[Translated excerpts from “Krise und Kriegswirtschaft in den USA” in GegenStandpunkt 3-02]
As important as economic growth is to America, it avowedly has more important things to do: with all its violence, and at whatever cost, it leads its community, and not only its own, in a “war against terrorism.”
What the US government forces on the rest of the world it first and also demands as a matter of course of its own people. American society is shifted into a state of war of a new type: the permanent state of a preventive defensive war against a virtually ubiquitous internal enemy who must be dragged out of his civilian cover and eradicated, as well as against “roguishly” governed states which can be got through to only by an unlimited supremacy in all questions of military and terrorist violence.
This domestic military buildup, but especially the development and procurement of newer, more sophisticated and superior weapons for the suppression and elimination of government authorities suspected of terrorism, costs of course an enormous amount of money. With its procurement the US government also intervenes quite properly into the living conditions of its free citizens: it revises the list of priorities according to which it manages American society with its budget. Additional funds are already appointed to the military budget as a first reaction to the decision to proclaim a world anti-terrorist campaign, which exceeds the total budget of the main NATO allies for war purposes – not to mention the military budget of the rest of the world; and three-quarters of a year later nearly 30 billion dollars are added again in addition so that everyone who stays in the United States can really be awarded his right to be monitored, so that nothing again goes awry with the issuing of visas, and to advise foreign governments in analogous measures in their countries. Even more important than the respective absolute sums is, of course, the clear position that the government takes with its demand: the President requests not a special budget, but demands its immediate deployment.
“I expect the United States Congress to not only pass the budget as I submitted, I expect them to make it the first order of business, so we can plan for this war.” (Bush speech on March 15, 2002 in North Carolina)
The question: “Can America actually afford this world war program?” does not even arise for President Bush:
“Nothing is more important than the national security of our country, nothing is more important. So nothing is more important than our defense budget. I've heard some of them talking about, it's too big up there. Let me just make this as clear as I can make it: the price for freedom is high, but it's never too high, as far as I'm concerned.”
Thus it is paid for, however high it turns out. In addition, several rules of budgetary policy, such as for example the goal of a balanced budget which was adopted under Clinton precisely at the insistence of Bush's party, are repealed: America decides on a war budget and demands that the whole capitalist world economy take responsibility for the financing of the anti-terrorist world war program.
The anti-terrorist war program, completely obviously, creates – like any war and especially like Ronald Reagan’s defense campaign against the Soviet Union – its own rules of budgetary policy: the budgetary management of national capitalism is put under conditions of war.
In order to explain the peculiarities of a war budget, first a digression.
State rule costs money. It takes it from its capitalistically employed society: it “socializes” private property. That's just really bad manners in this system, in fact it contradicts the fact that the social wealth exists as private property in the form of money and the purpose for which money is actually there: to serve as a means of its own augmentation, thus of the enrichment of its capitalistically engaged owners. Money in state hands is a deduction from property; state expenditures are wrong expenses because no advance is executed in order to flow back increased; it is an expenditure which does not pay off, “faux frais.” And therefore they are fundamentally unpopular with the professional owners of the social wealth and the apparatchiks of its accumulation.
At the same time, the beneficiaries of the privately owned wealth have themselves to blame for this block of costs. Their great love, their property bent on increasing, would not exist at all, let alone safely, and its use as a means of access to the source of social wealth, its power of command over social labor, would be in a bad way if no universal public force with laws and a gigantic administrative machinery ensured it. In the “faux frais” of state power the fundamentally dissatisfied owners and managers of capital just face the fact that the all-encompassing force relationship, which their rule over all social productive forces is based on, is not to be had for free. Incidentally, whatever the burden imposed on them by the monopolist on violence, they can be absolutely sure that a modern democratic government never forgets for long its reason and purpose by organizing its expensive rule activities economically. The operation of all the requirements of a successful market-economy in the use of land and people, which coincide in such a wondrous way with the material interests of the moneyed minority of the society, is recognized and followed as an alternative-less criterion of all budgetary policy. This applies to the tax authorities' access to the money incomes and money assets of its citizens: capitalistically productive revenue shall be spared, instead it conveniently detects how much surplus can be squeezed by the state power from the total “dependent” income, which is barely enough for its owners to live on. With its expenditures it wants to make sure that everything that a state power affords is “economically reasonable,” namely improves the conditions for capitalistic growth; the money-squeezed citizen has a right to that.
