Capitalism is a War-Making Machine
Harris and her Republican Love Affair
Within the Democratic Party’s rapid descent into hawkish neoconservatism over the last few decades, perhaps no moment has been as much of a “masks-off” moment than Kamala Harris celebrating her endorsement by Dick Cheney, and her corresponding embrace of Liz Cheney to accompany her on the campaign trail.
Despite the mass historical amnesia that seems to have settled like a wet blanket over many US Democrats who seemingly accept this endorsement without question, it’s important to remember that Vice-President Dick Cheney was a notorious war criminal in the early 2000’s and the architect of some of the most heinous torture techniques (think Abu Ghraib images), prisoner abuse, illegal detention and interrogation practices that this country has ever overseen. He fabricated countless lies that took this country into the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq that ended up taking more than a million lives. And Cheney was responsible for numerous constitutional rights violations against US citizens, such as detention without trial (including of US citizens), warrantless surveillance, and warrantless wire-tapping, which have become the new norm in US public surveillance.
Dick Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton, an oil-services company that provides construction and military support services. Halliburton and its subsidiary company, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), were heavily involved in the rebuilding of Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. KBR is estimated to have made billions of dollars rebuilding Iraq after the war. Cheney, who stepped down from Halliburton in 2000, was still receiving as much as $1 million a year in deferred compensation in 2003, as Halliburton played a major role in handling the Bush Administration’s post-war oil production in Iraq– a classic tale in the military-industrial-government revolving door phenomenon.
So it is remarkable that in spite of Cheney’s egregious and criminal record, Harris has been so very proud to accept the Cheney endorsement, bragging about it on multiple occasions. She also regularly brags about the endorsement of 200 Republicans who formerly worked with President Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain. At the same time, Harris, herself, said in an October 8th interview on “The View” that the main difference between a Harris and Biden Administration is that unlike Joe Biden, Harris plans to have a republican in her cabinet.
All of this data tracks well with Harris’s speakers at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago: six republicans took the stage compared to zero Palestinians, who were beseeching the Harris campaign to give them a voice as part of the Uncommitted Movement– just one chance to be heard from the DNC stage. But no Palestinian voices were heard. Arab-American voters staged a protest outside the DNC, while inside the convention, a Muslim delegate for the Democratic Party was beaten over the head with a “We Love Joe” sign– a physical assault from a fellow Democratic delegate.
According to Abbas Alawieh, co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement and a former congressional staffer, the Harris campaign now refuses to even meet with any members of the Uncommitted Movement because she refuses to meet with any person(s) who have not already endorsed her. And on October 21st, the Harris campaign, along with Liz Cheney, ejected a Muslim American Democrat from a campaign rally in metro Detroit, and he was threatened with arrest, even though he had RSVP’d, cleared security, and was already seated at the event, at the time they threw him out. Good luck, Harris, with the Arab-American vote in November!
In other obvious gestures to her status as a right-wing neocon, Harris’s campaign ads promise to be tougher on illegal immigration than Trump. And Harris repeats her mantra ad-nauseum about “Israel’s right to defend itself,” even as Israel continues its brutal slaughter in northern Gaza- launching daily airstrikes killing hundreds of people (in Gaza and Lebanon)– airstrikes on schools, refugee shelters, hospitals, entire neighborhoods, UN aid workers, and displaced refugees in tents, burning children and patients alive. The Biden-Harris Administration pretends their hands are tied, as they continue sending millions in aid packages to Israel.
And recently when Harris’ VP-pick Tim Walz, was asked in a debate with J.D. Vance, if the United States should support a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran, Walz responded by saying, “The expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States’ steady leadership there.” This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the US Democratic Party has publicly called for the expansion of Israel into other sovereign countries, even though the United States has long supported Israel’s expansion through financing, intelligence operations, etc.
