It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife. — Heraclitus.
The object of inquiry of this essay is not a history of war or an attempt at insight into its meaning. Our goal is a more modest attempt at a genealogy of contemporary military infrastructure. We are not seeking a painstaking study of military engagements or wars throughout history, and in a certain sense, war itself is a secondary consideration for our purposes. Genealogy renders explicit what causal events had to take place to make an actuality possible through the accumulation and sedimentation of contingencies or chance over extended durations.
Military infrastructure facilitates an unproductive expenditure, in war or in reproductive maintenance, necessitated by complex centralized social forms and world systems, whether world-empires or capitalist world-economies.1 While world-empires and world-economies both grow through imperial expansion, world-empires didn't have to continually expand out of necessity just to reproduce themselves. World-empires predate the bourgeois separation of the economic and the political, as well as the political boundaries drawn by a plurality of nation states. This is not simply to say that the political sphere and the state ruling class dominated the economic sphere, but rather the two were fundamentally inseparable and formed an organic whole.
The 16th to 17th centuries saw the emergence of world-economies, fueling the development of nation-states with increasing capacity for expenditure caught in a feedback loop with cycles of capital accumulation. This dynamic transforms the relationship between capitalist firms and the state, as well as offloading more and more of the social reproduction of the private sphere, whether directly or indirectly, onto the state. The drive for capital to continually reproduce itself on an expanded scale converges with and redirects the dictates of the states in the core of the world system, subsuming and appropriating state military expenditure as a means to ward off crises of profitability, overproduction, and overaccumulation, as well as access to untapped raw materials and labor power in the periphery.
The military theorist Carl Von Klauswitz, Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan, and Vladimir Lenin and J.A. Hobson’s theory of imperialism give us a means to reconstruct the geopolitical balance of forces active in a given world-system and its relation to military expenditure.
We will take the actual existing military infrastructure as a final cause and attempt to construct the telos, or chain of efficient causes and contingencies, making the actual possible. We will treat war as a moment or expression of a social totality that presupposes technical implementation and social differentiation determined in the last instance by the forces and relations of production. For Marx, the base, or social infrastructure, is composed of modes of production constituted by relations of production and appropriation (form) making up regimes of rent or tribute, capital accumulation, etc., as well as forms of exploitation and forces of production (technological infrastructure, labor power, material content, etc), structuring expenditures of labor time.
Our genealogy will track the development of military infrastructure as a product of this process and its increasing relative autonomy and ever-growing share of resources. As Clausewitz's thought experiment involving an ideal war is keen to remind us, war is always carried out within the real confines of ideological incentive structures governed by economic calculation, shaped by resource scarcity as well as internal and external political factors.
In essence, we attempt to underline the relation of military expenditure to imperialism while following the dynamics of imperialism past its instantiation in national monopoly capital. This is not to say that capitalism couldn't exist without war, but that a tendency has developed towards continued public/private military expenditure (which does not necessarily require war) as a means of addressing crises of overproduction and overaccumulation.
We will begin by considering the socio-historical developments in both infrastructure and superstructure that must take place for the existence of the military, as well as the technological means and division of labor that accompany it.
Social Forms and Social Differentiation
Giambattista Vico is perhaps the first philosopher to grasp the divisions of the social structure as issuing from a process of intensifying scission inherent to the growth and development of the social body itself. Vico’s view of history as an eternal cycle of three ages— the age of gods, the age of warriors, and the age of man — articulates a theory of social agents as collectives with conflicting interests generated by the dynamics of the whole. The rational kernel of Vico’s eternal history is the analysis of society as a historicizable system with structured emergent relations and tendencies.
The systems theorist Niklas Luhmann defines differentiation as “a process of growth by internal disjunction.”2 For Marx, the social body, in producing and reproducing itself, must delegate the conflicting roles and functions of political economy and social production throughout the totality. Each delegated function gradually establishes a relative autonomy and tends towards a more and more determinate, concrete function. Social differentiation occurs simultaneously at the level of the global whole and the local part. This process can be described as dialectical insofar as the scission of social differentiation occurs within a continuity that integrates the newly cut-up parts into a whole that is itself split again and again indefinitely. The division of labor and social alienation must be understood as inherent to and synonymous with the auto-production of the social.