And in one respect the aforementioned “reason” with its computations also always comes at their expense. Since actually it is not at all the case that the sum of money that the state de-privatizes and uses for its interests would be definitely detracted from business use. Certainly, for a while it does not belong to the professional money accumulator who in all modesty claims an absolute right to it; this capitalist nuisance remains. However, it always flows “back” into their tills. Because the state buys – directly or indirectly – what it needs and what its personnel uses from its capitalist entrepreneurs; in place of other customers it converts their commodities into cash together with the profit contained in it; in this system-conforming way it fits perfectly into the turnover of social capital – what else in the system of market economy? In this role of the financially powerful big customer, the modern state still does not limit itself to the sums it appropriates from the whole mass of social earnings. On an enormous scale it lends itself money and pays interest on it, straightforwardly transforming financial resources into interest-bearing capital – and increases with it not only the addresses with which rich people can allow their money to “work” in a completely solid and reliable way. Moreover, it permits the use of its debt instruments as lendable property and the basis for power of the financial industry to create credit; as the “bank of banks” in the last instance it even guarantees the availability of funds with which business is done without needing to already have been earned. With its debt it takes nothing away from any businessman; on the contrary it increases the financial means for the initiation of capitalist business as well as the social purchasing power on which its completion depends, pushing – in a cooperation with finance capital prosperous for both sides – the limits on national business life by the amount of capital already accumulated on the side of capitalistic advance payments like the return flow to be managed by the general solvency, inflating advance and surplus on a national order of magnitude. So the expenses that it causes its society do not reduce the capitalist trend of business in its society, but exceed it.
To be sure, the national capital location made so smoothly must also bring a decent growth. Otherwise the powerful equation with which the state does its capitalist good deed, namely so that its debts will really be as good as increased money, becomes a little questionable: in the end, it gains no profit from the loans, but in the last instance lets its taxpayers be responsible once again for the principal sum and interest; the growth of the nationally earned and taxable sum of money therefore decides whether it has worked in a capitalistically productive way with its miraculous business augmentation as requested, or whether the forcible equation of its debts with real money was too risky and then is rejected only far too consequentially against the real money of the society. The risk is certainly included in the state debt economy: the fact that the private business world calculates – indeed richly – on its national yields, but it does not enrich at all really and certainly not very impressively internationally with its fictitious earnings; since in the end finance capital is authorized to punish the credit and currency of the nation with critical assessments. This risk is, however, only the inevitable downside of a demanded and practiced relationship that is universally welcomed, that the state with its “faux frais” pursues the accumulation of capitalist wealth and with the credit that it takes for this it makes growing private enrichment an objective compulsion; an objective compulsion which it can even fail with its capital-enabling applications. Capitalist growth and state financial power require each other, this applies in the boom just as in the crisis.
The rule of economic “reason,” which the “faux frais” of the modern state system obeys, makes no exception for what states spend on their military. For the growth of capital on the national scale this money is quite absolutely necessary, more necessary than a lot of other things that a state power affords to maintain. It ultimately finances the security that domestic firms need for the business distrainment and use of foreign sources of wealth – labor power, natural resources, production facilities, financial solvency. The destructive power of an army is in this respect a real capitalistic productive force. Therefore, it goes without saying that spending for military and armaments must be higher the more capital accumulates in a nation, the further the radius of business interests extends abroad from the country, and certainly the more capital is already engaged abroad. The early days of modern imperialism are indeed past when colonial armies still had to open access to foreign lands and possibly had to guarantee them exclusively; in comparison, today’s multinationals and “medium-sized companies” with their global search and investment decisions enjoy such a thing as world peace. It consists however of an especially high level of militarily unequivocally guaranteed political control over the whole world of states; and the peaceful world economic nations themselves and their capital sites are culpable for being as responsibly involved in that as possible. That’s why their absolute and relative military power is essential and vital: it decides whether and to what extent, under the conditions of today's world peace order, they belong to the controllers or the controlled. And how deadly seriously they take this question becomes quite clear in the turmoil that the United States contributes with its new definition of global security, precisely among its allies.