So now we have the United States continuing to arm Israel not only as it executes its final stages of genocide in Gaza, its bombing campaign in Lebanon, and its promised attack on Iran. It’s again worth noting that even former President Reagan stopped Israel from bombing Lebanon in 1982, with a single phone call. But today’s neocon Democrats are clearly to the right of Reagan, when it comes to aiding and abetting war crimes and genocide. The United States is showing zero signs of restraint or diplomacy as Israel plans another major strike against Iran. It feels as if we are on the precipice of World War III.
Simultaneously, the Biden/Harris administration has dropped all talk of a cease-fire that they were supposedly “working tirelessly” for in the weeks leading up to the Democratic Convention. According to Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, “This idea they had that they were going to achieve a deal, bring home hostages, send aid to Palestinians, stop the bombing and the starvation, that’s all out the window at this point. The shiny new thing is a Lebanon incursion, opportunity and sort of hoping Gaza doesn’t reach the top headlines.”
And on October 1st, in a rare moment of honesty, White House spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “We never wanted to see a diplomatic resolution with Hamas.” And then when the reporter asked bewilderedly, “Well, what about the ceasefire?!” Miller said, “We wanted to see a ceasefire, but we’ve always been committed to the destruction of Hamas.” This belligerent statement came days before Israel killed Hamas leader and chief negotiator, Yahya Sinwar. And it came just two days after Israel killed Hezbollah Leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who had agreed to a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon just hours before he was assassinated.
Is there no end to this US administration’s willingness to support genocide, illegal invasions, extrajudicial killings, and the expansion of a US-Israeli war all over West Asia, while US residents are struggling at home– many still swimming in their neighborhoods after a wave a deadly hurricanes, and right before an election, when the US working class has seen more economic hardship in the last decade than at any time in recent history?
The Uniparty: a single foreign policy to rule the world
While it may be shocking to some progressives to observe the unfettered embrace of war-mongering neoconservatism within the Democratic Party, it’s not actually a new phenomenon at all. In a recent interview with Glenn Greenwald, Jeffery Sachs, world-renowned economist and professor at Columbia University, summarized US foreign policy leaders from 1991 (the fall of the Soviet Union). The following paragraphs are paraphrased:
The doctrine of the “grandiose, unipolar, indispensable state” took hold in 1992, was codified by Paul Wolfowitz, and initially executed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney under Bush, Sr.. This doctrine was based on the need for NATO expansion, which dominated the presidency of Bill Clinton.
And then as soon as George W. Bush, Jr., came into office in 2001, Victoria Nuland became the deputy national security advisor for then Vice President Dick Cheney.
Then comes Obama in 2008, who is supposedly our peace president. And Victoria Nuland becomes Hillary Clinton’s spokeswoman in the new State Department. She goes from being Bush’s ambassador to NATO in 2005-2008 when Bush pushes this extraordinarily reckless drive to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia- the reason for the Ukraine war. And Nuland goes immediately from being Bush’s NATO ambassador to being Hillary Clinton’s top assistant. Then she became the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, and then became the point person for overthrowing the Ukrainian government on February 22nd, 2014, during the Maidan protest.
Then comes Trump in 2016. He continues the NATO policies. He’s the one who starts arming Ukraine.
(And Sachs doesn’t mention this, but the Democrats launch impeachment trials against Trump in 2019, as soon as he stops arming Ukraine. And Lead Impeachment Officer Adam Schiff gave this famous speech about why the US needs to keep arming Ukraine.)
And then comes Biden in 2021. “He’s been up to his neck with the military industrial complex his whole career, taking money from it, being a shill for it, being a point person for it, being the one who gave the attaboys to the overthrow of democratically-elected Yanukovych in 2014, always pushing for NATO enlargement,” said Sachs.
So Jeffery Sachs’ concluding argument is that the United States, since 1991, has had one single foreign policy to rule the world, regardless of president. And now, Harris promises to maintain basically the same policies as Biden, other than adding a republican to her cabinet. So really, should it be any surprise that Dick Cheney, 200 republicans, and all these neocons are backing Harris? No, this is how the uniparty has operated for decades.