The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. [...] Admittedly, however, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by the other moments. For example if the market, i.e. the sphere of exchange, expands, then production grows in quantity and the divisions between its different branches become deeper. A change in distribution changes production, e.g. concentration of capital, different distribution of the population between town and country, etc. Finally, the needs of consumption determine production. Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This is the case with every organic whole.
For historical materialism, this concrete distribution of functions of social reproduction emerges from historical social differentiation according to a particular social form or mode of production. Christopher J. Arthur defines a mode of production in the following way:
It is a stable, relatively harmonious, combination of a social form and a material content. In Marx’s glib aphorism, ‘the handmill gives us society with the feudal lord, the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist’. It must be understood that, in the combination, the elements are not indifferent to one another, nor do they exhibit a one-way determination (the Marx passage has been misread as a technological determinism), rather they are dialectically interrelated.
Social forms – which is to say social relations of production and the content they subsume – are fundamentally plastic and dynamic. Against the Althusserian synchronic reconstruction of historical materialism, we assert that social forms not only coexist with one another, whether as differing modes or the same mode at different degrees of development, but, to paraphrase (and oppose) Etienne Balibar, they may descend or emerge from one another.5 Albeit they emerge or descend at durations, in what Fredric Jameson has called the “geological rhythms of history,”6 far exceeding those of the individual life spans of observers, let alone supposed immediate breaks and ruptures.
Jairus Banaji's7 elaboration of the complex relation between forms of exploitation and relations of production accounts for the varied ways in which social practices can be subsumed and integrated to social forms or structures throughout history over a long durée. Wage labor, commodities, and money all existed prior to capitalism, but only the real subsumption of wage labor by a capitalist regime of accumulation, expressed as the production of relative surplus value through commodity production and exchange mediated by money, can constitute the capitalist mode of production. The forms of exploitation employed in war and military infrastructure can be transformed through subsumption to relations of production in just as many varied ways.
The military, in its most abstract universal function across its possible variations, assumes a state's logistical capacity to mobilize the population and appropriate the social surplus of raw materials, living labor, and technological infrastructure without ever intending to produce use values. However, capturing the military in the concrete means reintroducing the differing social relations, forces of production, superstructural institutions, and social practices that render it possible at different historical periods.
The state's status as an agent of public consumption and the dissemination of resources is necessitated and presupposed by the historical advent of tributary modes of production and their respective relations of production and divisions of labor. The complex centralized states of the tributary mode “were not just ‘political superstructures’ to some self-contained economic base, they were essential moments of the structuring and organisation of the economy (of the relations of production).”8 The relation between base and superstructure is best understood as a recursive feedback loop. The base cannot exist independently of the superstructural functions and relations that directly or indirectly further and realize its ends.
Following V. Gordon Childe’s work on the Neolithic and “urban revolution” and the technological and cultural developments of the tributary states of the Bronze and Iron Ages, Deleuze and Guattari view the development of metallurgy and the tools, weapons, and warfare it made possible as the result of a surplus stock of resources generated by the twin developments of agriculture and the state, making possible the funding of large-scale mining projects in India, Africa, Anatolia (the Hittites), etc. Despite newer historical discoveries casting doubt on some of Childe’s periodizations, the relation between state surplus and metallurgy is sound.
This is one of the essential points of V. Gordon Childe's argument in The Prehistory of European Civilization: the metallurgist is the first specialized artisan, whose sustenance is made possible by the formation of an agricultural surplus. The relation of the smith to agriculture has to do not only with the tools smiths manufacture but also with the food they take or receive.