Military spending is capitalistically productive in another respect, in that it serves capitalist producers as a source of enrichment; in this it does not take second place to a traffic or education budget at all. It realizes the profit that a highly skilled staff has incorporated into the fine munitions like any capitalist commodity. That weapons have thus nothing at all constitutive of use value in themselves, are only good for destruction, actually changes nothing in this, on the contrary it only makes obvious the abstract nature of the wealth on which the market economy system solely depends: for this increase tanks are as well suited as road construction machines and bullets no different than chewing gum. In a downstream respect, armament devices are even better than civilian products: the state with its virtually inexhaustible purchasing power, its enormous demand, its planning ahead, its willingness to put officers and experts of the engaged industry together and to devise future war needs, etc is for capitalist entrepreneurs simply the ideal “market.” The military budget performs its solid contribution to the general growth: suppliers earn from it; money spreads “among the people” and obviously does not remain there, but promptly finds its way into the cash registers of other entrepreneurs, where it also belongs according to the rules of “economic reason.” With its way of “creating value,” capitalism through the production of pure destructive power makes the social wealth, namely private property, larger; therefore, for its economic upswing an opulent military budget is not a damage, but a pure blessing.
This is why the governments of powerful capitalist nations find it justifiable to take more credit for arms projects. They expect a stimulus to growth from it, and they do it for the reason that every sum that they give their armaments industry earns equal to its capitalistic value several times over. Here, in close military-industrial cooperation, they speed up technical progress, providing for all sectors from materials science up to pharmacology and from electronics to whatever else, as well as for the development of cutting edge technologies that ensure decisive competitive advantages for national corporations in civilian applications. Military devices quickly deteriorate according to “moral wear and tear”: it becomes outdated in no time. Different than other commodotoes, however, it does not become obsolete as a means of commerce: it is all sold to the many foreign monopolists on violence who cannot on their own just yet supply the third best means of force; the government ties the bonds necessary for it. The weapons companies in the leading nations enrich themselves from foreign states’ demand for violence; foreign funds support the national growth and thus contribute to the fact that from the “faux frais,” which the national purchaser has put into its most advanced industrial complex, a general capital accumulation arises to again put things more or less in line with the bloated mass of state debts. And the nation wins political influence on foreign sovereigns, also benefiting business relations, if the government tackles all this only partly skillfully.
For capitalistic communities it is not a curse but a blessing if a lot of credit is inflated for the ability to wage war to such an extent that the industries so excessively supplied with it manage to conquer all competitors for means of violence on the world market. Business and violence simply fit indissolubly well together in a market economy idyll.
The thing looks slightly different if a state no longer peacefully prepares for conceivable wars, but leads real wars. Then indeed the bourgeois community still does not stop settling accounts according to all the rules of double-entry bookkeeping. The expenses for murder and manslaughter as well as, if necessary, for repairs to its own location is neatly registered as budgetary accounting items. In the market economy war is even an honorable source of enrichment for the capitalists who supply the state power with its desiderata and in so doing obstinately think of their rate of return. That is why the killing and destruction and repair must be properly “depicted" financially: in a budget for which the commander in chief goes into debt with his finance capitalists; with credit papers which are properly handled and which blow up the socially available mass of finances. In all respects the symbiosis between state power and capitalistic business already tested during the arms buildup proves itself in war – but it is not left at that. Because, on the other hand, the execution of major military actions not only brings additional business into motion, but brings a lot of ongoing and planned business to a halt. The capitalist sources of wealth – labor power, production facilities, its own and ever so much foreign solvency – will be damaged because then normal circulation just does not continue, and speculation on their progress, this sensitive superstructure on whose credit and investment decisions the material substructure so decisively depends, becomes a mess. Ongoing operations are disrupted or destroyed, advances must be depreciated, the basis for renewed accumulation is decimated. With the destruction of the sources of material wealth even the capital magnitudes suffer on which the market-economy really depends: the legal titles to future profits which capitalist property really essentially consists of. Because this would be zero if it lay around only materially; in one or another form it is always ongoing as an advance for profit and growth, as a demand or bond with the promise of returns. Therefore, it is ultimately also worth only as much as the prospects of the business it is placed in. And in the event of war these are on the whole no longer widely seen. In this somewhat complicated way, war is also an immense case of loss according to the capitalist way of calculating.
