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US post-9/11 wars caused 4.5 million deaths, displaced 38-60 million people, study shows
(geopoliticaleconomy.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Bush should be in jail for Iraq.
Regarding Afghanistan, we should have focused exclusively on counter-insurgency and let the Loya Jirga do its thing without US interference.
war is just a way for businesses to shore up their falling profits. destroying another country gives victor companies chances to rebuild, which temporarily shores up profit rates because so much capital is destroyed and the creation of new capital during the windup phase actually increases the rate of profit for a little bit. there are other techniques as well. that said, the corruption was so rampant that they didn't even execute that well. either way the human costs of continuing to run capitalism as usual are staggering and wars are one of the many facets of that. all the other explanations and media outrage etc and just cover stories to make it palatable for the public, which has already believed the big lies about democracy and freedom existing under capitalism
Your argument would be very convenient for socialists or communists looking for an explanation that blames war on the rich. Unfortunately I do believe it is a gross oversimplification that is neither useful nor particularly true.
While it is true that the military industrial complex has gotten out of control in many western countries since World War II, the argument that private industry is the true beneficiary and intentional instigator of war can be readily disproved. Rather, this assumption made by many on the left is born from a partial realization of the truth that war is about resources, but the argument quickly loses the plot thereafter. War is indeed about resources, both physical and psychological in nature, or put more succinctly, war is about security. Each state actor responds and reacts as necessary in order to ensure their legitimate security needs are met.
This view was famously espoused by political scientist Kenneth Waltz when he built upon the theories of classic realists such as Machiavelli. Whereas Classic Realism suggests that war is about power, Waltz takes it one step further with Structural Realism and gives us an academic framework to understand the balance of power and the motivation behind state actors. Waltz suggests that these power shifts are the result of states reacting to perceived threats in order to ensure security. For instance, in the Structural Realist view, one could say that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to gain security in response to a perceived NATO threat. Using this theory, we could similarly suggest that the US invasion of Afghanistan was a move to obtain greater security in a region that threatened the US hegemony (though the argument starts to break down here when we distinguish between the Taliban and Al Qaeda as neo-realism does not explain the action of non-state actors).
While it would be fair to say that in many western countries, the military industrial complex has acquired a massive amount of power and control over the government, it can hardly be said that war exists only for the benefit of war profiteers who help with nation building. The most obvious proof of this is the fact that war long pre-dates crony capitalism, nation building, and the military industrial complex as a whole. Furthermore, while lobbyists do hold an incredible amount of power, they are certainly not the rulers and final decision-makers of our country. Foreign policy is set by a number of diverse lawmakers and civil servants across the political landscape, but the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, which was opposed by the Military Industrial Complex, as well as the US intervention in Somalia which was wholly a humanitarian mission, are proof that they do not make the final decisions.
Our democracy certainly has many problems. Money pollutes our campaigns, and lobbyists hold far too much power. Trump's five year lobbying ban for former US officials was a good start until he repealed it. We need more measures that limit lobbyists, and limit the ability of ANY politician or political party from totally derailing our country by putting us into unnecessary wars. We need more checks and balances in our system that prevent career politicians from fucking the rest of us over. And dammit, we definitely need to elect some better people than these jokers we've been electing lately. However; war is far more complex than you suggest.
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.