The division of labor includes not just tributary agricultural forms of exploitation and the specialized labor and technical means of the smith (as well as the geographical particularities allowing for mining and metallurgy), but also the forms of exploitation and technological infrastructure belonging to soldiers (some serving as professional volunteers and others serving as a form of rent) and the hierarchical delegations of authority of the military bureaucracy. This concrete instance of the military, integrating the abstract unproductive expenditure of the military into the division of labor of the tributary mode, assumes and maintains a world-empire premised on militaristic expansion and conquest.
Mimesis, Semiotics, and Military Strategy
The two most influential military theorists, Sun Tzu and Cal von Clausewitz – the former explicating the strategic discourse of the tail end of the Iron Age and the latter the tactical assumptions and innovations of the Napoleonic era (1803-1815) – provide an insight into the theory and practice of different historical accumulations of military infrastructure that remain relevant to the present, in turn allowing us to track historical shifts and continuities.
Sun Tzu's definition of war as deception reflects the dominance of strategic thought in the theory and practice of the world-empire of the Eastern Zhou period. This is not to say that this period was absent of tactical assumptions, but rather that the tactics employed – those belonging to what Clausewitz calls limited warfare – emphasized diplomacy, strategic maneuvers, “armed observation”, and gestures over actual battles and engagements. As we will see, Clausewitz conceives of war as a spectrum of tactical differences in degree of intensity. He begins his discussion of war with a thought experiment involving an “ideal war” without any limitations, social, economic, etc. The utility of this ideal war is to demonstrate its absurdity (“a logical fantasy”) and conclude that war is always governed by real strategic limitations – that is, governed by economic and political realities. Ideal war is to be distinguished from absolute war – war intended to destroy the combatant rather than as a means to negotiation – and total war, the full mobilization of a nation's resources, productive capacity, and population.
Clausewitz began the project that would become On War with the assumption that Napoleonic warfare was the norm throughout history. But later in the process of writing, he came to realize that absolute warfare was the exception rather than the rule. The pre- and post-Napoleonic era until World War I was defined by this limited warfare that engaged in battle only as a means to the end of preventing the prolonging of conflict.
In contrast to the tactical nature of battle and direct engagement, following Sam Forsyth,10 strategic maneuvers are governed by semiotic practices of deception and the detection of deceptiveness. For C.S. Peirce, there are three signs: icons, indices, and symbols. What Peirce calls “semiosis" is the recursive cycle of interpretation and formation of accurate claims that occurs in inferential cognition, always already mediated by signs. Strategic cunning, however, only encompasses the usage of icons and cannot ascend to the level of cognition that requires a universal community of inquiry unobstructed by deception.
Peirce’s icons are essentially abstractions that select those qualities from a stimulus or input deemed necessary and remove those deemed unnecessary. Unlike indexes, icons do not signify or refer to an object, nor do they refer to other signs endowed with semantic content like symbols. For Peirce, semiotics is a larger category than that of linguistics, as language is only a subset of the dissemination and circulation of signs, and therefore icons can occur independently of a human community of inquiry. Icons and indices occur in nature in the mimetic deceptive behavior of animals and plants. The adaptation of camouflage, the use of pheromones and airborne chemicals as signals, bird calls, etc., are all instances of the non-human, non-linguistic dimension of signs. The function of pattern recognition, linking statistical regularities through icons and indices, can be attributed to even the most basic of thermostatic closed systems.
Iconicity, in abstracting certain qualities over others, attempts to establish a similarity with an already-given association. “This resemblance, however, is wholly a matter of an arbitrary interpretation of the similarity-vagueness of something versus something else. In this sense, iconicity is really the stimuli-based discrimination of stuff.”11 The essential role of iconicity in deception is familiar to anyone accustomed to the Platonic anxiety of distinguishing the simulacra, or copy, from the model, or the sophist from the philosopher. The slippery nature of mimesis ungrounds the stability of the relation between an object and its representations, necessary for collective inquiry and the cognition of universals.