This applies especially to the private wealth that the state power borrows for leading the war and whose continued sound existence and increased strength it guarantees with interest payments. Because, on the one hand, in financing its military operations it no longer knows functional considerations for the national economic growth whatsoever; on the other hand, it finances all growth-oriented budgeting with the means of national preservation and the imposition of its power. The appropriately exorbitant and heedless expansion of its stock of debt, on the other hand, stands not at all face to face with any equilibrated inflation of general national money earning, but is rather a gash into current business life, a reduction of the accumulated property. However, this relation then quite significantly relativizes the equation according to which state debts should be credit instruments of indestructible value and must be an inherent necessity for the sake of a prosperous symbiosis of state financial power and private enrichment. At the national level, “abstract” wealth along with its national form, the currency, suffers from a war.
And although this is not to be killed by force of arms so immediately at all. Because, strictly speaking, it is even so – a final beauty of the intimate relationship between the violence of war and capital accumulation – that the entry to war suspends the capitalist damage that it causes. Indeed, it does hollow out the capitalistic property of the warring nation; however, as long as it is in the war, it refuses to tolerate every finance capitalist criticism of its efforts for a system-compliant financing of its combat, thus prevents the disclosure of the increasing dubiousness of all title claims to the yields of future growth which the government has brought into circulation and which otherwise still are in circulation. The question, directly utilizing the technique of finance capital, whether the capitalist wealth of the nation is actually enough for the war, is disallowed in practice. It becomes a proper criticism when peace returns and the re-opening of civilian business life brings the test of how much capitalist growth actually goes into motion with all the bloated masses of circulating property titles, what social money product thus must foreseeably vouch for the state debtor’s promises to pay interest – and consequently what its debts are really worth. Then it cares that it comes to light that much too much “war-related” – i.e., more precisely: related via the sparklingly pure market economy financing of the whole slaughter – credit is in motion than is foreseeable for its profitable use and would be reliable in state bonds. Therefore the victory of peace is the real economic loss to a capitalist war economy.
Even so – to give capitalism the honor that is its due in this regard – at any rate in the post war destitution the misery of an otherwise decent and industrious surviving population in the midst of a landscape of ruins, in which there is an enormous amount to rebuild, is however also a really good business condition; only provided that there is enough capital that uses this opportunity, as well as a good money that earns its capitalistic value. Business blossoms where such a symbiosis of capital and destitution arises, and some nations following the biggest disaster in their history have brought about a world-envied postwar boom – very fitting for a mode of production which unfolds its growth already in peacetime in such a way that its accumulating private property wealth periodically, for want of further growth opportunities, rigorously eliminates and allows to go to ruin commodities produced as sources of wealth, complete with the employees, so as to be able to cut loose its new growth on a reduced basis. Without a money, certainly, which first makes the post-war destitution capitalistically usable, and without capital which it also really uses as a business condition, this remains the mere terms and conditions, according to the laws of the market economy, for the needs of a reconstruction – a highly dismal political economic condition that perpetuates the misery. The examples of this are much more numerous than of the capitalistic bonanza in which financially powerful investors made a wasteland full of handy poor people into a paradise of exploitation. And this is no wonder since good money and solid credit, those essential means of capitalist reconstruction, are now in short supply in a nation that has afforded for its war all the debts that it has just required for reasons of a tidy war financing. From the principle back to the current case: compared to what the big capitalist nations in their previous histories have already carried off in war capitalism, America stages ...
