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Imperialism and the Logic of War
Making
By Joseph T. Salerno
This is a
revised version of a talk given October 28th at this year's Mises Institute
Supporter's Summit, "Imperialism:
Enemy of Freedom." The original talk, "Taxation,
Inflation, and War" is available in MP3 audio from Mises
Media. Commentaries
on war stretching back more than two millennia to the Peloponnesian Wars have
enshrouded the fundamental causes of war in an almost impenetrable fog of
myths, fallacies, and outright lies. In most studies, war is generally
portrayed as the inevitable outcome of either complex historical forces or
accidental circumstances generally beyond the understanding or control of the
human combatants. Fortunately,
there exists a science of human action that is applicable to all purposeful
activities. This science is referred to as "praxeology." Although
economics is its most developed branch, the basic principles of this science
can also be applied to analyzing violent action including warfare. Thus Murray
Rothbard wrote: The rest of
praxeology [besides economics] is an unexplored area. Attempts have been made
to formulate a logical theory of war and violent action, and violence in the
form of government has been treated by political philosophy and by praxeology
in tracing the effects of violent intervention in the free market.[1] As Rothbard
suggested, what we might call the "Logic of War Making" is a
relatively undeveloped area of the science of human action. Its elaboration is
therefore especially necessary if we are to dispel the mythology of war and
elucidate its true origin and character. The basic axiom of this praxeological
discipline is that war is the objective outcome of the human endeavor of war
making. As a human
endeavor like any other, war making is the product of reason, purpose and
choice. Therefore a proper analysis of war must take into account the goals of the
war makers, the means at their disposal, the benefits they anticipate from the
war and the costs they expect to incur in executing it. It also must
distinguish in a general way between the individual beneficiaries and victims
of war. These victims include not only the vanquished group of war makers and
those who reside in the territory they control but especially the productive
inhabitants of the region controlled by the victorious organization of war
makers. At this point it
is necessary to define war and distinguish it from other forms of inter-human
violence in order to circumscribe the bounds of the logic of war making within
the general praxeological system. For not all violent conflict constitutes war
making. War is here defined as violent interaction between two groups of
humans, one or both of which is a state. We adopt the definition of the state
given by the anthropologist and historian of primitive warfare, Lawrence H.
Keeley: States are
political organizations [that] have a central government empowered to collect
taxes, draft labor for public works or war, decree laws, and physically enforce
those laws. Essentially states are class-stratified political units that
maintain a "monopoly of deadly force" - a monopoly institutionalized as
permanent police and military forces.[2] Pre-civilized
social groups such as bands, tribes and even chiefdoms are not states because,
according to Keeley, "a chief, unlike a king, does not have the power to
coerce people into obedience physically," instead employing economic means
or exploiting a belief in magic to enforce his decrees.[3]
Although Keeley refers to "pre-state warfare" or "primitive
war," for the purposes of praxeological analysis, we restrict the term the
"war" to violent conflicts involving at least one state.
Combat between
looser social groupings was most commonly motivated by vengeance for previous
homicides or economic issues, especially access to natural resources and crude
capital goods. For example in Minnesota the Chippewa and Dakota Sioux tribes
battled one another for over 150 years over access to hunting territories and
wild rice fields, while tribes in the Pacific Northwest frequently fought for
frontage on the ocean and rivers giving access to the salmon run.[4]
Anthropological studies show that, while most of these conflicts involved
savage violence and extreme cruelty, often resulting in the expropriation,
enslavement, expulsion or annihilation of the vanquished tribe, their purpose
was never to establish a hegemonic relationship and exact regular tribute from
the foe. As Kelley explains, "Polities that lack the physical power to
subjugate their own populations or to extract involuntary tribute or taxes from
them are extremely unlikely to make war against others for these purposes,
since they lack the institutional and administrative means to convert victory into
hegemony or taxation."[5]
Thus, while both
non-state social groups and states have historically engaged in the violent
annexation of territories to acquire natural resources, only states possess the
institutional means necessary to pursue a policy of imperialism i.e., the
ongoing subjugation and economic exploitation of other peoples. Imperialist
wars waged by states in every epoch of history are not accidental; they are the
outcome of the powerful tendency to war making inherent in the very nature of
the state. All governments
past and present, regardless of their formal organization, involve the rule of
the many by the few. In other words, all governments are fundamentally
oligarchic. The reasons are twofold. First, governments are nonproductive
organizations and can only subsist by extracting goods and services from the