Deleuze, extrapolating from a brief aside in Plato's Timaeus, distinguishes between the knowledge of relations between continually shifting variables, dispars, and knowledge of universal continuities, compars, the latter of which Peirce called syncheism. Strategic iconicity, due to the constant threat of deception and the need to change strategic assumptions in light of successful deception, operates under the banner of dispars. Deleuze characterizes dispars as “anexact yet rigorous.”12 Much like Kant's schemata, this anexact iconicity belongs to neither sensible nor ideal entities (universals) but can act as a bridge between the two. Unlike the cognition of universals and continuities constituting compars and synechism, strategy and dispars belong to Peirce’s category of tychism. Tyche is the Greek deity of fortune, chance, and, most importantly for Peirce, contingency. For Clausewitz, contingency and chance, in addition to the passions and political rationality, constitute the tripartite components of real war.13 The strategy of a successful campaign must always adapt the demands of political rationality to the constant variability of chance.
The Nation State, Total War, and the Partisan
The centuries preceding Napoleon saw an increase in the cost, complexity, and intensity of engagement in warfare. This trend would reach its peak in total war.
[W]ar was waged with much to-do, with the deployment of huge armies, undertaking sophisticated and disciplined manoeuvres. The seventeenth century was the age par excellence of sieges, artillery, logistics and pitched battles. It was of course, an ever-open abyss into which money poured. States of small dimensions went under, in particular city-states, however sparing they were with their arsenals of weapons and their recruitment of mercenaries. If the modern state expanded at this time, and if modern capitalism took up residence within it, war was often the instrument: bellum omnium pater [war is the father of all]. But this kind of war fell very short of total war: prisoners were exchanged, rich men were ransomed, campaigns were more expertly waged than bloody. The Irishman Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery declared roundly in 1677 'We make War more like Foxes than like Lyons and you have twenty Sieges for one Battel'. War waged without mercy would only come with Frederick II of Prussia or with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
The novelty of Clausewitz's era and Napoleonic warfare lies in the modernization and professionalization of military infrastructure and warfare, including but not limited to universal military service, instituted by Napoleon. Prior to Napoleon, soldiers were sourced through volunteers and private mercenaries. In line with the republican values of the French Revolution, Napoleonic total war saw the increased conscription and mobilization of the entire population in service of the war effort. Crucially, the revolution's breaking of feudal hereditary class power allowed for meritocratic promotion within the military and the “rationalization” of the bureaucracy as a whole.
The growth in the size and professionalism of standing armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, increasing tenfold in just two hundred years, necessitated an expansion in the state-apparatus to maintain and finance the military. The military revolution also fostered significant state-intervention in the economy, with the state becoming a large producer and consumer of goods and provisions, for example in the shipbuilding- and construction-industries. The state emerged to service the military and the military waxed in strength to protect the nurturing state.
The advent of world-economies creates a plurality of core nation states in contrast to the single, centralized hegemonic core-states of world-empires. This leads to greater conflict among states as well as inter-territorial struggles over who would wield the state's monopoly on legitimate violence. This violence almost immediately found itself projected into the periphery in the colonial system of mercantile capital.
The new contingent variables created by the total war of Napoleonic warfare and the logistical complexities concomitant with it define the early modern military that will lie dormant until reappearing in its fully modern form in World War I, now industrialized and entering into an increasing degree of formal and real subsumption to capitalist valorization and Taylorization.16
For Carl Schmitt, the war introduces a new dynamic he calls real enmity: tactical engagements towards the ends of a new territorial agreement. “Real enmity was first engendered by the war itself, which began as a conventional state war of European international law and ended as an international civil war of revolutionary class enmity [following the October Revolution].”17 Clausewitzian limited warfare corresponds to what Schmitt deems the conventional warfare and enmity between states of the post-Napoleonic era, ruled by the Jus Publicum Europaeum.
