For the growth of capital, military expenditure is an absolute necessity. It is how the State finances the security its capitalists need to ensure themselves of sources of foreign wealth, the subordination of workers both at home and abroad, the direct and immediate use of natural resources, the management of factories and the power of national capitalism. To guarantee profits, the State “commandeers” nature and labour, not only at home but also worldwide. This is how military expenditure and the destructive power of an army truly become the real production force of capitalism, the real guarantee of continuity in the production process. Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Berlin, Warsaw are exemplary sites of capital’s destructive power: nothing else! The museums of horror that have been built in the bombed cities, such as the Holocaust museums and the monuments to the Unknown Soldier, serve as deterrents againstproletarian revolution and not against bourgeois wars, whose patriotic virtues they instead sing the praises of. A direct relationship exists between military spending and national production forces: the expenditure on the armed forces and armaments is all the greater, the more capital has been accumulated in a nation and consequently the more widespread is its range of business interests and, to an even greater extent, the more capital is already employed abroad. Military spending is productive for capitalism as a source of immense profits, equal to the spending on infrastructures and building work. The profit is gained by using the workforce to produce sophisticated arms, like any other capitalist goods. The fact that arms have a destructive use value changes nothing at all: on the contrary, it merely shows the socialized nature of wealth, its exchange value, which lies at the centre of any economic activity in a capitalist society. Tanks and bombers serve to increase this wealth, just as road-building machinery, bullets and toys, land mines and lollipops do. In one sense, perhaps armaments are worth even more than the offer of “civilian” goods to be sold to anyone: the State, with its inexhaustible buying power and its enormous needs, its long-term planning and its available resources, can bring together generals and engineers, industrialists and physicists to invent the future needs of warfare.
Military spending also makes a considerable contribution to growth in general. The creation of plusvalue permits capitalism to increase the wealth of society through the production of pure, destructive power, so that a flourishing military budget is not a drawback for capital and its State but a true blessing. The powerful capitalist nations certainly consider themselves justified in contracting more credit for their projects in the field of armaments: through close cooperation between industry and the armed forces, governments promote the interests of industrial technology in all sectors, from materials science to the pharmaceutical and electronics industries, ensuring the best technical resources for national enterprises, all in the interests of their competitive potential. Moreover, the machinery of warfare is subject to considerable “moral wear and tear” (as Marx calls it), far more so than in industry in general: i.e. armaments are rapidly overtaken by new technologies and nonetheless do not abandon the market, because crowds of buyers of all descriptions prove ready to add to their own arsenals. In addition, the vocation of modern industry is large-scale production, mass production, increase in the overall value of production and the reduction of value-per-unit. The production of war follows the whole itinerary, moving from scientific discovery to its wider technical applications and from here to the realization of plusvalue through the huge circulation of goods. Any price is paid for new arms and their production is an essential condition for the generalized development of “civilian” side industries. The market easily finds purchasers, and through the latter ensures large-scale reproduction for profits that are well above average. Financial means in this sector are the most powerful vehicles for magnifying and speeding up the circulation of war products. The sale of armaments allows for rapid valorization of the capital invested: but the war industry must consume these goods and foreign buyers (States), having planted the seeds for hotbeds of tension, know how to make use of them. This is demonstrated by the hundreds of more or less extended wars that have been fought since the end of the Second World War until today: in terms of numbers, destructive power, technical quality, complexity of military organization and mass of capital, each of them has in some cases gone beyond the armies and armaments used in the first and second world conflicts.
This is not all. Today arms are an exchange currency: they are conceived and produced especially to be exchanged with power-generating products (oil, gas, iron and radio-active raw materials). We wrote in “Armaments: a sector that never experiences crisis” (Quaderni del Programma comunista, n°2, giugno 1977): “The complicated compensation clauses contracted in relation to armaments demonstrate that arms are inextricably bound into the capitalist economy. But goods are what they are, because they possess a use-value. The arms race is a promissory note with a deadline, the use-value of the goods cannot be ignored. […] It is all as well to say that the use-value of arms can be represented by its use as a deterrent to enemies and thus not necessarily by it being ‘consumed’. Capitalist war is the destruction of surplus and its reconstruction; in this process the arms must therefore be consumed. And they are.”
For most new products, the launching of mass production requires a simple advance of capital, so that the customer must possess considerable financial resources to buy them. The capitalist State is one that, thanks to its taxes, can become the war industry’s best customer. In the age of imperialism all States fuel their leading industry, the military industry, and devour percentages of public money that cannibalize any other possibilities: enormous spending at all times. In the furnace of war the cathedrals of a now putrefying civilization will sooner or later be consumed.