Saturday, October 27, 2007

The Dialectics of War

Hegelian dialectics influenced Clausewitz as much as Marx. Both used his historiography as the basis of their analysis.

Clausewitz after 9/11

The Prussian master's brilliant analytical method in On War provides richer insights into the contemporary wars against terrorism than anything his glib critics have come up with.

Clausewitz thought of war in a framework that included his formula, but went way beyond it. That framework, known as the trinity, is usefully re-translated in Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century by Christopher Bassford, editor of the Clausewitz Home Page (4). In Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, Bassford has Clausewitz, in the famous final section of chapter one of book one of On War, keeping his theory ‘floating among’ three ‘tendencies’, as ‘among three points of attraction’. The three tendencies from which war is composed are:

  1. the blind natural force of primordial violence, hatred and enmity
  2. the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam
  3. the element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.

Bassford’s direct translation of Clausewitz goes on: ‘The first of these three aspects concerns more the people; the second, more the commander and his army; the third, more the government.’

This passage is vital. Andreas Herberg-Rothe treats his formula’s nuances – war as both a continuation of politics and as involving other means – with the careful thought they deserve in the prologue to Clausewitz’s Puzzle . But Clausewitz revisionists do not stop their vulgarisation of the man with his formula. No: Clausewitz revisionists reveal a much wider crisis in bourgeois thought about war.

Clausewitz’s dialectical method

Clausewitz’s method in relation to military affairs will always remain relevant because of his grasp of the importance of polar opposites, and of change, to the totality of interactions that comprise war. Thus Clausewitz both hated and admired Napoleon. His famous concept of friction defined it as ‘the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult’ . As the British historian Michael Howard likewise pointed out in 1983, Clausewitzian dialectics embraced the relations between means and ends; moral factors and physical forces; historical knowledge and critical judgments made in the field; absolute, or ideal, war and real war; attack and defence, and tactics and strategy . In their different books, Herberg-Rothe and Beatrice Heuser fret, as Germans tend to, that Clausewitzian theory inevitably leads to militarism à la Adolf. But they make an even bigger mistake, again in the manner of modern Germans, when they dismiss the way in which Clausewitz’s theory is underpinned by the dialectical philosophy of Georg Hegel (1770-1831).

In his admirable opening chapter to Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, ‘Clausewitz and the dialectics of war’, Hew Strachan points out that the vitality and longevity of On War derive ‘in large part from its refusal to embrace fixed conclusions’. In this chapter too, and in the editors’ joint introduction, a long-needed counter-attack is mounted on Mary Kaldor. Back in 1999, her New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era used the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s, as well as war in Rwanda, to distinguish between ‘old’ wars, involving nation states and political motives, and ‘new’ ones, which also involved organised crime and large-scale violations of human rights. In Strachan and Herberg-Rothe’s indictment, then, New and Old Wars turned Clausewitz into ‘not the analyst of war, but the representative fall guy for “old wars”’.

What the critics themselves miss out is that Clausewitz, like Marx, pretended to be neither an encyclopaedist nor a Nostradamus. Both men, rather, encouraged people to think carefully, creatively and self-critically about laws of motion, whether they pertained to capital or to war. Indeed Marx himself, so often written off as an economic determinist, had this to say about ‘economics’ and war. War, Marx wrote in his economic notebooks, ‘developed earlier than peace; the way in which certain economic relations such as wage labour, machinery etc develop earlier, owing to war and in the armies etc, than in the interior of bourgeois society. The relation of productive forces and the relations of exchange also especially vivid in the army.’

Although war generally grows out of the dull relations of peaceful political economy, Marx knew that it could have its own effect precisely on those relations. Clausewitz, as Strachan’s book reminds us, was invigorated by the ideas of the German Enlightenment; he ‘knew full well that policy can expand war as well as limit it’. For both men, the dialectical relations of society were the key thing. No picking of holes, or told-you-so reference to posthumous events, can take away from the insights that still follow from applying their method.


The COMPLETE translation by
Colonel J.J. Graham

published by N. Trübner,
London, 1873

Posted to the web by




SEE:

Dialectics, Nature and Science

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Libertarian Dialectics

A Philosophical Dilemma


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Military Waste


All capital invested in the military is waste as Veblen and Galbraith have pointed. It is the creative destructive aspect of capitalism as Schumpeter called it. Military spending destroys capital, both excess production and workers.

And government waste rises with the increase in investment in military spending. Investment in social programs on the other hand are attacked by the right as spending and waste rather than what it really is investment in social capital.


How much happiness does big money buy the military? A lot less than it hoped.

Even after Liberal and Conservative cash injections, the forces are struggling to rebuild and renew while fighting a very different and difficult 21st century war. Equally worrying for the department, the consensus that led successive governments to boost spending to modern highs is cracking as other political priorities emerge.

Senior government officials and academics confirm entrenched problems aren't evaporating with a budget that will top $18 billion next year, some 27 per cent higher than before 9/11, according to a report released this week.

Its highest since World War II and more than 100 times higher than federal spending to combat homelessness.

While our troops are fighting the war in Afghanistan, the defence department spent $32 million last year on -- furniture


Ah the joy of being part of the NATO Military Industrial Complex.


SEE

The Tory Nanny State

Canada Celebrates Star Wars

The Budget Item Flaherty Forgot

State Capitalism Quebec Style

Defense Lobbyist Now Minister

Derek Burney Voice of America

Contracting Out Is A Crime

Guns and Butter for Conservatives

Liberals Military Heritage

Canada's State Capitalist Success


Job Protection for


Canadian Reservists



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Environmentalists Caused Wildfires


So said Mike Brown, ex-head of FEMA during the Katrina debacle, on FOX News. He blamed the California wildfires on environmentalists; he claimed they opposed selective burns of brush and bush areas. While he stated that it is only natural for people to want to move into wilderness areas, including those prone to wildfires. Talk about Republican spin.

Yep environmental issues are behind the wild fires but not environmentalists. As Californian's are finding out that old adage Think Globally (warming ) Act Locally (put out wild fires). And the excuse that the fires were arson does nothing to halt the fact that they were fueled by Santa Ana wind's and as a result of climactic changes brought on by Global Warming.

Al Gore though art avenged.


SEE:

Black and White

Blaming Others




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Aliens and American Politics


It seems that aliens have become a theme in American Presidential politics. And I am not talking about Mexican migrant workers.

Democrats see them and Republicans are ready to blast them out of the skies.

It is the difference between libertarian and Law and Order approaches to politics.


Did Congressman Dennis Kucinich see a UFO?

A new book soon to be released says he did.

The book is written by one of Kucinich's closest friends, actress Shirley MacLaine, who attended his wedding in Cleveland in 2005.

Giuliani: Preparedness is key (even if aliens attack)

Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani yesterday said preparedness will be key for all crises, even an attack from outer space.

During a town hall meeting in Exeter, a young questioner asked the former New York mayor about his plan to protect Earth.

"If (there's) something living on another planet and it's bad and it comes over here, what would you do?" the boy asked.

Giuliani, grin on his face, said it was the first time he's been asked about an intergalactic attack.

"Of all the things that can happen in this world, we'll be prepared for that, yes we will. We'll be prepared for anything that happens," said Giuliani, who spent the day campaigning in the key early voting state.


SEE:

Libertarians for U.S. President

Iraq; The War For Oil

Telus About UFO's

Horse and Carriage


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