Schmitt distinguishes between conventional enmity, real enmity, and absolute enmity (corresponding to Clausewitz's absolute war). In addition to the modernization of warfare, for Schmitt, the Napoleonic era also saw the entry of a new player into world history: the partisan. The figure of the partisan first emerged briefly in Spain and Prussia in opposition to Napoleon's army. The partisan is informal or irregular, as the partisan is a citizen, rather than a professional soldier, who spontaneously takes up arms. Schmitt's real enmity, based upon the friend (in this case that which is internal to a homogenous state)/enemy (that which is external to the state) distinction, the foundation of his theory of politics, assumes both sides to be sovereign states; the partisan complicates this, as its irregular and informal nature escapes this dualism.
For Schmitt, Lenin is the first to recognize the importance of the partisan. Lenin, furthering the thought of Marx and Engels, conceives of the partisan as in service of an offensive international revolutionary class war; however, for Schmitt, this describes one pole of the dynamic of the partisan. For Schmitt, the true significance of the partisan is in its defense of the homeland. The revolutionary offensive partisan and the defensive telluric partisan are further distinguished by their level of enmity. The Leninist international revolution declares absolute enmity against an international class enemy. The Telluric partisan seeks real enmity as a means to an end of achieving territorial autonomy and recognition as an independent state from an opponent.
However, the informal, irregular nature of the partisan is never self-sufficient, and this complicates the status of the partisan's national defense:
For the partisan is always dependent in some way, as an irregular fighter, on a regular power. [...] Today the connection strikes us even more forcibly, since continuous increase in the technical means of war renders the partisan dependent on the ongoing assistance of an ally who is in a position, technologically and industrially, to supply and develop him with the newest weapons and machinery. [...] In the longer view of things the irregular must legitimize itself through the regular, and for this only two possibilities stand open: recognition by an existing regular, or establishment of a new regularity by its own force.
The first Spanish partisans were backed by their own state and the British, seeking to undercut Napoleon. Schmitt quotes Mao's description of the Chinese partisan and the Red Army as being two arms belonging to the same man. Given the historical context of Theory of the Partisan, a lecture given by Schmitt in 1962, the role of the Cold War proxies, such as Vietnam and Cuba, is highlighted as a figure of the partisan.
The emergence of the partisan is far from the only mutation in political calculus generated by the end of post-Napoleonic warfare. The technological and industrial limitations of the partisan noted by Schmitt speak to the convergence of the development of military infrastructure with the growth of fixed capital, spurred on by the industrial revolution. As Lenin argues in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), increased concentrations of capital in individual firms develop into monopolies and cartels fused with banks that exert political influence over nations, leading to international conflict over resources and labor in the underdeveloped periphery.
The superstructural transformations engendered by the era of imperialism make the ideological incentives, not of the bourgeoisie themselves, but of the production process and the firms and financial institutions that constitute it, a universal interest. “[T]he classical public sphere is originally rooted in the [private] bourgeois context of living, yet separates itself from the latter and the production process. By contrast, the new public spheres of production are a direct expression of the sphere of production. [...] The differentiation between public and private is replaced by the contradiction between the pressure exerted by production interests and the need for legitimation.”19
For Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, this “public sphere of production” decenters the traditional bourgeois public sphere of voluntary association and civil society (newspapers, chancellories, parliaments, clubs, parties, etc.) theorized by Kant, Hegel, and, most importantly for Negt and Kluge, Jürgen Habermas. The classical public sphere that, despite falling short of its theoretical idealization, allowed the revolutionary bourgeoisie to act as a class with political agency, assumed a separation of the political and the economic, nevertheless marked and determined by the economic in its limitations and exclusions regarding property. The public sphere of production reintegrates the political and the economic by sacrificing the notion of the political as the self-organization of an ideologically limited yet universal public sphere in service of a notion of politics as technocratic administrative consensus meeting a bare minimum of political legitimacy through the mediation of bureaucratic interest groups.
