Maurizio Lazzarato (1955), exiled in France following the crackdown on April 7, 1979 on the Organized Worker Autonomy movement, in which he was an activist at the University of Padua, is an Italian independent sociologist and philosopher living in Paris. He is author of numerous books and articles on immaterial labor, cognitive capitalism, biopolitics and the bioeconomy, debt, war and what he calls the Capital-State machine.
"However great a nation is, if it loves war it will perish; however peaceful the world is, if it forgets war it will be in danger."
from Wu Zi, ancient Chinese military treaty
"When we say system of war we mean a system such as the one in force that assumes war even if only planned and not fought as the foundation and culmination of the political order, that is, of the relationship between peoples and between men. A system where war is not an event but an institution, not a crisis but a function, not a rupture but a cornerstone of the system, a war always deprecated and exorcised but never abandoned as a real possibility."
Claudio Napoleoni, 1986
Donald Trump’s advent is apocalyptic, in the original meaning of the world apocalypse, revelation. His convulsive flailing has the great merit of demonstrating the true nature of capitalism, the relationship between war, politics and profit, between capital and the state usually hidden under the fig leaf of democracy, human rights, values and the mission of Western civilization.
The same hypocrisy is at the heart of the narrative constructed to legitimize the 840 billion euros for rearmament that the EU has imposed on member states using the state of exception. Arming does not mean, as Draghi says, defending "the values that founded our European society" and have "guaranteed for decades, to its citizens peace, solidarity and with the American ally, security, sovereignty and independence," but it means saving financial capitalism.
There is not even any need for grand speeches and documented analysis to mask the paucity of these narratives. It only took another massacre of 400 Palestinian civilians to bring out the truth of the indecent chatter about the uniqueness and moral and cultural supremacy of the West.
Trump is no pacifist; he merely acknowledges NATO's strategic defeat in the Ukraine war, while European elites reject the evidence. Peace for them would mean returning to the catastrophic state to which they have reduced their nations. The war must continue because for them, as for the Democrats and the U.S. deep state, it is the means to get out of the crisis that began in 2008, as happened once before with the Great Crisis of 1929. Trump thinks he can solve it by prioritizing the economy without disavowing violence, blackmail, intimidation, and war. It is very likely that neither of them will succeed because they have a huge problem: Capitalism, in its financial form, is in deep crisis and it is precisely from its center, the U.S., that “dramatic” signals are coming for the elites who govern us. Instead of converging to the U.S., capital is fleeing to Europe. This is big news, a symptom of great unpredictable ruptures that threaten to be catastrophic.
Instead of producing commodities, finance capital blows bubbles that all inflate in the U.S. and all burst to the detriment of the rest of the world, proving to be weapons of mass destruction. U.S. finance sucks value (capital) from all over the world, invests it in a bubble, which sooner or later bursts, forcing the peoples of the planet into austerity, their sacrifices paying for its failures: First the internet bubble, then the subprime bubble that caused one of the biggest financial crises in the history of capitalism, opened the door to war. They also attempted the green capitalism bubble that never got off the ground and finally the incomparably larger bubble of high-tech companies. To plug the flaws of the private debt disasters dumped on public debts, the Federal Reserve and the European bank flooded the markets with liquidity that instead of 'dripping' into the real economy, served to fuel the high -tech bubble and the development of investment funds known as the "Big Three" -- Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street -- (the largest monopoly in the history of capitalism, managing $50 trillion, major shareholder in all major publicly traded companies). Now even this bubble is deflating.
If you divide the entire capitalization of the Wall Street Stock Exchange list by two we are still a long way from the real value of High tech companies, whose stocks have been inflated by the very funds to keep dividends high for their "rescuers" (the Democrats were also counting on replacing welfare with finance for all, as they had previously raved about housing for all people in the U.S.).
Now the party is over. The bubble has reached its limit and values are falling leaving a real risk of collapse. If we add to this the uncertainty that the policies of Trump, representing a form of finance that is not that of investment funds, are introducing into a system that the investment funds had managed to stabilize with the help of the Democrats, we can understand the fears of the “markets”. Western capitalism needs another bubble because it knows only how to reproduce the same thing over and over (the Trumpian attempt to rebuild manufacturing in the U.S. is doomed to certain failure).