The US president announces, “as clearly, as I can” to his own nation and to the rest of the world, not just an American arms buildup, but the introduction of a new strategic bottom line in the world of states to be accomplished with war, as well as the corresponding budget policy for it. And that means a noticeably divergent militaristic perspective from the existing customs and regulations for the capitalism of America and the world.
The US president does not have the slightest doubt: the financial needs he announces will be satisfied. This self-confidence is remarkable. Because at least it is not just to be about an albeit wickedly expensive, however delimited armaments project like – and pursued in addition anyway – the pet project of an impervious missile defense system, but for one war or another: undertakings with no limitable military complications, collateral damage, supply needs in advance – also, to get to the essential point: financial requirements. It is not only about a single campaign of an estimable, as-needed duration, but avowedly about an open list of cases for a continuous military sorting-out of the entire world of states, totaling up to: a venture that requires the militarization of international relations and a suitable quasi-wartime strain on all forces, including financial, for the totalitarian ideal of a universal, worldwide, preventive security of American interests. And to that extent it concerns a budget that is actually warlike in its dimensions and its imponderableness. However, for its procurement the President sees no bigger problem than the agreement of his Congress – and he is sure of this from the outset. He holds the financing of his newest “American dream” of exterminating anti-Americanism from the globe to be an easy going routine that is already as good as accomplished by its announcement – and also easily compatible with a tax cut for the rich, which should again lead from crisis to economic growth.
Quite obviously, the US administration counts on the fact that the finance capital of the capitalistic world has credit in unlimited amounts for its bellicose interests and even has cheap rates left over. It now knows, ever since the end of the “Soviet block,” a similar bunch of political and strategic problem cases in the world; however, its financial jugglers know of nothing other than capitalists and nations which do their utmost to earn dollars; who are keen to spend or invest their earned dollars in America again; who therefore from pure self-interest accept every demand for credit of the American state as an offer, thus satisfying the world-economic relations which daily certify the identity of US debts with wealth in the form of the money of the capitalist world, to which an American, not to mention the President, never has a doubt anyway. With this solid expertise Bush and his administration assume that this is how it will remain; through all the misadventures of their unpredictable anti-terrorist crusade and under the banner of this world improvement project only more so than ever. And this is daring to say the least. Because with their self-defined global mission the USA shakes up – even now, and with every further escalation much more fundamentally – all the political economic relations which they themselves have established, secured and used; they tend to intervene and destroy the usefulness and the usability of the globe as a big money machine which has operated and still functions not least in their interest and for their needs. Already the effects can be inspected.
The efforts of the USA to interpose their anti-terrorist world war scenario in the Middle East to Central Asia region has roughed up this region of the world and has brought a whole collection of different political-economic disasters to a point that also strikes back at the organizer with significant expenses above the replacement price of launched rockets.
B. Demands and side effects on the rest of the world of statesOf a completely different caliber are the impositions and – deliberate or unintentional – economic side effects of the US-war program that those states that calculate imperialistically and world-economically see themselves set back by; the fact that they find themselves compelled to more and longer diplomatic defensive battles against the demands and actions of the world power gives some information about this point.
On the one hand, they should not be stingy with their financial expenditures when the leading power in the anti-terrorism war allocates sub-tasks, calls for military contributions, a strengthening of internal control apparatuses and anti-terrorist manhunts; apart from this readiness for the declared universal war, it clearly and constantly insists on an improved war capability from its allies and even requires as a first step a massive increase of their military budgets. There is nothing else under it: whoever decides that their own nation cannot stand aside while the whole world is cleaned of terrorists and the civilized state world is freed from wrong regimes; whoever wants not to be left behind in the initiated new stage of imperialistic order founding, but to be active in the process: he must also answer with his national assets for this ambition. In the process, there can be no timid calculating that would set the financial costs into relation with the imperialist benefits, but solely the yardsticks that the US government has already set with its decision that “nothing is too expensive” for “freedom.” A budget policy is demanded with priority for war measures; a budget organization in which consideration for national growth and deficit limitations is decisively set aside behind the aim of violently eradicating anti-American activities.