The public sphere of production, in addition to the production process itself, is constituted by the many facets of commercial mass media, television, the internet, “the media cartel, the combined public relations and legal departments of conglomerates and interest groups,”20 as well as the classical bourgeois sphere -- albeit it is included as a private interest within the public sphere of production or, as in the case of the state and traditional political institutions and parties, “an additional overlying element.”21 The state, and other traditional political institutions, are reduced to mere capstones in the many different expressions of public-private partnerships occurring under such political circumstances as Keynesianism, Nazism, Neoliberalism, etc.
Negt and Kluge see the variety of public spheres, whether feudal, bourgeois, proletarian, or productive, as compartmentalizing and appropriating each other and the functions of the state according to the demands and potentials of the concrete social situation. For our purposes, this concept is crucial in grasping the increasingly complex role the military plays in mediating between the state and private interests and contractors. For Negt and Kluge, the state in the public sphere of production acts not as an absolute, totalizing, top-down authority, but as a coordinator or administrator.
Proxy Imperialism and the Global Capitalist World-System
We can now pull together our previous threads — understanding the military as an outgrowth of political-economic social differentiation, the semiotics of military strategy, the emergence of the partisan, and the public sphere of production — into a more concrete yet still unfinished sketch. The rationalized, professionalized total war waged by Napoleon returns in World Wars I and II with greater intensity and destruction each time. In the post-war era, both the Cold War and the War on Terror, with few exceptions, we see partisan proxy war take center stage – without, however, fulfilling Schmitt’s hopes for a real enmity that establishes a new nomos of the earth. Nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction see a return of limited warfare and the semiotics of deception, but now on a global stage, enabled by decades of technological developments largely directly funded by military spending.
Due to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, capital must always seek higher returns and even cannibalize itself if necessary. In attempting to counter this tendency, capital runs up against the limits of workers' purchasing power (effective demand), as wages must be kept as low as possible for profitability; any attempt at expanding production of the means of consumption (without expanding consumer access to credit) can lead to possible crises of overproduction. Imperialism and the continued post-imperialist war economy offer an answer to capital's structural tendency towards a crisis of profitability, serving as a means for the realization and valorization of surplus otherwise unrealized (overaccumulation) due to fears of overproduction.
“The role of a politico-military-economic complex is the more manifest in that it guarantees the extraction of human surplus value on the periphery and in the appropriated zones of the center, but also because it engenders for its own part an enormous [relative surplus value generated by technological advancements] by mobilizing the resources of knowledge and information capital, and finally because it absorbs the greater part of the surplus value produced.”22 The collusion of the military and the private sector has become a permanent feature of capitalism, even after the decentering of Lenin's imperialism by the global capitalist world-system.
It’s our contention that this war economy is a core element of actually existing capitalism and can be understood as an outgrowth of the development of monopoly capital and imperialism that continues to exist and expand to the present day, albeit undergoing changes in character with the advent of transnational capitalist firms and an integrated global market.
Lenin's critique of Kautsky's “ultra-imperialism” — that the tendency towards a single world trust that would put an end to international conflict is proved absurd by the reality of imperialist war — still holds. However, conflict in the post-war era has, with few exceptions, been between hegemonic nations in the core and peripheral partisan proxies backed by nations attempting to avoid direct real enmity. We see a return of limited warfare, albeit now on a global or transnational scale, with the character of something approximate to J.A. Hobson's informal empire, the reign of finance and economic interdependence (IMF, World Bank, etc), existing synchronously alongside (what we have deemed) proxy imperialism.
Extrapolating upon Lenin’s illustration of the role of cartels and monopolies in their relation to the state in the era of imperialism, the expansion and development of this tendency sees the military join this series and create the aforementioned politico-military-economic-complex that undergoes a transformation in the transnational era, which sees finance in the core deterritorialize from the nation state and its previous function in financing national development and international expansion to administering transnational debt relations of unequal exchange between core and periphery. As Mike Davis has shown, the “structural adjustment programs” or SAP’s instituted by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s forced nations in the periphery to remove all internal defenses of national industry (subsidies and tariffs, import controls, privatization of the public sector, etc.) to be overrun by cheaper mass produced subsidised commodities from the core they were incapable of competing with as a condition for receiving loans.23 The hegemon of the informal empire holds a monopoly or at least a majority portion of the total social capital liquidity and, by virtue of this, enjoys not only profits from financing accumulation in the rest of the world-system but also the immense political power that comes with it.