The perfect identity of "production" and destruction
Europe, which already spends more than twice what Russia spends on arms [$420 billion vs. 158] (NATO accounts for 55 percent of the world's arms spending, Russia 5 percent) has decided on a major investment plan of 800 billion euros to further increase military spending.
The war and Europe where political and economic networks are still active, and power centers that align with the strategy represented by Biden, which was defeated in the last presidential election, have the opportunity to build a bubble based on armaments that compensates for the growing difficulties of the U.S. "markets." Since December, stocks of arms companies have already been the subject of speculation, going from rise to rise and functioning as a safe haven for capital that sees the U.S. situation as too risky. At the center of the operation are investment funds that are also among the largest shareholders in major arms companies. They hold significant stakes in Boeing, Lockheed Martin and RTX, influencing the management and strategies of these companies. They also have a presence in the military-industrial complex in Europe: Rheinmetall, a German company that manufactures Leopards [tanks] and has seen its stock rise 100 percent in recent months, has Blackrock, Société Générale, Vanguard, etc. as major shareholders. Rheinmetall, Europe's largest munitions manufacturer, has surpassed the continent's leading automaker, Volkswagen, in terms of capitalization, the latest sign of investors' growing appetite for defense-related stocks.
The European Union wants to collect and channel continental savings into armaments with catastrophic consequences for the proletariat and a further division of the Union. The arms race will not be able to function as "war keynesianism" because investment in arms intervenes in a financialized economy that is no longer industrial. Built with public money it will generate profits for a small minority of private investors while worsening conditions for the vast majority of the population.
The arms bubble can only produce the same effects as the U.S. bubble of high-tech enterprises. After 2008, the sums of money captured for investment in the high-tech bubble never 'trickled' down to the U.S. proletariat. Instead, they have produced ever-increasing de-industrialization, de-skilled and precarious jobs, low wages, rampant poverty, the destruction of the little Welfare inherited from the New Deal and the subsequent privatization of all services. This is what the European financial bubble will undoubtedly produce in Europe. Financialization will lead not only to the complete destruction of the Welfare State and the outright privatization of services, but to the further political fragmentation of what remains of the European Union. The debts, incurred by each state separately, will have to be repaid, and huge differences will be produced among European states in their ability to repay the debts they have incurred.
The real danger is not the Russians, but the Germans with their 500 billion rearmament and another 500 billion for infrastructure, crucial financing in building the bubble. The last time Germany rearmed it wreaked global disasters (25 million dead in the Soviet Union alone, the final solution, etc.), hence François Mauriac's famous statement against German unification "I love Germany so much that I’m happy there are two of them." Waiting for the further developments of nationalism and the already 21% far-right that "Deutschland ist zurück" [Germany is back] will inevitably produce, Germany will impose its usual imperialist hegemony on other European countries. The Germans have quickly abandoned the ordo-liberal creed that had no economic foundation, only political, and embrace to the hilt Anglo-American financialization, but with the same goal, to command and exploit Europe. The Financial Times recounts a decision made by Blackrock's man Merz and Goldman Sachs' man Treasury Minister Joerg Kukies, with the endorsement of the 'left' parties SPD and Die Linke, who, like their predecessors in 1914, are once again taking responsibility for future carnage.
If Germany's previous internal imperialism was based on austerity, export mercantilism, wage freezes and the destruction of the welfare state, this one will be based on the management of a European war economy organized hierarchically according to the differential interest rates to be paid when repaying the contracted debt.
The already heavily indebted countries (Italy, France, etc.) will have to find those who will buy their bonds issued to pay off the debt, in an increasingly competitive European "market." Investors will find it worthwhile to buy German bonds, bonds issued by arms companies on which upward speculation will be in play, and European government debt securities, which are certainly safer and more profitable than the bonds of super-indebted countries. The famous "spread" will still play its role as it did in 2011. The billions needed to pay the markets will not be available to the welfare state. The strategic goal of all governments and oligarchies for the past 50 years will now be achieved: Destroy social spending for the reproduction of the proletariat and instead privatize it.