productive class in their territorial domain. Thus the ruling class must remain
a minority of the population if they are to continually extract resources from
their subjects or citizens. Genuine "majority rule" on a permanent
basis is impossible because it would result in an economic collapse as the
tribute or taxes expropriated by the more numerous rulers deprived the minority
engaged in peaceful productive activities of the resources needed to sustain
and reproduce itself. Majority rule would therefore eventually bring about a
violent conflict between factions of the previous ruling class, which would
terminate with one group establishing oligarchic rule and economically
exploiting its former confederates. The second
factor that renders oligarchic rule practically inevitable is related to the
law of comparative advantage. The tendency toward division of labor and
specialization based on the unequal endowment of skills pervades all sectors of
human endeavor. Just as a small segment of the population is adept at playing
professional football or dispensing financial advice, so a tiny fraction of the
population tends to excel at wielding coercive power. As one writer summed up
this Iron Law of Oligarchy: "[In] all human groups at all times there are
the few who rule and the many who are ruled."[6] The inherently
nonproductive and oligarchic nature of government thus ensures that all nations
under political rule are divided into two classes: a productive class and a
parasitic class or, in the apt terminology of the American political theorist
John C. Calhoun, "taxpayers" and "tax-consumers."[7] The king and his
court, elected politicians and their bureaucratic and special-interest allies,
the dictator and his party apparatchiks - these are historically the
tax-consumers and, not coincidentally, the war makers. War has a number of
advantages for the ruling class. First and foremost, war against a foreign
enemy obscures the class conflict that is going on domestically in which the
minority ruling class coercively siphons off the resources and lowers the
living standards of the majority of the population, who produce and pay taxes.
Convinced that their lives and property are being secured against a foreign
threat, the exploited taxpayers develop a "false consciousness" of
political and economic solidarity with their domestic rulers. An imperialist
war against a weak foreign state, e.g., Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Iran, etc. is especially enticing to the ruling class of a
powerful nation such as the United States because it minimizes the cost of
losing the war and being displaced by domestic revolution or by the rulers of
the victorious foreign state.
A second
advantage of war is that it provides the ruling class with an extraordinary
opportunity to intensify its economic exploitation of the domestic producers
through emergency war taxes, monetary inflation, conscripted labor, and the
like. The productive class generally succumbs to these increased depredations
on its income and wealth with some grumbling but little real resistance because
it is persuaded that its interests are one with the war makers. Also, in the
short run at least, modern war appears to bring prosperity to much of the
civilian population because it is financed in large part by money creation. We thus arrive
at a universal, praxeological truth about war. War is the outcome of class
conflict inherent in the political relationship - the relationship between
ruler and ruled, parasite and producer, tax-consumer and taxpayer. The
parasitic class makes war with purpose and deliberation in order to conceal and
ratchet up their exploitation of the much larger productive class. It may also
resort to war making to suppress growing dissension among members of the
productive class (libertarians, anarchists, etc.) who have become aware of the
fundamentally exploitative nature of the political relationship and become a
greater threat to propagate this insight to the masses as the means of
communication become cheaper and more accessible, e.g., desktop publishing, AM
radio, cable television, the Internet, etc. Furthermore, the conflict between
ruler and ruled is a permanent condition. This truth is reflected - perhaps
half consciously - in the old saying that equates death and taxes as the two
unavoidable features of the human condition. Thus, a permanent
state of war or preparedness for war is optimal from the point of view of the
ruling elite, especially one that controls a large and powerful state. Take the
current US government as an example. It rules over a relatively populous,
wealthy, and progressive economy from which it can extract ever larger boodles
of loot without destroying the productive class. Nevertheless, it is subject to
the real and abiding fear that sooner or later productive Americans will come
to recognize the continually increasing burden of taxation, inflation, and
regulation for what it really is - naked exploitation. So the US government,
the most powerful mega-state in history, is driven by the very logic of the
political relationship to pursue a policy of permanent war. From "The
War to Make the World Safe for Democracy" to "The War to End All
Wars" to "The Cold War" and on to the current "War on
Terror," the wars fought by US rulers in the twentieth century have
progressed from episodic wars restricted to well-defined theaters and enemies
to a war without spatial or temporal bounds against an incorporeal enemy named
"Terror." A more appropriate name for this neoconservative-contrived
war would involve a simple change in the preposition to a "War of