Transnational finance necessitates proxy warfare. Proxy warfare, through its indirect real enmity, creates and protects geopolitical conditions and blocs of interest that favor the informal empire of finance by preventing the eruption of conflict into international real or absolute enmity. Giovanni Arrighi has argued that the informal empire of the British necessitated an absence of international war and imperial expansion that nevertheless required an exception to the rule in its relation to India:
[T]he case of India does not contradict the informal character of English expansionism between the years 1830 and 1870. In fact, the peculiar tendencies of any period 'rest upon' those which characterized preceding epochs and are, so to speak, conserved within newly-emerging tendencies. As the typical features of nationalist imperialism were preserved within the phase of formal imperialism when circumstances required, so did the typical institutions of formal imperialism continue to be utilized in India, precisely because of its strategic military and economic position in the construction of an informal empire in the rest of the world.
The function of British imperialism in India, outlined by Arrighi, is analogous to proxy imperialism under the contemporary American informal empire.
As we saw previously with Schmitt’s figure of the partisan, the proxy or partisan is dependent upon recognition and funding from a legitimate nation. Proxies appear in the margins and cracks of the informal empire, acting as a means to indirectly release tensions and conflicts in the world-system, as well as maintain an endless source of revenue for military contractors and mercenaries in the core, a central strand of the war economy. This is the contradiction or antinomy of the defensive partisan: it seeks to achieve recognition from its opponent as an independent territory while becoming dependent upon a legitimate benefactor state, instrumentalizing the partisan enmity to its own ends. As an extension of what Schmitt noted in the relation of the partisan to nations that fund and recognize it, rather than generating a new “nomos of the earth” as Schmitt had hoped, “[proxy] wars are rather an expression of the progressive disintegration [...] of the hierarchical inter-state structures which characterized the world system for over twenty years [as of 1978]; and in all probability their effects will tend to converge with the consolidation of the informal empire of free enterprise inscribed in the policy of the hegemonic power.”25
Technological development, the State, and Specialized Social Reproduction
The maintenance of the politico-military-economic complex and the world-system it presupposes requires a public sphere of production to meet the needs of the social reproduction of the technicians, civil servants, and military officials who populate it. The contemporary public sphere of production blurs the line between traditional liberal ideological notions of public and private to the point of being indistinguishable. The reproduction of the division of labor and the corresponding differentiated social strata necessitate institutions and practices that facilitate their continued propagation.
The development of state capacity in the US prior to the New Deal was already in the process of laying the social infrastructure for the maintenance of civil servants and professionals, necessitated by the advancement and increasing complexity of capitalist production. The Morrill Act (1862), put in place by Lincoln, granted land to states for colleges for agricultural research and education. “By the end of the nineteenth century, though, the USDA was already recruiting many of its civil servants from the land-grant colleges. Indeed, characteristic career lines were beginning to carry individuals from the colleges to Experiment Stations (or Extension Service posts), then into the Department of Agriculture, and perhaps finally back to administrative positions in the colleges or in state agricultural programs.”26 The establishment of state run “experiment stations” in 1887 and their federal equivalent the extension service in 1914 finalized the reproductive circuit generating the agricultural experts and administrators of the USDA and Bureau of Agricultural Economics who would shape state policy in the coming decades and engage in the rationalization and quasiplanning of agricultural production.