Driven by self-interest, 27 national entities will battle each other with nothing to gain, because history, which “we are the only ones who know what’s happening” has backed them into a corner, useless and irrelevant after centuries of colonialism, wars and genocides.
The arms race is accompanied by a pounding "we are at war" pretext used against everyone (Russia, China , North Korea, Iran, Brics) that cannot be abandoned and is likely to come to fruition in a real war because this delusional amount of weapons must still "be consumed."
The lessons of Rosa Luxemburg, Kalecki, Baran and Sweezy
Only the clueless can claim to be astonished by what is happening now. Everything is repeating itself, only it is happening within a system dominated by financial capitalism that is no longer the industrial capitalism of the 20th century.
War and armaments have been at the heart of economics and politics since capitalism became imperialist. And they are also at the heart of the process of reproduction of capital and the proletariat, in fierce competition with each other. Let us quickly reconstruct the theoretical framework provided by Rosa Luxemburg, Kalecki, Baran and Sweezy, firmly planted, in contrast to the useless contemporary critical theories, on the categories of imperialism, monopoly and war, which offers us a mirror of the contemporary situation.
We will start with the crisis of 1929, which had its roots in World War I and the attempt to get out of it by activating public spending through state intervention. According to Baran et Sweezy (henceforth B&S), the drawback of government spending in the 1930s was its volume, which was inadequate to counteract the depressive forces of the private economy.
"Viewed as a rescue operation for the U.S. economy as a whole, the New Deal was thus a blatant failure. Even [John] Galbraith, the prophet of prosperity without war orders, recognized that in the decade 1930 - 1940, 'the great crisis' never ended."
The system would only come out of its crisis with World War II: "Then came the war, and with the war came salvation (...) military spending did what social spending had failed to accomplish" because government spending rose from $17.5 billion to $103.1 billion a year.
B&S show that government spending did not bring the results that military spending did because it was limited by a political problem that is still our own. Why did the New Deal and its spending, fail to achieve a goal that "was within reach, as the war later proved"? Because regarding the nature and composition of government spending, that is, of the reproduction of the system and the proletariat, the class struggle is unleashed.
"Given the power structure of U.S. monopoly capitalism, the increase in civilian spending had almost reached its outer limits. The forces opposing further expansion were too powerful to be overcome."
Social spending competed with or harmed corporations and oligarchies, robbing them of economic and political power. "Because private interests control political power the limits of public spending are rigidly set without any concern for social needs, however shamefully obvious they may be." And these limits also applied to spending, health care and education, which at that time, unlike today were not directly competing with the private interests of the oligarchies.
The arms race allows increased public spending by the state, without transforming this into increased wages and consumption of the proletariat. [The challenge is] how to spend public money to avoid the economic depression that monopoly [capitalism] brings, while avoiding strengthening of the proletariat? "By armaments, by more armaments, by more and more armaments."
Michael Kalecki, working on the same period but on Nazi Germany, succeeds in elucidating other aspects of the problem. Against all economism, which always threatens the understanding of capitalism by critical theories, even by Marxist ones, he highlights the political nature of the capital cycle: "Discipline in the factories and political stability are more important to capitalists than current profits."
The political cycle of capital, which can now' only be guaranteed by state intervention, must resort to arms spending and fascism. For Kalecki, too, the political problem manifests itself in the "direction and purposes of public spending." The aversion to "subsidizing mass consumption" is motivated by the destruction it causes "of the basis of the capitalist ethic ---- 'you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow' (unless you live off the profits of capital)."
How to make sure that state spending is not transformed into increased employment, consumption and wages and thus into the political strength of the proletariat? The inconvenience for the oligarchies is overcome with fascism because the state machine is then under the control of big capital and the fascist leadership, with "the concentration of state expenditures in armaments," while "factory discipline and political stability is ensured by the dissolution of trade unions and concentration camps. Political pressure here replaces the economic pressure of unemployment."
