State of Crisis, Part 2: Military Industrial Complex

Among the more prominent objects of systemic and structural critique is “the military industrial complex.” The phrase “military industrial complex,” popularized by President Eisenhower during his farewell address in 1961, refers to an economic system that is inextricably connected to the military industry. This economic system is beholden to the private fiscal agreement between military lobbyists and political figures that necessitates escalating annual stimulus into military expenditure using public monies commensurate to the expanding productive benchmark of the industry. The product of this iniquitous alliance is clear. It breeds an economic incentive to engage in militarized behaviour and to pursue aggressive outcomes in political scenarios. This incentive filters down through colonial and post-colonial conflicts all the way to policing “urban jurisdictions” at home. Weapons used to subjugate “foreign insurgents” are “donated” to police when they are no longer needed or when “restive” domestic elements pose the greater threat to “public order.” Violence and profit propel one another reciprocally into a Gordian-Knot. This dilation of militarism permeates every facet of life, rendering it invisible as the pageantry of military display is hyper-normalized. Suffusion of symbolic violence or the implicit power of military violence is so ubiquitous that only its absence is noticeable. This is the military industrial complex.

Historians and critical scholars most often associate the military industrial complex with the American Century and the nuclear Cold War. They do so with good reason, too. Prior to 1941 the American economy had begun to recover under the auspices of FDR’s New Deal Keynesianism. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor radically expedited the process of recovery, however, and American engagement into the Second World War eliminated the last vestiges of poverty and unemployment with impunity. Vast stores of public wealth were generated by the resultant exigencies of total war and they only petered out in the ’70s; it could easily be argued that The Second World War was responsible for an age of unprecedented prosperity in America (though this was obviously not the case for non-Americans, including those deemed as such living in America). The truth is that capitalists and war-hawks justified the extension of Second World War arms manufacturing practices into the Cold War in pursuit of intractable proxy conflicts in the “Dark Continents,” warding off spectral topographies of socialism. The Global South and its people became dumping grounds for an infinite supply of anonymous ordnance in order to maintain that banal white-picket America.

Pinning the blame for this state of affairs on America feels good and it feels correct, but unfortunately it is also too easy. American responsibility for the military industrial complex is, in most cases, as a facilitator and exacerbator, but to claim that it is primarily responsible for the military industrial complex is to elide the deeper historical roots of the relationship between money and blood. (It might be more accurate to suggest that the military industrial complex achieved a kind of terminal velocity under American direction; militarization assumed a thanatotic directive.) Rather, it should be argued, as the great Fernand Braudel does, that the basic foundations of the state (the state that Tilly identifies for us) are grounded in the economics of organized military violence. The hyper-militarized every day is camouflaged in its own corpulence, but this phenomenon belongs to the collapse of the medieval world in the 14th century, not to the secret-society WASPs in New England.

It is the central conceit of this project that the state, as we presently understand it, was born at the intersection of a rapidly crystallizing proto-capitalism and the bureaucratization of violence. These two forces collided at blinding speed amid the most calamitous socioeconomic moment in Europe post-476. Feudal economic disintegration and demographic disaster, caused by rapidly diminishing returns on a finite land-base for resource extraction and the black plague’s evisceration of the peasant population by 1350, respectively, assembled those conditions essential for the ascension of an aggressive new socioeconomic paradigm.

Concurrent to the socioeconomic shakeup, a technological watershed smashed the military gridlock that had entrenched a dense patchwork of localized power controlled by autonomous warlords; the introduction of longbows, crossbows, and eventually cannons and handheld firearms toppled the castles of Europe, previously bastions of decentralized rule. Bands of cavalrymen, descended from the patrician dynasties that received land and privilege as a reward from service to Charlemagne, had previously defended their suzerain with ease from attempts at centralization and retained those significant rights and privileges. These marauding nobles nominally appointed the Princes of Europe as they could collectively overmatch the strength of a single monarch during the medieval period. The slight advantage that these Princes held — in wealth and in manpower at their disposal — would make all of the difference as conflict changed rapidly between 1350 and 1550. Cannons — affordable only to the richest of warlords — swept away castle walls that had stood for hundreds of years and riflemen with weeks of training easily dispatched the romantic knights of yore, practiced over the course of a lifetime in the art of mounted combat. A defensive reaction preserved the existence and power of the nobility (most notably the Trace Italienne), but in a vitiated state compared to their predecessors. Military powerbrokers radically altered the map of Europe by the 16th century and it began to take a shape we might recognize today. Centralization of European politics and power began with a bang and its echo heralded “modernity” through the next 500 years.

