Tag: history

The Globalization of the Military-Industrial Complex

The U.S. military-industrial complex has grown over time, both domestically as a powerful lobby in U.S. politics, and globally, as a conduit for U.S. imperial expansion that has occurred in lockstep with the transnationalization of capital. I define the U.S. military-industrial complex as a constellation of powerful domestic interests within U.S. politics that includes military contractors, U.S. national security bureaucracies, and a bipartisan political establishment in both the U.S. executive branch and Congress that enables its systematic and long-term expansion. The growth of transnational capitalist investment, production and trade during the decades of neoliberal capitalism have increasingly linked the U.S. military-industrial complex toward global expansion, often supported by transnational capital—inside and outside the U.S., fusing the expansion of U.S. empire with the broader interests of transnational capitalist firms that benefit from U.S. imperial expansion.

Global networks of U.S. defense contractors, transnational capitalist investors and political elites have defined the terms of the expansion of U.S. empire. The U.S. military-industrial complex incorporates U.S.-based corporations that produce military weapons within a broader ecosystem of domestic and international alliance networks. Domestically, the complex includes a wide range of political bureaucracies, think tanks, domestic lobbies and bipartisan political support from the U.S. executive branch and Congress. Globally, the complex connects the interests of this U.S. domestic political network to transnational investment blocs that directly benefit from global militarization and the expansion of U.S. empire. As the most powerful sectors of capital have transnationalized their investment and production over the decades, the global expansion of the U.S. military-industrial complex has often functioned as a political, economic and ideological vehicle to advance the profit-making interests of transnational capitalist investment blocs.

Investment blocs refer to the political-economic networks of transnational capitalist firms, political actors, interest groups and ideologues that form across state borders in support of transnational capitalist expansion. The growth of U.S. empire is therefore intertwined with both global militarization and the transnationalization of global capital, which is enabled and promoted by the global expansion of the U.S. military-industrial complex, providing both structural and instrumental benefits to a range of global capitalist investors.

Structurally, the expansion of the military-industrial complex protects access to foreign markets within a system of transnational capitalist accumulation. Instrumentally, the global expansion of the military-industrial complex offers profit-making opportunities that include military production but also the inputs linked to military production through global supply chains and production networks. Transnational investment blocs have been central to a global expansion of the military-industrial complex as a vehicle linking the U.S. domestic interests comprising the military-industrial complex to a broader set of transnational interests that benefit from the expansion of U.S. empire.

Throughout the history of global capitalism, there have been rivalries between global capitalist firms over access to foreign markets, trade and investment. The trends of the past several decades are not a departure from the history of capitalist globalization, but instead are a specific manifestation of a long-term neoliberal reorganization of global capitalism that has its own iterations, tendencies and expressions. Corporate power within the capitalist state and through transnational organizations has been used to expand the opportunities for capitalist accumulation and profit-making.

The imperatives of global capitalist accumulation have led to a more intensive and structured system of globalized production, defined by political, economic and geostrategic competition between transnational investment blocs. Transnational investment blocs have battled over the terms of globalized production, specifically over which capitalist firms and investment blocs will be in the best position to profit from newly established and negotiated economic, political and geostrategic arrangements. Corporations have organized within transnational investment blocs to lower the costs of global accumulation and increase profits. By expanding globalized production, transnational capital has sought to reverse tendencies of the rate of protit to fall by securing more favorable global conditions for the transnationalization of capitalist production.

The U.S. military-industrial complex has been at the center of defining the geopolitics of global military, political and economic alliances between the U.S. and foreign governments, from the expansion of NATO to the U.S. militarization of the Persian Gulf to the militarization of U.S.-China relations. In each of these cases, military contractors within the U.S. military-industrial complex and transnational capitalist investors coalesced within transnational investment blocs to lobby for an expansion of global military spending. These transnational investment blocs advocated an expansion of militarization in Europe, the Persian Gulf and Asia to protect and advance the profit-making interests of sectors of transnational capital against threats from rival capitalist competitors and/or states that were perceived to be sources of instability.

Two recent articles highlight aspects of this complex. Ken Silverstein examines the expansion of the corporate intelligence firm WestExec Advisors that provides a revolving door connecting global corporate profit-making opportunities to positions within the national security bureaucracy:

https://www.washingtonbabylondc.com/p/recent-hiring-spree-westexec-advisors

Another article from the New York Times covers the staggering costs, $1.7 trillion over 30 years that the U.S. national security bureaucracy began planning in 2010, and is rapidly implementing to pay for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles, submarines, and thermonuclear warheads:

Favorite Books of 2023

This past year was rich in scholarship. A few of these books were published in 2022, but I read them this year and felt they had to be on this list since they were so compelling. That includes the first two, The Long Land War by Jo Guldi and Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff. Guldi’s book is a magisterial account of the history of social, political and economic battles over ownership of land.