On the other hand, the partners, and this now applies with quite special urgency to the new quasi-federated Russia outside of NATO, should respect all the restrictions and regulations in their world-economic activities that Washington wants to see respected. This begins with comparatively cheap affairs like an obtrusive control regime that protects America in all commercial ports of this world with more than 100-per cent security from foreign anthrax bacteria and terrorist nuclear dirty bombs, and which in peacetime would be terminated as costs impelling “additional trade barriers,” in the criticism of all the globalization advocates. However, this concerns, first of all, the bi-and multilateral trade relations of the competitors: all important states should willingly boycott the countries that the US government has designated or put under suspicion in the “axis of evil”, which could soon become due; and this completely apart from whether they have agreed to such measures in the form of a UN resolution or have always rejected them. The fact that European companies and the doubtful market economy in Russia seize their opportunity to the oil state Iran unchallenged by U.S. competitors, and even the main enemy with its huge oil reserves, Iraq, as sources of money; that Russian companies help the “mullah regime” with nuclear energy and technical expertise and the German Federal Government supports an industrial exhibition in Baghdad: for America this is simply unacceptable and the material for political divisions of a different order of magnitude.
But whether they can now be blackmailed or not: in any case, the imperialist friends and third rate competitors are confronted with the fact that their spheres of business are banned in the eyes of the American anti-terrorist warriors and are in all likelihood to be squashed before larger business relationships and significant investments have paid off. The US government, very emphatically aided and goaded by Israel, announces to the businessmen and investors who want to get rich in Iraq and Iran, as well as to those politically responsible for such plans, the military destruction of their business partners. Or else the Europeans also lose promising business opportunities in the “arc of crisis” between the Indian ocean and the Mediterranean merely by the fact that the region awaits a war deployment by the US army and there simply is no more time for bigger projects, which need at a minimum stable conditions for their handling. And if – to still mention this example – the discord between the United States and the Saudi kingdom continues, it will also hardly benefit Swiss Bankers. The new business-damaging uncertainty which confronts the allied free world trading powers is limited by no means to the acutely disordered Middle East region. It concerns the very “fundamentals” of the world economy so essential to growth because all capitalist accounts include magnitudes such as, for example, the price of oil, and even before any Iraqi or any other oilfield is actually set on fire. Because this is just the capitalist fundamental condition and means for free market business life: it is about advance and surplus, about generating future profits from current expenditures, and the whole capitalistic mathematical expertise revolves around the question how safe one follows from the other. Speculation, calculated in the global corporate headquarters and incarnated objectively in the stock market floors and computers of finance capital, decides on capitalist production and circulation; and with the effects of the USA’s anti-terrorism war this loses its usual criteria. Not only selling prices and markets become incalculable according to all previous standards: everything generally becomes uncertain, and indeed for other and more violent reasons than the usual business and economic politics that are to answer the vital question of the capitalist world, namely on which “engagement” they should set their most precious thing, their property.
No question, the loss of the usual terms of trade is for the professional participants of this absurd event nothing more than a new one – but precisely a bad one. And this is already enough to allow market prices to drop, drive companies into bankruptcy and put state budgets much deeper in the “red.” Of course, there are also speculators of the higher sort, hedge funds, which make their special goldmine from the new insecurity and losses. But their activities arise precisely from an altogether disastrous state of business: they are the executors of the breakdown and confusion of all capitalist calculations, the general damage to growth of world trade which follows from the uncertainty of war.
3) The new additional qualification of the global market economy: war economyFor a politics that produces exactly these effects, the US government treats itself to credit; not only absolutely massive sums, but in principle as much as desired. Completely unmoved by national “stagnation” and bigger breakdowns all over the world, by “collapsing” tax revenue and a general “uncertainty” of the business world, it finds the financing of its business-damaging march to war completely unproblematic and covers its “exploding” budget deficits with new debts. Its anti-terror war, which produces loud cases of damage, paralyzes money sources and diminishes the basis of its own financial power, is offered to the ruling class of industrial bosses, stock speculators and traders in state debt as a source of money.
