On the Fifth Anniversary of the Iraq War

Posted on March 21st, 2008 filed in Corporations, Politics

This week George Bush and other Western war-mongers celebrate the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

War is good news for the corporations which the war-mongers represent.

War is profitable and militarism plays a key role in the capitalist system.

Wars are fought for class interests. The Iraq war is no exception.

Writing fifty-two years ago in their book Monopoly Capital, American economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy characterize the impact militarism has on society and the function of militarism in capitalist society :

“There is no doubt that supplying the military is universally regarded as good business : all corporations, big and little, bid for as large a share as they can get. The private interests of the oligarchy, far from generating opposition to military spending, encourage its continuous expansion.

The class interests of the oligarchy work in the same direction. Whereas massive government spending for education and welfare tend to undermine its privileged position, the opposite is true of military spending. The reason is that militarization fosters all the reactionary and irrational forces in society, and inhibits or kills everything progressive and humane. Blind respect is engendered for authority; attitudes of docility and conformity are taught and enforced; dissent is treated as unpatriotic or even treasonable. In such an atmosphere, the oligarchy feels that its moral authority and material position are secure. Veblen, more than any other social scientist, appreciated the importance of this social function of militarism :

The largest and most promising factor of cultural discipline – most promising as a corrective of iconoclastic vagaries – over which business principles rule is national politics… Business interests urge an aggressive national policy and businessmen direct it. Such a policy is warlike as well as patriotic. The direct cultural value of a warlike business policy is unequivocal. It makes for a conservative animus on the part of the populace. During wartime, and within the military organization at all times, civil rights are in abeyance; and the more war and armaments, the more abeyance. Military training is a training in ceremonial precedence, arbitrary command, and unquestioning obedience… The more consistent and the more comprehensive this training, the more effectually will the members of the community be trained into habits of subordination and away from that growing propensity to make light of personal authority which is the chief infirmity of democracy. This applies first and most decidedly, of course, to the soldierly, but it applies only in less degree to the rest of the population. They learn to think in warlike terms of rank, authority, and subordination, and to grow progressively more patient of encroachments on their civil rights… Habituation to a warlike, predatory scheme of life is the strongest disciplinary factor that can be brought to counteract the vulgarization of modern life wrought by peaceful industry and the machine process, and to rehabilitate the decaying sense of status and differential dignity. Warfare, with the stress on subordination and mastery and the insistence on gradations of dignity and honour incident to a military organization, has always proved an effective school in barbarian methods of thought.”

- Source : Monopoly Capital (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966) by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy; Chapter 7 : The Absorption of Surplus : Militarism and Imperialism; citing Thorstein Veblen ‘The Theory of Business Enterprise’ pp. 391-3