Hence the immense success of the Nazis among most economic liberals in both Britain and America.
War and arms spending were central to American policy even after the end of World War II, because a political structure without an armed force, that is, without a monopoly on its exercise, was inconceivable. The volume of a nation's military apparatus depends on its position in the world hierarchy of exploitation. "The most important nations will always need the most, and the extent of their need (for armed force) will vary according to whether or not a spirited struggle for first place is going on among them."
Military spending thus continued to grow in the center of imperialism: "Of course, most of the expansion of government spending took place in the military sector, which rose from less than 1 to more than 10 percent of GNP and accounted for about two-thirds of the total increase in government spending since 1920. This massive absorption of the surplus in limited preparations has been the central fact of postwar American history."
Kalecki points out that in 1966 "more than half of the growth in national income is resolved in the growth of military spending."
Now, after the war [World War II], capitalism can no longer count on fascism to control social spending. The Polish economist, a 'pupil' of Rosa Luxemburg, points out, "One of the fundamental functions of Hitlerism was to overcome big capital's aversion to large-scale anti-consumerist policy.
The big bourgeoisie had given its assent to the abandonment of laisser-faire and to the radical increase of the role of the state in the national economy, on the condition that the state apparatus would be under direct control of its alliance with the fascist leadership," and that the destination and content of public spending would be determined by armaments.
In the Glorious Thirties (1930s), without fascism ensuring the direction of public spending, states and capitalists were forced into political compromise. Power relations determined by the century of revolutions forced the state and capitalists into concessions that are nevertheless compatible with profits reaching previously unknown growth rates. But even this compromise is one too many because, despite large profits, "the workers become 'recalcitrant' in such a situation and the 'captains of industry' become eager to 'teach them a lesson.'"
The counter - revolution, unfolding since the late 1960s, will have at its center, the destruction of social spending and the fierce desire to direct public spending toward the sole and exclusive interests of the oligarchies. The problem, since the Weimar Republic, has never been a generic intervention of the state in the economy, but the fact that the state had been invested by the class struggle and had been forced to yield to the demands of workers' and proletarian struggles.
In the "peaceful" times of the Cold War, without the aid of fascism, the explosion of military spending needs legitimacy, secured by propaganda capable of continually conjuring up the threat of a looming war, of an enemy at the gates ready to destroy Western values : "The unofficial and official creators of public opinion had the answer ready: the United States must defend the free world from the threat of Soviet (or Chinese) aggression."
Kalecki, for the same period specifies, "Newspapers, cinema, radio and television stations that work under the auspices of the ruling class create an atmosphere conducive to the militarization of the economy."
Spending on armaments has not only an economic function, but also one of producing subjugated subjectivities. War by exalting subordination and command "contributes to the creation of a conservative mentality."
"While massive public spending on education and welfare tends to undermine the privileged position of the oligarchy, military spending does the opposite. Militarization favors all reactionary forces (...) a blind respect for authority is determined; conduct of conformity and submission is taught and imposed; and contrary opinion is regarded as unpatriotic or even treasonable."
Capitalism produces a capitalist who, precisely because of the political form of its cycle, is a sower of death and destruction rather than a promoter of progress. Richard B. Russel, a conservative U.S. Southern senator as early as the 1960s quoted by B&S, tells us: "There is something about preparations for destruction that induces men to spend money more carelessly than if it were for constructive purposes. Why this happens I don't know; but for the thirty years or so that I have been in the Senate I have realized that in buying weapons to kill, destroy, wipe cities off the face of the earth and eliminate great transportation systems there is something that causes men not to calculate the expenditure with the same care employed when it comes to thinking of decent housing and health care for human beings."
The reproduction of capital and the proletariat became politicized through the revolutions of the 20th century. The class struggle also investing this reality has brought out a radical opposition between the reproduction of life and the reproduction of its destruction that has only deepened since the 1930s.