US Government and the War Industry
While the policy is not surprising, the absence of any sincere efforts toward diplomacy in the uniparty is noteworthy though. The State Department was once the home of the nation’s top diplomats. Now it’s the home of the nation’s top lobbyists for the military industrial complex. Secretary of State Blinken, for example, came to the State Department after co-founding West-Exec Advisors, a business described by the Project on Government Oversight to be “helping defense corporations market their products to the Pentagon and other agencies.” In 2020, the Intercept described Biden’s national security team as “a well-worn group of advisers who backed or waged the disastrous wars of the last two decades, and the group is notable for keeping the military-industrial complex’s revolving door greased and spinning. His transitional advisors include… retired Gen. Lloyd Austin (of Raytheon), former principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy Kathleen H. Hicks (of Aerospace Corporation), and the former No. 2 civilian at the Pentagon, Robert Work (of Raytheon and Govini), among many others in the incoming administration’s orbit.” In fact, one-third of Biden’s national security team is financed by the weapons industry.
One thing we can easily conclude from this always-increasing US investment in the war industry is that war is very profitable, and diplomacy is not. It’s so profitable, in fact, that US lawmakers, themselves, can’t keep their own hands out of the pie, even when they’re sitting on national security committees, conducting official government business. Let’s look at a few numbers:
+ The United States continues to have the largest military budget in the world- an estimated $967 billion for 2024- a larger military budget than the next nine countries’ with the biggest national military budgets combined.
+ The United States continues as the world’s largest arms supplier. From 2014-18, the US supplied 35% of global arms exports. From 2019-23, it supplied 42%, an increase of 17% between those two time periods. In those same time periods, Russia’s share of global arms exports decreased by 53%.
+ In 2020, according to American Prospect magazine, “51 members of Congress and their spouses own between $2.3 and $5.8 million worth of stocks in companies that are among the top 30 defense contractors in the world.” And “Eighteen members of Congress, combined, own as much as $760,000 worth of stock of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor in terms of overall defense revenues.”
+ In 2022, according to Responsible Statecraft, “At least 25 [Congress] members sat on committees that shape national security policy while simultaneously trading financial assets in companies that could create competing interests with their work, such as defense stock. With a near-even party split, Democrats and Republicans may have found a rare instance of common ground.”
+ Also in 2022, according CNBC, in the lead-up to the US-backed Ukrainian war against Russia, more than a dozen Congressmembers (or their family members) traded stocks in weapons companies that were directly involved in the war: companies like Raytheon, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, Crowdstrike, Marathon and Akamai. These trades totaled some $7.7 million that began on Feb 1st, 2022, just days before Russia’s military operations began.
In addition to the direct profits that Congressmembers make directly from US-backed wars, we should also look at the general trends of the stock market as the global economy becomes more and more militarized.
In 2022, in the first two weeks of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, war industry stocks surged across the board: Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman stocks surged between eight and 22 percent, with one consultant to Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies: “For the defense industry, happy days are here again.”
In October 2024, military stocks hit record highs as the wars in Palestine, Lebanon, and tensions with Iran escalated. Lockheed Martin and RTX (previously Raytheon) shares booked all-time highs on Oct. 1st, 2024, while L3Harris and Northrop Grumman tallied their top share price since 2022.
According to the Financial Times:
The world’s largest aerospace and defence companies are set to rake in record levels of cash over the next three years as they benefit from a surge in government orders for new weapons amid rising geopolitical tensions. The leading 15 defence contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52bn in 2026 — almost double their combined cash flow at the end of 2021.
Military Accumulation- a primary economic engine of the global economy
So what does all of this say about the trajectory of the global economy? Sociologist William I. Robinson, in his article, “Global Capitalism Has Become Dependent on War-Making to Sustain Itself,” details how military accumulation has now become a primary economic engine of the global economy. While it’s almost always been common sense that war stimulates the economy, Robinson’s analysis goes far beyond that. He defines “militarized accumulation” as:
a situation in which a global war economy relies on the state to organize war-making, social control and repression to sustain capital accumulation in the face of chronic stagnation and saturation of global markets. These state-organized practices are outsourced to transnational corporate capital, involving the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation. Cycles of destruction and reconstruction provide ongoing outlets for over-accumulated capital; that is, these cycles open up new profit-making opportunities for transnational capitalists seeking ongoing opportunities to profitably reinvest the enormous amounts of cash they have accumulated. There is a convergence in this process of global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression in the face of mounting popular discontent worldwide and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation.