And this offer is – obviously – accepted. An entirely “rational” decision for investors: if so much business plunges downward and “the future” is so uncertain, it is advisable for the sake of the security of the enacted investments to bet on the power that makes everything so uncertain: on the war material and the financial needs of the world power. Quite unspectacularly, the managers shift the weights in their risk calculation in the decisive head offices of the world economy: militaria and credible war resolve are valued a little higher or are introduced as new additional viewpoints in the speculative calculations; conversely, business prospects which assume peaceful civilian relations require more critical classification. And already the thing goes their way: world capitalism serves America’s new world war with everything that it needs, i.e. it enriches itself on it.
What in the higher spheres of globally powerful finance politics and finance capitalist decision-making is tantamount to a small “paradigm shift” is actually the transition to a capitalist war economy. It signals thereby that the state – American in this case, with consequences for the whole world – by the use of its financial power whose functionality for capitalist growth it continually postulates and presumes, nevertheless practically negates its dependence on general economic growth. Not that it would unconditionally respect this dependence in peacetime; then also its budget is a de facto continuous practical test of whether its money-creative indebtedness is justified by the growth that it thereby launches with it; the mass of socially earned money that it bids as its tax base is the practical information and acknowledgement of the corresponding economic-political growth or failure. However, with the crossover to war as the highest national priority, the state practically remits the interesting “decree” that the procurement and creation of the funds with which it buys the means for its military adventures from its capitalist economy is basically free from the barriers that the growth of social wealth in its private property form, successful capital accumulation, really sets to a sound state debt. Still, just as in deepest peacetime – assuming there has ever generally been one for the world power in the last century... – the war-leading supreme force of America insists that the credit which it increases and pays interest on and uses as purchasing power for its victories goes well economically, i.e. represents regularly increased capitalist wealth, and that it therefore also continues to absolutely merit the equal sign inscribed on it, that identifies the dollars brought into circulation as the authentic money of the capitalist world; at the same time it wants to know absolutely nothing about the restrictive economic conditions of this equation, about the need for a verification of their debt economy by a somehow “appropriate” process of capital accumulation. It avails itself of the usages of finance capital so as to meet its own claims on a capitalistically solid state debt economy and in doing so not allow the question whether the credit accounting with war can generally work out. Without changing something in the wonderful objective laws of the market economy and without making the slightest deductions from the private power of money as the highest economic “authority”, the state decrees, in perfect compliance with the rules of a budget organization friendly to capital, the emancipation of its financial power and by this initiates exactly the objective laws of all-around money making on which its budgetary economics is based. The disruption of its economic base by its war should not diminish this achievement, but rather the reverse, the military achievement that brings about all the economic disruption should undo what it causes with its warfare. It is as if Bush and his anti-terror warriors wanted to put the strategic worldwide success that they have planned and expect to win in place of the capitalistic “law of value” and just thereby cope precisely with this “law.”
Anyone who holds this to be contradictory is certainly not wrong. But what does this mean – in a world that is governed anyway by the rules of the economic “rationality” of capitalism, by the objective constraints of imperialist rule and by character masks, not the experts of the “law of value.” Here even the greatest absurdities present themselves as interesting viewpoints that are assessed by speculators and politicians, weighed and heeded or not after deliberation; here in the end one can even argue the question – in the acute event of war, certainly invalid for ethical reasons – whether war is worthwhile or not. Because no more and no less follows from the contradiction of a capitalist war economy made in Washington than that America sacrifices nothing for its war and must not sacrifice what it needs; the capitalists of this world make their fortune, if the “old” no longer works so well, in a new type of “new market,” which “simply” and pending further notice grants greater importance to the criterion of the military expenses and success of the USA with the invested money. And exactly the same authorities manage – in event of peace or whenever, after the announcement or cancellation of the next clash of weapons, collectively or against each other, with (to quote a great American false prophet) a bang or a whimper, but in any case with all imperialist brutality – to allow their political economic social work for war to collide with the iron imperatives of good money and solid growth.
Quite a few speculators will once again make a lot of money.