Michael Kidron

Surfing the net I was reminded of Michael Kidron’s, The Permanent Arms Economy (1968)


We all deplore the UK (and others) exporting arms to Saudi Arabia (and elsewhere) when we know damn well that they are going to use them to terrorize the civilian population, and we hope that public indignation might make the government more careful about what it sells to whom.


But such sales are not just an error of judgement by government, they are systematically imposed by the way in which capitalism works. 


It all starts from the observation that the working population can never realize the full value of the outputs that they themselves generate in the workplace (Rosa Luxemburg amongst others).  This is because the value of the outputs is made up of the wages paid to the workers plus the surplus appropriated by the enterprise; so the wages of the workers can only realize the value of a part of the outputs. 


There are a number of ways in which the shortfall can be made good; by selling the goods overseas (imperialism); by building more and newer plant and machinery - the workers so employed are being paid wages but not producing commodities that need to be bought by the other workers; by workers employed by the government to build the national infrastructure; by workers employed in the production of luxuries for the capitalists; by providing credit that allows the value of outputs to be realized today but paid for tomorrow; and by the massive expenditure of armaments, that also are not produced for consumption.


But all of these (and others) have to be working at full stretch if there is not to be a shortfall in the purchasing power to necessary to realize the value of consumer products.


The form in which this is expressed in ordinary everyday reporting and debate, is that the armaments industry is “vital to the health of the economy”. If we don’t export guided bombs to the Saudis, the factory will close, thousands of workers will get laid off, there is that much less purchasing power being generated in the economy, other firms go bankrupt, a full scale depression is triggered, and the capitalist economy grinds to a halt as in The Thirties.


The other form in which this conundrum finds its expression is in the innumerable wars it generates. If countries manufacture and buy arms, there is a great temptation to use them 

If the Burmese get fed up with ethnic minorities they can send in the tanks and helicopter gun ships; so equally if the Ethiopians get fed up with the Eriteans; and ditto with the Tigrayans; similarly with the Sudanese; not to mention the various insurgencies sponsored by US.  Add to that all the armaments then smuggled into the resistance groups.


So it is not some error of judgement that swamps the whole world with armaments, the world is swamped by the mechanisms structural to capitalism as a system.  It is not just brutal dictators that use them against their fellow countrymen, they’ve paid money that they can ill afford for all those tanks and gunships and there is every incentive to use them for what they are designed to do - to kill people.  



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