Terror" - because the American state is terrified of productive,
work-a-day Americans, who may someday awaken and put an end to its massive
predations on their lives and property and maybe to the American ruling class
itself. In the meantime,
the War on Terror is an open-ended imperialist war the likes of which were
undreamt of by infamous war makers of yore from the Roman patricians to German
National Socialists. The economist Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few
non-Marxists to grasp that the primary stimulus for imperialist war is the
inescapable clash of interests between rulers and ruled. Taking an early
mega-state, Imperial Rome, as his example, Schumpeter wrote: Here is the
classic example . of that policy which pretends to aspire to peace but
unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the
policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world
where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If
the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had
no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to
contrive such an interest - why, then it was national honor that had been
insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was
always being attacked by evil minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing
space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly
Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were
enemies who only waited to fall upon the Roman people. [No] attempt [can] be
made to comprehend these wars of conquest from the point of view of concrete
objectives.. Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of
domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain.. Owing to its
peculiar position as the democratic puppet of ambitious politicians and as the
mouthpiece of a popular will inspired by the rulers [the Roman proletariat] did
indeed get the benefit of the [war] booty. So long as there was good reason to maintain
the fiction that the population of Rome constituted the Roman people and could
decide the destinies of the empire, much did depend on its good temper.. But
again, the very existence, in such large numbers, of this proletariat, as well
as its political importance, was the consequence of a social process that also
explains the policy of conquest. For this was the causal connection: The
occupation of public land and the robbery of peasant land formed the basis of a
system of large estates, operating extensively and with slave labor. At the
same time the displaced peasants streamed into the city and the soldiers
remained landless - hence the war policy. The latifundian
landowners were, of course, deeply interested in waging war.. . The alternative
to war was agrarian reform. The landed aristocracy could counter the perpetual
threat of revolution only with the glory of victorious leadership. [I]t was an
aristocracy of landlords, large-scale agricultural entrepreneurs, born of
struggle against their own people. It rested solely on control of the state
machine. Its only safeguard lay in national glory.. An unstable social
structure of this kind merely creates a general disposition to watch for
pretexts for war - often held to be adequate with entire good faith - and to
turn to questions of foreign policy whenever the discussion of social problems
grew too troublesome for comfort. The ruling class was always inclined to
declare that the country was in danger, when it really was only class interests
that were threatened. This lengthy
quotation from Schumpeter vividly describes how the expropriation of peasants
by the ruling aristocracy created a permanent and irreparable class division in
Roman society that led to a policy of unrestrained imperialism and perpetual
war. This policy was designed to submerge beneath a tide of national glory and
war booty the deep-seated conflict of interests between expropriated
proletarians and landed aristocracy.
Schumpeter's
analysis explains the particularly strong propensity of democratic states to
engage in imperialist war making and why the Age of Democracy has coincided
with the Age of Imperialism. The term "democratic" is here being used
in the broad sense that includes "totalitarian democracies"
controlled by "parties" such as the Nationalist Socialist Workers
Party in Germany and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. These political
parties, as opposed to purely ideological movements, came into being during the
age of nationalist mass democracy that dawned in the late nineteenth century.[8]
Because the masses
in a democratic polity are deeply imbued with the ideology of egalitarianism
and the myth of majority rule, the ruling elites who control and benefit from
the state recognize the utmost importance of concealing its oligarchic and
exploitative nature from the masses. Continual war making against foreign
enemies is a perfect way to disguise the naked clash of interests between the
taxpaying and tax-consuming classes. In this vein, it
is noteworthy that the first instance of sustained global imperialism in the
Western world was the democratic city-state of Athens. Victor Davis Hanson has
emphasized this in his path-breaking work on the Peloponnesian War. Hanson
writes: "Athenianism"
was the Western world's first example of globalization. There was a special
word of sorts for Athenian expansionism in the Greek language, attikizô,
"to Atticize," to become like or join the Athenians.[9] By the standards
of the time, the expanse of the Athenian empire was breath-taking. By the
outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian empire had swelled to
"nearly two hundred states run by seven hundred imperial overseers."
