War is about the rate of profit decreasing and is one of the premier ways of conterveiling that decrease. Rate of profit is total surplus value (which is the amount of labor that the worker does not get paid for, which the capitalist pockets in order to reinvest in his business) divided over the cost of constant capital ( machines and commodites that go into production ) + the cost of labor (also called variable capital). ( r = s/ (c + v) ) When taken on national scale or on an industry scale or even on a global scale, you can see that the overwhelming tendency is for this value to decrease. Carchedi and Roberts have rather good empirical confirmation of this in their work, as do many other economists who study this tendency. Marx is the first one to come up with this, though the labor theory of value had been around previous to him in various unfinished forms.
The tendency of this ratio to decrease is due to the tendency of capitalism to, over time, invest more and more in labor-saving capital as a cost cutting measure to remain competitive and corner the market while overproducing commodities until it reaches limit of realizing profit while at the same time reducing its reliance on workers (labor) by laying people off and keeping fewer workers around to work the more advanced means of production. Initially capital is in an ascendant phase but overtime all of capital reaches this crisis.
This very tendency is what causes capitalist global crisis. Capitalist crisis is what causes global imperialist conflicts and wars. Iraq and Afghanistan are just examples.
What you are referring to in terms of military industrial complex and resource wars is simply the class of business owners employing some counterveiling tendencies to reverse the trend temporarily. Cheap resource extraction actually decreaces the value of C in the formula S/(C+V), so this increases the rate of profit. Making workers desperate for work, such as what’s happening in Ukraine, due to the war, decreases V without decreasing S, which also increases the rate of profit. Destroying an entire country destroys massive amounts of both C and V and allows entire industries to be started anew, which restarts the accumulation cycle in that region to its starting point, at which point it can enjoy a certain limited period of increasing rates of profit before the inevitable decrease.
Checks and balances and other half measures won’t do. The capitalist revolution overthrew kings and queens and got rid of feudalism but it benefited overwhelmingly the class of business owners and not anyone else. To get the rest of the classes to go along with them, they came up with fake shams like the Constitution and business-friendly philosophers came up with nonsense like the bill of rights. You should ask yourself whose rights? Clearly of those that control business, those who won the borgeois revolution. Those same people who, in the case of the US, fought to not pay taxes and own slaves, the same ones that did not allow regular working people to even vote without owning property. Its clearly a system for owners by owners with hogwash and bullshit for everyone else.
If we want a planet that will not be destroyed by this crashing system that only benefits a rather miniscule portion of the planet we (workers) will sieze control through revolution and reorganize society to benefit all from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. This will involve great deals of class consciousness as well as class based violence and terror in the period before establishing a dictatorship of the workers and solidifying the power of the workers councils. After that we will finally have the freedom necessary to reorganize production into a new mode of production that does not involve wage labor, commodities or classes, with the help of highly advanced means of production and advanced planning techniques as well as a culture born from class conscious struggle and the creativity of the working masses that will replace the current superstructure.
Naturally, ours is a fighting ideology but not one dedicated to shoring up the profits of a tiny minority of sick bastards.
War is about the rate of profit decreasing and is one of the premier ways of conterveiling that decrease. Rate of profit is total surplus value (which is the amount of labor that the worker does not get paid for, which the capitalist pockets in order to reinvest in his business) divided over the cost of constant capital ( machines and commodites that go into production ) + the cost of labor (also called variable capital). ( r = s/ (c + v) ) When taken on national scale or on an industry scale or even on a global scale, you can see that the overwhelming tendency is for this value to decrease. Carchedi and Roberts have rather good empirical confirmation of this in their work, as do many other economists who study this tendency. Marx is the first one to come up with this, though the labor theory of value had been around previous to him in various unfinished forms.
The tendency of this ratio to decrease is due to the tendency of capitalism to, over time, invest more and more in labor-saving capital as a cost cutting measure to remain competitive and corner the market while overproducing commodities until it reaches limit of realizing profit while at the same time reducing its reliance on workers (labor) by laying people off and keeping fewer workers around to work the more advanced means of production. Initially capital is in an ascendant phase but overtime all of capital reaches this crisis.
This very tendency is what causes capitalist global crisis. Capitalist crisis is what causes global imperialist conflicts and wars. Iraq and Afghanistan are just examples.
What you are referring to in terms of military industrial complex and resource wars is simply the class of business owners employing some counterveiling tendencies to reverse the trend temporarily. Cheap resource extraction actually decreaces the value of C in the formula S/(C+V), so this increases the rate of profit. Making workers desperate for work, such as what’s happening in Ukraine, due to the war, decreases V without decreasing S, which also increases the rate of profit. Destroying an entire country destroys massive amounts of both C and V and allows entire industries to be started anew, which restarts the accumulation cycle in that region to its starting point, at which point it can enjoy a certain limited period of increasing rates of profit before the inevitable decrease.
Checks and balances and other half measures won’t do. The capitalist revolution overthrew kings and queens and got rid of feudalism but it benefited overwhelmingly the class of business owners and not anyone else. To get the rest of the classes to go along with them, they came up with fake shams like the Constitution and business-friendly philosophers came up with nonsense like the bill of rights. You should ask yourself whose rights? Clearly of those that control business, those who won the borgeois revolution. Those same people who, in the case of the US, fought to not pay taxes and own slaves, the same ones that did not allow regular working people to even vote without owning property. Its clearly a system for owners by owners with hogwash and bullshit for everyone else.
If we want a planet that will not be destroyed by this crashing system that only benefits a rather miniscule portion of the planet we (workers) will sieze control through revolution and reorganize society to benefit all from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. This will involve great deals of class consciousness as well as class based violence and terror in the period before establishing a dictatorship of the workers and solidifying the power of the workers councils. After that we will finally have the freedom necessary to reorganize production into a new mode of production that does not involve wage labor, commodities or classes, with the help of highly advanced means of production and advanced planning techniques as well as a culture born from class conscious struggle and the creativity of the working masses that will replace the current superstructure.
Naturally, ours is a fighting ideology but not one dedicated to shoring up the profits of a tiny minority of sick bastards.