>>> Max Sawicky <sawicky at epinet.org> 03/29/99 01:02PM >>
Military conflicts are not
necessarily the best way to get more funds allocated to hardware
R&D. In fact, the debate for more hardware/R&D had already been
decided before the Kosovo affair. By supporting anti-missile
defense, Clinton and the Democrats already gave the contractors
all they could have asked for. By encouraging Serbian terrorism,
in fact, this intervention threatens to take the focus away from
the mythical missile threat to the more likely one, relatively
speaking, of two guys in a pickup truck, thereby sapping the
drive to finance the fancy hardware.
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Charles: Perhaps not Keynesianism, but part of capitalist war economic policy .Without any military conflicts for the U.S. , the rationale for military spending at all is lessened, especially with the U.S. at overkill military preparation level for all its post-Cold War opponents. If there are no "dangerous" people like Saddam or Milosevic in the world in some hazy sense in general, if the world is not now and in the future a dangerous place, then in common sense the demand for the products of the merchants of death are undermined, especially with all the U.S. super weapons left over from the arms race against the Soviet Union. The logic of the U.S. military industrial complex demands more than ever since WWII that the U.S.propaganda promote the myth of new little Hitlers around the world.
In general, capitalism still needs the _institution_ of war, not just this war. War is a major way that capitalism gets rid of capital in crises. This war is necessary as contributing to the perpetuation of the rationale for the institution of war, even if in itself the war does not substantially fulfill directly the periodic creative destruction of capital.
This is good old capitalist imperialist militarism, with its irrationality more evident because we are in such a decadent and late phase of capitalism, and the unexpected expiration of the Soviet Union, its excuse for the scale of the U.S. military budget.
Charles Brown