According to Hanson, "To maintain such an empire, in the fifth century
[B.C.] Athens had fought three out of every four years, a remarkable record of
constant mobilization, unrivaled even in modern times."[10]
Moreover, unlike its openly oligarchic rival Sparta who led a loose voluntary
coalition of states that genuinely feared a "proselytizing and
expansionary" Athenian democracy, Athens unilaterally formulated and
imposed a single strategy on its imperial subject-states and allies.[11]
Hanson does not
shrink from noting the parallels between the imperialism of ancient Athens and
the modern US mega-state, writing: Although
Americans offer the world a radically egalitarian popular culture and, more
recently, in a very Athenian mood, have sought to remove oligarchs and impose
democracy - in Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq - enemies, allies,
and neutrals alike are not so impressed. They understandably fear American
power and intentions while our successive governments, in the manner of
confident and proud Athenians, assure them of our morality and selflessness.
Military power and idealism about bringing perceived civilization to others are
a prescription for conflict in any age - and no ancient state made war more
often than did fifth-century imperial Athens.[12] Severing
The Sinews of Imperialist War Ernest Hemingway
once wrote, "The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials,
maintenance (food) and morale."[13]
In a modern market economy, Hemingway's five M's, in practice, boil down to
one: money. A political oligarchy that rules and exploits a large and
productive economy need only get its hands on sufficient monetary funds in order
to obtain the men, material, and maintenance necessary to carry out its war
plans. Furthermore, an ever expanding supply of money and credit also boosts
the morale of the civilian population by distorting economic calculation and
creating the temporary illusion that war brings prosperity. Thus Cicero spoke
more truly when he said, "The sinews of war, a limitless supply of
money."[14]
Explaining the
connection between monetary inflation and civilian morale during wartime, Mises
wrote in 1919: In every great
war monetary calculation was disrupted by inflation.. The economic behavior of
the belligerents was thereby led astray; the true consequences of the war were
removed from their view. One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an
indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on
welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would
set in much earlier.[15]
However, the
initial stages of war inflation must eventually give way to crisis and
depression. The reason is that war entails a massive consumption of capital
because of the diversion of real resources from production for present and
especially future civilian needs - that is, the maintenance and replacement of
capital goods - to production for immediate military purposes. The productive
class only becomes aware of the enormous destruction of its real income and
wealth when inflation ceases and the ensuing crisis and recession reveal the
true costs of the war, aside from its physical destruction of lives and
property.[16]
At this point the bitterly disillusioned and demoralized producers begin to
realize that their own interests are not identical with those of their
imperialist rulers.
In the two World
Wars of the twentieth century the war makers on both sides were able to
forestall this day of reckoning by abrogating the freedom to produce and
exchange and instituting a more or less thoroughgoing command economy featuring
pervasive price controls and central direction of production and distribution
by legal fiat.[17]
Things are different in contemporary imperialist wars, such as those fought by
the United States since the end of the Cold War. The reason is that the vast
disparity in military and economic power between the imperial state and the
state it wishes to subjugate obviates recourse to massive monetary expansion. For example, the
current US war on Iraq is estimated to have cost roughly $346 billion from its
inception in 2003 until the present.[18]
During this time, the change in the Adjusted Monetary Base (MB), which is
completely controlled by the Fed and represents the "seigniorage" or
inflation tax that the government realizes from money creation, has been about
$137 billion. But the rate of growth of MB has steadily declined from mid-2002
from 10 percent to below 5 percent currently. This is reflected in a decline in
the rates of growth of broader monetary aggregates such as MZM, M2, and M3. Yet
at the same time, US Federal Government debt has ballooned by nearly $2
trillion since March 2003, expanding the total debt accumulated since the
inception of the American Republic by over 30 percent! How has this flood of
new debt been financed if not by money creation? The answer is by
borrowing from foreigners. In March 2003, foreign investors held about $1,286.3
billion of Federal government debt. By June 2006, foreign investors were
holding $2091.7 billion of the debt, an increase of $805.4 billion or over 40
percent of the increase of the total debt since March 2003.[19]
In other words, foreigners have by and large financed the US imperialist
adventure in Iraq, greatly mitigating the economic burden of the war borne by
