Capitalist accumulation is causally linked to war.

Conversely, other causal links act in the direction of crisis towards war. On the one hand, economically, war happens to be integrated into the capital cycle, as the destruction of capital. According to the capitalist point of view, the expenditure on armaments being considered unproductive, would they not be a means of destroying surplus capital? We are dealing today, within the very power of finance, with a systemic crisis—which means that capital is not finding internal solutions to the contradictory dynamics it is deploying. This is the reason why the extreme form of devalorization of capital, i.e., military war, is more and more frequently used by the dominant financial fractions of capital. Instead of having, in the United States, an economic growth driven by an active strategy oriented towards production, these fractions of the dominant classes, at least as far as the “Globalists” are concerned, have on the contrary made the choice to promote an accumulation of fictitious financial and military capital. And on the other hand, politically, because it is the State that goes to war on behalf of capital, imperialist war is there to reproduce the conditions for maintaining the command of finance over the entire global capitalist system. These factions now retain their power only through their investments in the military-industrial complex, in order to offer capital new outlets and opportunities for speculation. The global system seems to function more and more directly through recourse to the armed forces of the United States or the military threat agitated by Washington—the basis of this visible violence being that, invisible, of capitalist relations of production. Militarization is the mode of existence of financial oligopolies. Backed by the U.S. military, finance capital is trying to keep control of the petrodollar—even if that means new wars or threats. Hence the armed conflicts maintained in the Middle East, an oil, de facto dollarized, and thus coveted region.

War and crisis are embedded phenomena. The 2000s began with the attack of September 11 (2001) and ended with the “subprime” crisis. In both cases, there was an intensification of wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, then Iraq). After a decline observed during the post-Soviet or “peace dividend” era, military spending was on the rise again. The U.S. interest rate remained low to fight the crisis until 2004, before rising in mid-2005 to finance these wars. But it gave a boost to the real estate market. The mechanisms of the “subprime” crisis were put in place, with perilous risk-taking. A few months after the military engagement in Iraq and the raising of its interest rates by the Fed, mortgage loan installments began to be interrupted by debtors in default. The Fed kept rates high until mid-2007, when the crisis was already here. It was only late, after the summer of 2007, that it granted the banks huge amounts of interest-free credit, without managing to avoid the panic. Meanwhile, the economy had entered a depression. The 2008 crisis arose as the external and internal imbalances in the United States worsened: the first identifiable in the balance of payments, due in part to industrial relocations (to Mexico, China, etc.); the second (budget deficits and public debt) can be explained by several causes, the most decisive of which is the pressure exerted by increased financing needs to wage the imperialist wars that Washington is undertaking in an attempt to prolong its military control of the planet.

What about capital accumulation? If a high interest rate tends to inhibit credit and growth, one solution is to create billions of dollars of new money out of thin air and buy sovereign securities to reduce that rate to zero. If the contraction in demand threatens to lead to deflation, money will be issued in the form of government securities with which to finance mega-armament projects. But the ripple effect on the domestic economy will only be guaranteed if there are more wars and/or arms sales made to customers abroad. Since the fall of the USSR, the greater part of U.S. military spending has been carried out by indebtedness in dollars, which materializes through issuing Treasury bonds, therefore by resorting to fictitious capital, transferred to third countries. This type of expenditure thus becomes a source of profitability for capital because it can transform unproductive capital, financed by public debt, into additional fictitious capital. Faced with the profit rate’s downward trend in civilian production, the war economy constitutes the “alternative”— always from the point of view of the capitalists. The work carried out in this sector, which plans neither more nor less than the destruction of human lives, but also of material and natural wealth, is unproductive by its content. Weapons are unproductive in the sense that they do not favor the expansive cycle of capital. As military goods count as real wealth, the sale of the means of destruction nevertheless makes it possible to make additional profits in a cycle. Yet even when sold without being “consumed” or causing destruction in a war, they are retained in the cycle, but do not contribute to the expanded reproduction of total capital, nor do they appear in the next cycle as means of production to increase capital and hire labor force. The capital generated then becomes an obstacle to the next cycle. The rise of military capital therefore limits the reproduction of total capital and affects economic growth. Thus, to transfer the weight of this expenditure, it will be necessary to utter ever more threats, based on real or invented arguments, and even to launch new wars.

THE GLOBAL SYSTEM FACED WITH ITS CONTRADICTIONS: NEW RISKS OF CRISES AND WARS

The U.S. government will not be able to revitalize the accumulation at the center of the capitalist world system through war because the destructions of (constant and variable) capital caused by these armed conflicts, obviously considerable for the countries undergoing them, would be insufficient to stimulate a long cycle of renewed expansion, like what the Marshall Plan was able to produce in the past. But they would also be insufficient to revive growth if we take into account the effects of effective demand associated with such wars, which act mainly in the short term, or even the technological fallout, which is positive for the military sector alone. Unless these imperialist wars expand and become permanent in a context of systemic crisis, accompanied by a drain of capital towards the USA and an aggravation of the North-South confrontation.

Defense is now being outsourced by the State, which is waging war “by proxy”. Nonetheless, the contradictions of the system are then exacerbated and taken to a higher level. By 2008, the numbers of the U.S. military in Iraq had exceeded those of private military companies. The paramilitary troops (i.e., 75,000 men employed by some 300 firms with cumulative turnover of more than 100 billion dollars per year, integrated into the “total force”) formed the second contingent in 2007, exceeding the combined Allied troops. Their main client is the State, which has turned Afghanistan and Iraq into a market in the “War on Terror” crusade. Result: this privatization of war proves to be a failure, which brings multiple contradictions and its share of scandals... The militarization of finance neoliberalism is a dead end. Its strategy of total war is at an impasse.

Current U.S. military spending is around 1 trillion dollars, but if we include the amortization and interest of the associated debts (a form of fictitious capital), the burden is much heavier. In the early 2010s, including private paramilitaries paid by the Pentagon in the calculations, there would have been 935,700 U.S. military personnel abroad, more than the post-WWII historical record (927,851); troops dispersed over some 1,150 bases. The reflection is to be carried out in terms of the balance of forces and striking powers, but in all cases, it shows a military superiority of the USA vis-à-vis its Northern allies as well as its rivals (Russia, China). Yet the U.S. hegemony is in crisis and its difficulties seem insurmountable. Its ability to support its armies is running out. And it would be even worse if the petrodollar peg got away from it. The destabilization of the dollar, a pillar of this hegemony, could unbalance the other, the military pillar, which depends on the country's debt capacity. As soon as Treasury bonds are no longer in demand, the source of funding for the giant military-industrial complex will dry up, revealing its unproductive, fictitious, character. And if the United States could no longer maintain its network of military bases, its unipolar world would be called into question. In the capitalist logic of valorization for valorization, the climate crisis multiplies the risks of ecological disasters, but also of wars for access to water, natural resources, hydrocarbons, with tragic and massive forced migrations to be expected.