As I understand this, the profitability of constant war creates a feedback loop whereby transnational capitalists accumulate mass amounts of wealth by investing in arms, military contracts, intelligence, surveillance, policing, and other forms of social control. And by investing in the war industry at the expense of domestic priorities– education, healthcare, housing, etc., then there’s more and more political discontent within the masses, within the working class, and more of a ruling-class need for wars and policing to repress popular resistance movements. So governments are not only increasing their military and police budgets every year, but they’re also reinvesting those profits directly into the war economy. So transnational capital continues to grow through this violent cycle of profit, wars, genocide, mass destruction, followed by capitalist reconstruction.
When Benjamin Netanyahu showed his plans in September 2023 to the United Nations– plans for a massive economic project– a canal/corridor to connect India, Europe and the Middle East– he showed a map to his audience of the canal going directly through the middle of Palestine, through what would be the West Bank and most likely the Gaza Strip. He made no mention of Palestinians, nor were their territories shown on the map.
Not only would such a transnational corridor like this be an enormous capitalist infrastructure project that would be incredibly profitable for the industries that build it, but just as profitable for the global economy is the genocide to rid Palestine of Palestinians, in order to prepare for this project.
In addition, Israeli officials have talked for decades about oil and natural gas reserves that sit off the coast of Gaza. According to TRT World, “Israel’s hegemony over oil and gas reserves in its vicinity reflects a long-term ambition to become an energy hub and regional connectivity nexus. Therefore, as in any colonial settler endeavor, displacement and mass killings are merely the price to pay to continue the ruthless exploitation of resources from the native population.”
It’s perhaps too horrific for most people to imagine that this is how our global economy functions. It’s far more comfortable to pretend we still operate within democracies that respond to the needs of people, rather than to realize that national governments have largely become agents for the militarized accumulation of capital.
In Caitlan Johnstone’s article: “The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government,” she writes:
It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government…The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof.
And beyond the politics of global domination, anyone who has a basic understanding of Marxist economics knows that capitalism as an economic system requires constant growth, constant profit, and endless extraction in order to achieve profit. If capitalism stops growing, stops profiting, it collapses. It is not a system that can ever achieve stasis or balance with other interdependent systems around it. It has to expand, consume everything, create bigger and bigger profits, until it devours its host. This is one of capitalism’s deadly contradictions, and it’s why capitalism is an unsustainable economic system within fragile ecosystems. And it is also why a hyper-militarized global capitalist economy will quickly destroy our ecosystem, since war is one the most carbon-emitting, environmentally-destructive activities on the planet.
At this stage in capitalism’s inevitable devolution, this global economic system has become dependent on non-stop wars. Capitalism has to always be acquiring new markets, and war is now one of, if not, the main way the global economy does that. Wars are mechanisms of market expansion. If you believe that nation states are supreme and have supreme power of the market, you won’t be able to understand this. And if you think that governments will generally do what’s best for their people and won’t start WWIII, nuclear war, or completely destroy the climate to make their profits, then you have missed the point.
Like Halliburton’s oil contracts in the rebuilding of Iraq, Chevron’s contracts in Ukraine, and Netanyahu’s corridor planned on top of a flattened Gaza, the potential spoils that come from these genocidal wars and colonial projects reign supreme over any risk or national interest. At the expense of everything – national security, diplomacy, international standing, human survival– many governments will happily sign up to sponsor a genocide (as we have witnessed) in order to partake in the spoils of war. So many governments are now agents of the military industrial complex. They are drunk on the profits of war. Capitalism is a war-making machine.