Military revolution essential to state centralization carried a cost, though. New weapons and combat techniques required an entirely new approach to warfare. More projectile weapons and larger volleys of projectiles required more men to fight. Commoners had to bolster the ranks of any effective army but historically they’d never held any social or legal obligation to fight and to protect landholdings as the nobility had. The politicking of the medieval period necessitated a diverse set of expedient and contingent agreements, covenants, and privileges across a diffuse web of relations. Even the peasantry had negotiated a set of robust responsibilities and rights with the nobility and because many of these obligations survived into the Early Modern period the aristocrats could not simply draft peasants at the point of a sword to fight. There were means to circumvent traditional obligations, but the lateral costs of such a maneuver would have been prohibitive for most military campaigns, particularly when there was an alternative. Until the 18th and 19th centuries it was preferable instead to hire mercenary companies to staff the ranks of an early modern army. Mercenary companies were highly effective. Mercenaries were also famously fickle. There is only one way to retain the loyalty of a mercenary: money, and money right now.

Another problem for these Kings and Barons looking to maintain and expand their demesne was the incompatibility of their income with the demands of mercenaries. Despite the collapse of the feudal economy from the 12th to the 14th century these warlords relied on the land and its steady material return for their income. In the parlance of today the land they controlled was a fixed asset, but they required liquidity to pay capricious mercenaries unwilling to wait for these fixed assets to produce “cash” over time. Luckily for the Princes of Europe a flourishing new group of people with access to large sums of money proliferated in the expanding townships of Europe: bankers. Also fortunate for the Princes of Europe was the fact that this new urban Burgher class was actively seeking to transform its money into money-capital by way of loans and state bonds. Burghers, bankers, and small pockets of the nobility that had begun progressively diversifying their economic assets became the crucial foundation for the new breed of organized military conflict. Exchange of quick private liquidity for public bonds and crown debt was (and frankly still is) routinized and regularized in order to expand the purview of the state and its bid to make war as often as possible. At the height of Spain’s imperial majesty under the aegis of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, its colonial galleons were filled to the brim with Andean silver. Not a doubloon touched the public coffers in Madrid. All of that stolen wealth serviced European war debt to banking dynasties. From the outset of the state-building project a bureaucratizing apparatus of violence met capital at a systemic nexus to forge a new integrated system, a system of states.

This system of states has always been a system reliant on reciprocal crises. The instability of capitalism and its manifold crises, particularly in its earliest stages, paired well with the crisis of warfare to create a larger system of paradoxical stability amid permanent crisis. One provides immediate stimulus for the other. Crisis in one pillar of the state system stabilized a crisis in the other. A new governing synergy emerged at the incipience of the future world super-power, the state. Violence and dispossession have been the most reliably profitable enterprise for thousands of years, but this systematized relationship born from an emergent capitalism and the state bureaucracy exponentially magnified the potential return on violent investment. Now that warfare was receiving economic stimulus in return for its own stabilizing role, organized violence became something else entirely.

The relation of these phenomena to the brutalization of 2020 may appear tenuous, but the historical relation is eminently clear when the development of these systems over the following half millennium is in focus. The transformative process inherent to the synergistic fusion of the state, bureaucratized violence, and proto-capitalism altered their structures in a manner identifiable today. In the act of becoming this system of systems created the structures that dictate the physical, psychological, and economic expressions of modern violence.

Capitalism and its determinant structures changed the most dramatically from this polymerization with warfare and the state. The new “state capitalism” marked a stark bifurcation in the development of “capitalism” as such. State capitalism soundly routed alternative configurations of anarchic or mercantile capitalism. The Hanseatic League, among other loose federal affiliations and unbounded empires that were assimilating nascent capitalisms into their governing system of systems, was ineffectual and inefficient in comparison to the state and its discrete brand of capitalism. As such state capitalism deftly swept it away. The logistical considerations essential to the proper function of capitalism, particularly in its earliest stages, were easily realized within the strictures of the bounded state. Diverse, polyglot polities and associations, particularly those without a superior central governing body, had far more difficulty agreeing to basic structural attributes of a functional capitalism. In The Sovereign State and its Competitors Hendrik Spruyt convincingly demonstrates that rates of exchange and even simple measurements of goods and services were difficult to manage without a central body dictating a standard or stable conversion rate among multiple stakeholders. (This is just one, among many reasons that anarcho-capitalism is unfeasible as a competitor to our current model and is used as a utopian ideological cover for surreptitious economic cartelization.)

The state and its capacity to discipline the peasantry and burgeoning urban workforce using violence was also appealing for prospective capitalists in its own respect. Its centralized disciplinary input also afforded the possibility for a model of socioeconomic relation and organization previously unattainable. The pattern of Enclosure in England, and later the United Kingdom, from the 13th to the 19th century was the textbook demonstration of the state’s expanding power to “relieve” the peasantry of their traditional holdings, thereby obliquely creating a materially progressive class structure in the process. Aristocrats “consolidated” small holdings traditionally farmed in common by the peasant class. The forced divestment from the land facilitated the expansion of large-scale animal husbandry and the production of high-value animal commodities. These industries required significant open space to accommodate the livestock responsible for the production of high-value commodities; open space that was once necessary for the reproduction of basic subsistence slowly transformed into vast zones of economic exclusion and abstract value-maximization, belying the existence of an even larger system of systems emerging from the bellicose-capitalist state.

