rather abstract principle is established, the question still remains unanswered. After all, there is no inherent reason why geo-economic competition should lead to defence spending consuming trillions of dollars of value each year. Part of the answer has to be located in the way that high levels of military spending became such an entrenched part of the global landscape in the aftermath of two world wars.

In the context of the second world war, and then in the subsequent cold war, one thing about military spending that became abundantly clear is that it is never just about conflict. As in the conduct of wars themselves, the institutionalisation of military spending quickly becomes entangled in a series of incentives that are entirely tangential to the ostensive motive. …more