Who's talking about conscious or even unconscious motivation as much as systematic tendencies and effects? KM is the _last_ guy to be interested in motivation. "I in no sense paint the capitalist coluer de rose, but in this work (Capital I) he is merely a bearer of social relation." (Close paraphrase.
I think Charles' account is too reductionist as an explanation of either the causes or the effects/function of war and crises. Wars start for lots of reasons. I think on broad strokes, that Lenin got the ultimate explanation of the cause of WWI right (roughly, competition for colonies between latecomers and early risers); Mandel tried to extend that to WWII while admitting that there was a lot more going on. But the "realists" in IR have a point that many wars are caused by struggles for military rather tan economic dominance (a big factor in the Nazi invasion of Western Europe), or to pre-empt perceived potential aggressors -- as much a cause of the Nazi war against the USSR as the stated desire for Lebensraum and slave labor, and certainly Japan's primary motivation in attacking the US.
In the case of WWI and especially WWII there was hardly an excess of unrealized value that had to be destroyed to kick-start the economy; with WWII, quite the opposite. Neither war particular involved "creative" destruction, unless you count the tank, poison gas, and trench warfare (the last two of two of which were abandoned) as innovations. There were more spinoffs (radar, sonar, acceleration of computer technology, nuclear energy for power and other stuff, rockets, jets) that came out of WWII, but there would have been lots cheaper ways to develop all of that, and most of it (computers, rockets, even nuclear technologies) that were already in the pipeline.
WWII took the US out of depression, but that's not why we got involved; we were actually attacked and subject in the case of Germany to a formal declaration of war, for some incredibly stupid Hitlerian motive, more deeply, this was a was great powers war against military opponents -- the war in the Pacific having rather more of an element of economic struggle for colonial dominance. The destruction of the German, Japanese, and Russian economies in the war probably accidentally contributed to postwar creativity in making them build new industrial bases, but that wasn't a cause of the war either, just an effect.
And many of the post WWII post-colonial wars often lacked any rational explanation. The Pentagon hired teams of analysts to figure out Why We Were In Vietnam, and the product -- the Pentagon Papers -- concludes, who fuck knows? The Korean War? A proxy war in a classic IR realist great power struggle. (_Maybe_ you could look at Vietnam like that, but that's not what explains the escalation in '65, damned if I know what does. Algeria? Kenya? Stupidities, destructive to all concerned. Obviously so and so regarded by all intelligent observers at the time. Iraq? Well, it has something to do with oil, but what? And none of these wars involved destruction of oversupply.
Economic crisis theory is a very vexed subject and I'll just say I follow Brenner, pretty much, which is a sort of creative destruction view, I guess, but less wrt to oversupply than to the inability of forerunners to recoup capital investment costs in now antiquated productive assets -- basically the mechanisms of Marx's FROP without the LTV. Brenner might regard that as a total mischaracterization of his view.
Late, I'm procrastinating, work to do.
--- On Mon, 3/9/09, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] it's over - now the destruction really begins
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, March 9, 2009, 8:36 PM
> I doubt any of this ever entered Hitler's head. Anyway,
> didn't Britain and the US and USSR and France try to
> avoid the war as much as possible? Chamberlain wasn't
> thinking "yeah, war! now we get to destroy stuff!"
>
> --- On Mon, 3/9/09, Charles Brown
> <cdb1003 at prodigy.net> wrote:
>
> > From: Charles Brown <cdb1003 at prodigy.net>
> > Subject: [lbo-talk] it's over - now the
> destruction really begins
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > Date: Monday, March 9, 2009, 9:26 PM
> > CB: Maybe the idea is that war can be one form
> > of creative destruction and depression
> > is another; not so much that depression
> > causes war ? A depression is a
> > devalorization itself.
> > Great Depression was devalorization.
> > WWII was revalorization for the US,
> > and further devalorization (creative destruction)
> > for Europe.
> >
> > War also is a way to pit the workers
> > of different nations against each
> > other to avoid revolution within a nation.
> > Thus the Bolsheviks opposed the war
> > adamently, and criticized the German
> > Social Democrats.
> > It back fired in Russia in WWI 'cause
> > they had Bolsheviks.
> > US Cold War and hot wars in
> > the same period had this motive
> > especially.
> >
> > Also, post WWII imperialist wars were to
> > open markets or reopen markets in
> > former colonies and semi-colonies.
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
>
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