How does capitalism work
War and armaments, excluded in practice from virtually all critical theories of capitalism, function as discriminants in the analysis of capital and the state.
It is very difficult to call capitalism a "mode of production," as Marx did, because economy, war, politics, state, and technology are closely intertwined and inseparable elements. The "critique of economics" is not enough to produce a revolutionary theory.
Already with the advent of imperialism a radical change in the functioning of capitalism and the state had been produced, made crystal clear by Rosa Luxemburg for whom accumulation has two expects. The first "concerns the production of surplus-value ---- in the factory, in the mine, in agricultural exploitation ---- and the circulation of goods in the market. Viewed from this point of view, accumulation is an economic process whose most important stage is a transaction between the capitalist and the wage earner."
The second aspect has the whole world as its theater, a world dimension irreducible to the concept of "market" and its economic laws. "Here the methods employed are colonial politics, the international loan system, the politics of spheres of interest, war. Violence, fraud, oppression, predation develop openly, without mask, and it is difficult to recognize the strict laws of the economic process in the interweaving of economic violence and political brutality."
War is not a continuation of politics but coexists, from time immemorial, with it, as the functioning of the world market shows. Here, where war, fraud, and predation coexist with economics the law of value has never really worked.
The world market looks very different from the one sketched by Marx. His considerations seem to no longer apply, or rather, need to be specified: only in the world market would money and labor become adequate to their concept, bringing their abstraction and universality to fruition. On the contrary, what we can see is that money, the most abstract and universal form of capital, is always the state currency. The dollar is the currency of the United States and reigns only as such. The abstraction of money and its universality (and its automatisms) are appropriated by a 'subjective force' and are managed according to a strategy that is not contained in money.
Finance too, like technology seems to be the object of appropriation by "national" subjective forces, hardly universal. In the world market, even abstract labor does not triumph as such, but instead encountering other, radically different labor (servile labor, slave labor, etc.) is the object of strategies.
Trump's action, having dropped the hypocritical veil of democratic capitalism, reveals to us the secret of economics: it can only function from an international division of production and reproduction that is defined and imposed politically, that is, using force that also involves war.
The will to exploitation and domination, simultaneously managing political, economic and military relations, constructs a totality, which can never close in on itself, but always remains open, split by conflict, war and pillaging. In this split totality, the set of power relations converge and are governed. Trump intervenes on the use of words, but also on gender theories, while he would like to impose a new global positioning, both political and economic, of the U.S. From the micro to the macro, this is a political action that contemporary movements are far from even thinking about.
The construction of the financial bubble, a process we can follow step by step, happens in the same way. There are many actors that contribute to its production: the European Union, the states that must go into debt, the European Investment Bank, political parties, the media and public opinion, large investment funds (all based in the United States) that organize the movement of capital from one stock exchange to another, and large corporations. Only after the clash/cooperation between these power centers has given its verdict can the economic bubble and its automatic mechanisms function. There is a whole ideology about automatic operation that must be debunked. "Autopilot," especially at the financial level, exists and works only after it is politically established. It did not exist in the Glorious Thirties because it was politically decided upon, it has been functioning since the late 1970s by explicit political will.
This multiplicity of actors who have been agitating for months is held together by a strategy. There is thus a subjective element that intervenes in a fundamental way. Two ways. From the capitalist point of view, there is a fierce struggle going on between the "subjective factor" Trump and the "subjective factor" of the elites who were defeated in the presidential election but still have strong presences in the centers of power in the U.S. and Europe.
But for capitalism to work we must also consider a subjective proletarian factor. It plays a decisive role because it will either become the passive bearer of the new process of capital production/reproduction or it will tend to reject and destroy it. Having ascertained the incapacity of the contemporary proletariat, the weakest, the most disoriented, the least autonomous and independent proletariat in the history of capitalism, the first option seems the most likely. But if it fails to oppose a strategy of its own to the enemy's continuous strategic innovations, capable of continual renewal, we will fall within an asymmetry of power relations that will take us back to before the French Revolution, into a new/already seen "ancien régime."