The pipeline from education and accreditation to public and or private sector work to state or federal positions or even returning to education to produce the next generation of specialists and professionals and ensure the cycle continues is by no means unique to agriculture or the state policy and capacity of the US, it's a matter of necessity for the developed nations of the core. A similar reproductive circuit can be seen at work in the military industrial complex in the three channels of Coveri, Cozza, and Guarascio, and the “revolving door” of circulation between defense agencies and positions in the government. “(i) the “originary linkage" and the role of technology transfer; (ii) the platforms’ control of critical technologies and infrastructures and their role in the military-related supply chains; (iii) the peculiar position of platforms as ‘eyes and ears’ of the military apparatus.”27
In the long durée, we can see the state's capacity for directing and managing surplus and the logistical deployment of populations, beginning in the 17th century, converge with the dictates of the valorization of capital and constitute a feedback loop intensifying and reinforcing each other, reaching its peak in the 20th and 21st centuries. The organic relation between the state, the military, and capital is necessary to facilitate the development of technology at its current rate of pace and intensity. It plays a crucial role in continued economic productivity and profitability, as well as the reorganization of production to undercut global social labor and develop new modes of technologically mediated social control and surveillance. The war economy and its social infrastructure are synonymous with actually existing capitalism and the evolution of the tendency towards crisis, as well as its countervailing tendencies.
As such, an analysis of the war economy offers us a cross-section of actually existing capitalism and its contradictions, the function of finance and debt in unequal exchange, the increasingly incestuous relation between capital and the state, the evolution of the capitalist firm, the development of technology through military expenditure and its relation to the extraction of relative surplus value, and the production and maintenance of a strata of administrators and technicians and their corresponding superstructural institutions. The cracks appearing in the informal empire of the contemporary global world-system will no doubt intensify the existing dynamics and trends of military infrastructure. It remains to be seen if nuclear weapons will continue to act as a deterrent from Schmittian real enmity and maintain the precarious balance struck between limited warfare and proxy imperialism that has characterized the world social order of the post-war era.
Notes
1. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th century, Vol. 3, (New York: Harper& Row, 1984), p. 54-57.
2. Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 230-231.
3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 99.
4. Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital, (Brill, 2004), p. 210.
5. “[T]here is neither a progressive movement of differentiation of the forms, nor even a line of progress with a logic akin to a destiny. Marx does tell us that all the modes of production are historical moments, but he does not tell us that these moments descend one from the other.” Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, (London: NLB, 1970), p. 226.
6. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, (Verso, 2010), p. 587 (For the discussion of geological time p. 532-545).
7. Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, (Brill, 2010).
8. Ibid., p. 24.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 562.
10. The sections of this essay dealing with detection and deception are indebted to Forsyth's use of Peircean semiotics to explicate strategic cunning and the historical genealogy of epistemic conflict.
11. Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit, (MIT press, 2018), p. 306.
12. A Thousand Plateaus. Pg. 367-370. Following Husserl’s characterization, the anexact is “essentially and not accidentally inexact.” Deleuze characterizes dispars as the consolidation or arrangement of heterogeneous sets into “fuzzy aggregates.”
13. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, (New York: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 85-86. Real war and the shifting relation between limited and absolute warfare in Clausewitz's unfinished revisions to On War, p. 20-22.
14. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th century, Vol. 3, (New York: Harper& Row, 1984), p. 60-61.
15. Marcel van der Linden, Karl Heinz Roth, and Max Henninger, Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-first Century, (Brill, 2014), p. 69.
16. Formal and real subsumption, and the primitive accumulation they encourage and are encouraged by, occur throughout the development of capitalism in an asymptotic manner pulled along by the tendency towards a falling rate of profit, and should not be used as one-time historical periods or epochs.
17. Carl Schmitt, Theory of the partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, (Telos Press Pub., 2007), p. 67-68.
18. Ibid. p. 52-53.
19. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere of Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 11-18.
20. Ibid., p. 12.
21. Ibid.
22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 235.
23. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, (London: Verso, 2006), p. 153.
24. Giovanni Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism, (London: NLB, 1978), p. 65-66.
25. Ibid., p. 107.
26. Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), p. 255-278.
27. Coveri, Andrea; Cozza, Claudio; Guarascio, Dario (2023): Blurring boundaries: an analysis of the digital platforms-military nexus, GLO Discussion Paper, No. 1364, Global Labor Organization (GLO), Essen.