The Purpose of Destruction

Marxian reflections on warfare in the posthistorical age

There is something very fake about war in the post-historical age, certainly if one is an American. The reasons we go to war are barely “political” anymore. As Americans, we have already subdued our enemies; the whole world is our empire. There are no more good reasons for warfare. And yet, as conflicts in Ukraine and Israel have exposed, the U.S. government still seems to itch for bloodshed, jumping at every possible opportunity to funnel billions or even trillions of taxpayer dollars into the prolongation of pointless destruction. What is the purpose of this systemic warmongering? Is it the outburst of the innate human thumos? Is it the manifestation of some manly desire to exhibit warlike valor, as a virtue worth cultivating in its own right? Or is it out of some perverse addiction to the thrill of having and defeating an enemy, such that we must invent new enemies when really there are none? Further yet, is it a calculated maneuver to maintain the image and the power of American global hegemony, by virtue of which the U.S. may claim to police and adjudicate all the world’s conflicts, thereby establishing itself as universal judge over the nations?

These explanations have something attractive about them, and might well appeal to the peace-loving philosopher. And indeed, perhaps they contain some piece of the truth. But there is another, more mundane reason for warfare that may be gleaned by looking at the prevailing economic situation of the entire globe through the lens of Marxist economic science. According to Marx, capitalism contains two inherently contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, capitalism relies on production to generate profit: human labor adds value to raw materials, making them into commodities that are sold on the market for a higher value than what was invested into their production. This process is made even more productive, and higher profits are thereby derived, the more capital can invest into the labor-saving components of production, i.e. tools, machinery, etc., so that a greater quantity of human labor can be employed to add yet greater quantities of surplus value. As this continues, profits become bigger and bigger, and capitalists reap unimaginably massive returns. At the same time, the rate of profit is falling, for although more and more commodities are produced in diminishing units of time, each individual commodity contains lesser value — they’re getting cheaper and cheaper.

Initially, this is to capital’s advantage: the more productive is the labor process, the greater the quantity of commodities that can be produced and the cheaper the commodities will be; and the cheaper they are, the easier will it be to sell them, and thus reap massive profits, concealing what is also the reality of a falling rate of profit. But it is not in capital’s interest to allow this process to progress to its limit. For although it is advantageous, at first, to be able to produce more commodities cheaper, they can’t be allowed to get too cheap or too abundant. If the labor process is allowed to become so productive that it costs nothing to produce things, this would mean they were so cheap that they’d cost nothing to buy: they could no longer be sold. They would be free. Indeed, if the productivity were allowed to increase to truly absurd levels, capital would run out of the physical capacity to hold its own commodities, and thus it would be forced to pay people to take its goods! Capital would self-expropriate and redistribute itself, by the sheer force of overproduction. Despite having recently derived massive profits, once the production process reached overproduction, capital could no longer derive any profits, for the rate of profit will be zero. Instead, it will only lose profits; this would be the only way of freeing itself from an excess which it could no longer sustain as private property. Communization would be inevitable. Profit would no longer be possible. Money would no longer be necessary.

Thus, there is the other side of the contradiction inherent to capitalism: it must at some point place a severe limit on production itself. It may even be necessary for it to engage in actual destruction. Capital, in order to preserve itself, cannot allow its own production process to become so advanced that abundance is automatically guaranteed. Capital depends on scarcity; and it will create that scarcity by violence if it must. There are many ways to do this: capital might choose to deindustrialize, to force a reduction of productivity levels. This in fact happened in the U.S. in the “neoliberal” era, and the U.S. has likewise been waging a continual battle upon the rest of the world in a desperate attempt to deindustrialize the globe. The nefarious “Green” agenda has a lot to do with giving an ideological justification to this effort, which has produced poverty and deprivation on a scale that is only beginning to be understood.

Another violent method of creating scarcity, I maintain, is war. From an economic perspective, war always involves unimaginable destruction of national and personal capitals. As such, war is simply the opposite of productive. It is the rapid and violent creation of scarcity. It is a systemic way of undermining the very abundance that makes money unnecessary and profit impossible. It directly upholds the capitalist system, simply because it is so destructive. It doesn’t matter what are the ideological, ethical, philosophical, or political reasons behind war. All that matters is that it is so wasteful and destructive, for its purpose is none other than to create the world of scarcity in which alone capital can survive. This would explain why the U.S. seems more eager to spend billions of dollars on prolonging warfare abroad than upon the more intuitive objective of promoting industrial growth on its own shores.