The territorial exclusivity of the state and capitalism’s paradoxical necessity for perpetual capital growth instigated the development of an economic world system. Immanuel Wallerstein and Perry Anderson have both observed that this “modern world system” created a new division of labour on a global scale using the state as the primary ordering principle within the organization. Gestating capitalisms received all of the benefits of state affiliation but suffered none of the limitations of a bounded polity. Additionally, the modern world system creates the opportunity for a complexity of economic engagement that is not tenable under cruder sociopolitical conditions. English aristocrats could not fully engage in enclosure practices until the world system had sufficiently developed so that foreign markets could fully supplement staple foodstuffs and commodities. Animal husbandry and its requisite expansion onto former subsistence agricultural land otherwise negated the ability to survive this economic transition. Abstract commodity production and the production of high-value cottage industry goods in England and western Europe could be supplemented by more rudimentary grain production in central Europe. The world economy grew outward from western Europe much like a series of concentric rings or a reticulated spider’s web. As the complexity of the relations between elements of the world system grew, so did the abstraction of the production and commodities. Slave labour that western Europeans extracted from colonies using their superior capacity for organized violence served to accelerate the transformation of localized economies within the larger world system.

The closer to the heart of the modern world system, the more complex and the more abstract the economy. Further into the periphery one travels, the more rudimentary, and transparently violent, the economy. This was true when the modern world system began, it was true during the high colonial period in the 19th century, and it is true now. Contemporary bankers in London and New York program computer algorithms that trade fractions of cents of stocks in fractions of seconds every single second making millions of dollars per day while families in the global south live in vertiginous iPhone cemeteries salvaging cyber dregs caked in battery acid.

The capitalist imperative for permanent growth had important world historical ramifications. Aggressive colonial and imperial competition accelerated the growth of the concentric rings of the modern world system dictating the global division and abstraction of labour. Africa, Asia, and the Americas were host to the “great game,” a race between powers at the center of global production to envelop as much of the non-European world as possible within their control and to force the constituent elements of these “backward” human societies into a burgeoning flow of global capital. Despoliation and dispossession were the driving motivation for this race. Bruce Morrison provides significant evidence to suggest that even common people in post-Napoleonic England understood that these “glorious” military ventures were thinly veiled private cash grabs using public funds. He suggests that the emergence of the prototypical British “classical liberalism” that demands a “small state” was not motivated by a specific ideological maneuver, rather it was a defense against the growing neo-monarchist reaction to a bloated military budget that enriched the landed parliamentary class. (The British still retained a massive imperial apparatus for the next 150 years, however. Simply less venal.) Military ventures overseas were a means to stuff the private coffers of Princes and political entrepreneurs. Wielding state violence over the Global South was a safe investment strategy by the 18th century. It was a quasi-religious obligation by the 19th century.

Enfolding the entire diversity of the world into this modern world system created a new ontology. Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts demonstrates the fundamental transformation of goods, services, food, nature, landscapes, and particularly people as colonizers violently thrust them into a highly unstable international flow of abstract market values. Life itself was drawn into crisis at the point of a bayonet. Staple foods stored in common in order to circumvent famine in the case of drought or crop failure became surplus goods subject to immediate surrender to God’s invisible hand. Farmland became oil fields, rivers became hydro-electric dams and waste dumps, and humans became human capital. Human bodies quite literally transformed as colonizers forced them into cramped cargo-holds and amputated limbs in punishment for disobedience or for sadistic succor. Colonized bodies doubled as cartographies charting the new blood continents. Nothing was sacred, all things instead became a remote sign value in a ledger predicting an algorithmically determined benchmark for labour output. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call this process “deterritorialization.” Capitalism (and specifically in this case imperial capitalism) removes everything from its specific cultural context or value. Stripped of their history, objects slide easily into the matrix of global exchange; their organizing principle or divine root is capital; capital is the beatific value that assumes priority over and through everything. Nothing can belong for itself or for its own context, there is no immanence. This ontology justified (and does continue to justify) manufactured famine because the value of surplus foodstuffs entering the market was greater than the human capital that died. The capitalist dalliance with military violence bred a spiritual brutality that still suppurates in 2020.

(Unfortunately, now this process of fungible food and famine is even more abstract and cruel. Producers purposely spoiled or destroyed thousands of tons of food at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as global markets plummeted and global trade stalled. The “market value” of foodstuffs could only remain level if these food producers introduced artificial scarcity. This profane calculus deems the world’s hungry and malnourished people unworthy of life, nor is the sacrifice made by the many animals in the creation of many of these products a factor in this equation at all.)