US taxpayers and consumers - at least until foreigners refuse to absorb any
more US debt. At this point increased taxation and more rapid money creation
must be resorted to in continuing to finance the war as well as the interest
payments on the outstanding debt. In the meantime,
an interesting issue to contemplate is whether an aroused and disgruntled
taxpaying class has any means at its disposal short of violent revolution for
putting an end to the never-ending series of imperialist wars sucking the
lifeblood (accumulated capital) out of the economy and consuming its real
wealth and income. Vladimir Lenin's answer was, "[C]onvert the imperialist
war into a civil war; all consistently waged class struggles in wartime and all
seriously conducted 'mass-action' tactics inevitably lead to this."[20]
The logic of war making in conjunction with its cognate praxeological
discipline, economics, reveals that Lenin's dictum is indeed practicable and
that there are a number of peaceful tactics available to the productive masses
that strike directly at the sinews of the imperialist war machine. The first is the
general strike, an Atlas Shrugged scenario writ large, in which the
producers go on strike for lengthy periods of time and live off their accumulated
savings. This chokes off the current taxes that pay for the war as well as the
military supplies needed to execute it. Mass boycotts of goods and services
produced by enterprises directly profiting from the war as well as central
government enterprises such as the post office strike directly at the revenues
of the tax-consuming class. So do economic boycotts of the mass media,
including establishment newspapers and periodicals and the major television
broadcast networks. In the contemporary United States, the latter, in
particular, are little more than legally licensed cartelists spewing forth
government war propaganda. Withdrawing all
bank deposits and using only cash or barter arrangements in exchange would
cause the fractional-reserve banking system to grind to a halt for a lengthy
period of time as the monetary authorities would have to freeze all bank
accounts until sufficient currency was printed and delivered to banks
throughout the country. This would take months and would completely disrupt the
monetary and financial system in the meanwhile, forcing the government to
resort to the archaic and costly technique of literally printing up and
shipping new currency to pay for its war expenditures.[21]
Selling government bonds en masse causing their prices to plunge would wreak
havoc with the balance sheets of banks and other financial institutions and
make it extremely difficult for the government to issue war debt.
These
mass-action tactics would have a number of additional and very important
benefits. First, they would cause a deep rift in the ruling class, which, in a
plutocratic democracy such as the United States, is by no means monolithic
because it includes significant elements of the big business and finance
establishment that are competing with one another for subsidies and special
legal privileges from the state. This uneasy
coalition of political interests can be readily destabilized by the radical
change in the pattern of benefits and costs brought about by mass-action
tactics that unevenly affect the revenues and subsidies of politically
connected business firms. Thus, those industrial firms and financial
institutions suffering significant hardships from these tactics would turn
against the war, thereby shrinking and weakening the ruling class. With the prospect
of civil war with its former allies looming, those in control of the state
apparatus would have a strong incentive to halt its war-making activities. Second, other
business firms completely outside the ambit of the tax-consuming,
government-industrial complex - e.g., McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, etc. -
would also suffer economic losses as a result of the general strike and
financial collapse, giving them an incentive to ally themselves with the
renegade firms that were formerly members of the political establishment. This
newly emergent anti-state coalition of business organizations could also
peacefully strike at the enfeebled and demoralized imperial state by refusing
to do business with it and threatening to blacklist individual bureaucrats and
politicians as candidates for the anticipated lucrative jobs in the private
sector. Finally, the
anti-imperialist alliance of large and powerful business interests brought into
existence by the general strike and other peaceful mass-action economic tactics
would naturally, if unintentionally, interpose itself as a protective shield
between the economically debilitated but still dangerous and vindictive state
and the individual dissidents of the taxpaying class. The
praxeological method, which has been used successfully to elaborate the laws of
economics, is also capable of yielding a systematic body of truths when applied
to the analysis of war. Although the logic of war making has yet to be fully
elaborated, it is clear that this praxeological sub-discipline is useful in
dispelling the long entrenched myths and fallacies about war. The logic of war
making also provides knowledge of the means to those whose goal, for
ideological or economic reasons, is to bring about the cessation of a war. |
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