Guldi provides a sweeping overview of how colonial power structures, militaries, police forces and laws imposed from above, worked to expand control of land for the few, but in turn have been consistently challenged by social movements and revolutions from below, which have attempted, sometimes successfully, but often not, to redistribute landholding from the few to the many. Guldi is meticulous in identifying the historical patterns that have helped determine the winners and losers in the “Long Land War,” and as such, produces the first book of its kind to be written on such a large and inclusive historical and geographical canvas.

Ben Tarnoff also examines structures of power and domination within the history of the Internet, focusing on how public funding was used in the U.S. to develop the architecture of the Internet, only to transfer that architecture to private sector corporations for profit. Tarnoff offers compelling examples of efforts to fight back and create public alternatives to private sector domination of the Internet.

Michael Zweig, an economist and long-time organizer and activist, has written a gem of a book: one of the best introductions on how to think about the relationship between theory, practice, and building successful social movements. Instead of getting caught up in the counterproductive exercise of separating class from race and gender, Zweig articulates what should be a common sense notion for people on the left: advancements toward greater equality in each and all of these areas: class, race and gender, should be applauded. Zweig provides a useful roadmap of how to conceptualize the fight for social justice in a way that should be of use for a wide range of social justice movements.

Quinn Slobodian, whose previous book The Globalists tracked the origins of neoliberal ideology from the 1920s and 1930s to the present, examines how libertarians, especially anarcho-capitalists, have championed special economic zones as areas of uber-privilege for capitalist owners—free of any public accountability or democratic control. Within these zones, which have proliferated under neoliberal global capitalism, capitalist ownership enclaves determine winners and losers through monetary exchange, which then sorts out the successful from the unsuccessful based on private capitalist accumulation, absent intermediaries, other than—and this is an important caveat: a militarized and authoritarian state structure that serves to protect wealth from democratic politics. It’s an eye-opening account of the marriage between libertarian ideology and authoritarianism.

The other books on my list cover a wide range of provocative topics in a thoughtful and informed way. Christina Gerhardt offers a compelling account of the impact of climate change from the bottom up, profiling the islands that are slowly and steadily disappearing through the eyes and minds of islanders themselves. Malcom Harris examines the historical evolution of Silicon Valley, especially its connections to systemic racism and eugenics, the military-industrial complex, corporate welfare and corporate power blocs that have used their privilege to monopolize their positions in contemporary capitalism. Antony Loewenstein traces the history of the Israeli state from a militarized domestic apartheid to a global seller of weapons to dictatorships around the world. Gary Anderson has edited an important collection of articles showing how the creation and expansion of NATO has always been firmly grounded in the interests of dominant corporations and states, not so much in the interests of the public.

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire have written a must-read account of the corporate forces that have engaged in a decades long push to privatize public schools in the U.S. and the consequences of these policies, as well as the efforts to fight back. Will Bunch identifies the corporatization of universities, with less public funding, rising tuition and dependence on large-scale student debt, as systemic drivers of inequality in the U.S.

Kerry Howley in Bottoms Up examines the growing infrastructure of the U.S. surveillance state, especially its lack of accountability and its treatment of whistleblowers. Joe Posnanski is a beautiful writer of baseball history and his new book captures many of the joys of fandom.

Victor Lavalle’s Lone Women is a wonderful narrative that combines science fiction with social history in its story of an African-American woman homesteading from California to Montana in the early 20th century in search of a new beginning, but also in possession of both a curse and a revenge for wrongs committed in the past. Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi wrote a science fiction novel about The Centre, a language institute that is capable of training individuals to speak any foreign language fluently within just a couple of weeks, but at a significant price.

Steven Conn’s Lies of the Land is a much-needed corrective to simplistic tropes about rural America. Conn argues that the same corporations that have dominated urban areas also prevail in rural America, from military-industrial corporations, retail chains, extractive industries, and manufacturing plants. There is a class structure here from which the politics follow, rather than just a disgruntled angry base that votes for Donald Trump. Naomi Klein has written one of her best books that captures the larger socioeconomic and political implications of identity creation, re-creation and marketing through social media, led by Klein’s own experience of being confused for Naomi Wolf, a deep state conspiracist of the far right. Gilbert Achcar has published a collection of his excellent and perceptive essays on the ways that the U.S. has used the post-Cold War period to entrench a set of expansive, militaristic policies in search of new enemies. Costas Lapavitsas has edited a book, The State of Capitalism, that has several worthwhile contributions useful for understanding trends in global corporate power. Evan Drellich examines the ethical bankruptcy of major league baseball’s Houston Astros by locating their cheating scandal within a larger use of baseball analytics in which winning becomes the justification for scrapping morality, not that this is terribly new or novel, but a compelling read.