Peripheries and subalterns assumed the most important material position in the extractive function of the modern world system concurrently with their symbolic degradation in this new order. The periphery of the modern world system was a massive zone of exception open to marauding European colonizers. Peripheral distance from the European economic core — and from the nineteenth century bourgeois propriety developing as the modern world system flourished — gave agents of state violence the implicit consent to act with impunity so long as the economic ends of colonial projects were achieved and the stories of the means to achieve them did not conspicuously return home. Indeed, distance should be understood as one of the key concepts in this system. The larger the system becomes and the greater the distances between its constituent parts, the greater the role violence plays as the mediating function within the modern world system. Without a material stake in the system, populations belonging to peripheral regions within the modern world system had no other reason for compliance aside from the threat of violence. The cultural signifiers of the colonizer that justified this sadism were not shared with the colonials and there was no social incentive for colonials to comply. Colonizers were therefore “forced” (as though many of them did not prefer the sadism) to hold the system of blatant extraction (read: theft) together with innovations in brutality and force multiplication.

Epistemologies of categorization and value were born in “the Orient” at the same time as colonizers concocted the newest stratagems of state brutality away from prying eyes on “Dark Continents.” (We’ll come back to epistemologies of categorization and power, and to violence and experimentation in the periphery soon.) Princes, bankers, and investors together transformed the nature of the world, its people, and its geographies in order to sustain the new leviathan. In doing so a new rationale for rule emerged that prioritized the maintenance of the system of systems and its extractive mechanisms above all other values. This new logic of imperial rule not only dehumanized and othered its subjects but also its rulers as the “rational” distance between rulers and ruled and the prioritization of the abstract systematic form alienated the stewards of empire from their humanity. The hegemony of the state and its imperial outgrowth necessitated a superstructure so complex it folded in on itself.

As colonial real estate for peripheral material wealth extraction evaporated when the entire world was made a part of this system of systems, it was imperative that the extractive mechanisms of the modern world system turn back in on the system’s core. Infinite economic growth used to fund infinite escalation of the capacity for violence, and vice versa, is the superlative concern for the state. Colonial methods for pacifying restive populations returned home to the modern world system’s economic core. Colonial ideological confusions and the collective inability to distinguish between the capitalist state’s two core functions — violence and extraction — returned to the core of the system as well. For official and unofficial policing elements at home and abroad the violence and the brutality became the primary object of the state and its security. Colonial violence came home.

Global power brokers grafted the technologies of colonial power onto Euro-American life. Fascists used racial anxiety to justify the renewed brutality in the core of the system of systems. Allied powers then used fascism to justify the renewed brutality in the core of the system of systems. Post-war Allied powers, suffused with the fascist ideology of Project Paperclip reclamations, used communism to justify the renewed brutality in the core of the system of systems. Terrorism as retribution from the periphery justified the extension of legal and extra-judicial brutalities that could be inflicted upon any global population, not just those held at diminishing distance. Security, surveillance, automated drone ordnance, prison confinement, and economic insecurity are held in common above the heads of all people that are not integrated into the highest strata of maintenance of the modern world system. Perhaps that is the new feature of American military industrial complex. The scale of its threat is boundless. Bureaucratic brutality utilized to extract every last drop of blood from the stone of the world’s underclasses transcends even the state borders that gave life to the modern world system now.

Perhaps the military industrial complex has outgrown the strictures of the state. Even so it

is impossible to understand how a system such as the military industrial complex functions without understanding the world historic role of the state in the socioeconomic development of capitalism and modern discipline. State hegemony in the early modern and high colonial periods performed its function as a nexus for organized violence and for the experimental economic forms that would become capitalism to meet and to behave in a revolutionary manner. This revolutionary synergy has performed overt and covert violence in pursuit of the material wealth necessary to fund greater violence and escalating dispossession of material wealth for 700 years. As the inevitable decline in the rate of profit accelerates, so too shall the violence used to immiserate all of the world’s people in defiance of all humanity and in the name of the cold imperial “rationality” edified on high atop the bodies of its countless victims, those lost forever to the feral ideology of raiders and rapacious bankers, hidden beneath the filigree of bourgeois civility.

We have always lived in the age of the military industrial complex; it is the default social configuration. It socializes us and creates us as it subjects. In turn, we hyper-normalize its casual violence in everything we do, say, and think. The military industrial complex is Max Weber’s Iron Cage just as it is Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; it is our sun and our stars, the guiding political light luring human civilization into the abyss. It is a charnel house waiting at the end of man’s sojourn into madness. It is our past, but it cannot be our future if we are to have one at all.

Part three will be about America’s unique position in the modern world system as both colony and colonizer and the world historic consequences this has had for modern empire.