The Adoption of Eisenhower’s analysis leads to a distorted view of why imperialism fights wars

It is a common and very mistaken analysis of the US left to attribute the wars engaged in by US imperialism simply to being a profit boosting excercise for the military industrial complex (MIC). The MIC has a guaranteed massive profit every year that comes directly from the ever expanding military budget (no way Elon and Vivek are cutting that) and as the book “Spoils of War” by Andrew Cockburn makes clear the flow of money increases whether it is open warfare or “peace”. The military industrial complex is a manifestation of US imperialism, it was created to service the needs of the massive military commitment made by the US ruling class to defending their class interests in the early to mid 20th century. Eisenhowers speech is a classic case of telling a very partial truth to cover a much bigger one.

By fixating on the interests of the MIC US leftists and libertarians routinely miss the bigger picture which is US imperialism as a system. The MIC grows rapidly because the US ruling class needed to reimpose capitalist rule in Europe and (essentially) rescue the imperialist system from being swept away after 1945. This took a giant amount of investment and (as with every new venture under imperialism) the MIC rapidly became financialised and very parasitic. It’s ownership structures and incentives are structured in such a way that mass production is actually something they don’t want to do anymore. This is why they’ve struggled to upscale the production even of artillery shells, there’s easier and greater profits to be made in other areas which don’t involve employing more workers on production lines or investing heavily in automation to upgrade these facilities. Deindustrialisation and financialisation are hardwired into capitalism and this is particularly the case with the oldest imperialist nations meaning that it afflicts all of their military production as well. Hence why they are getting hugely outpaced by the Russians who are drawing on the strength of Soviet era facilities.

The reality of imperialist wars is that they are based around the need to conquer markets, resources, sources of labour to exploit and also for strategic reasons. Every war the imperialists wage has these various layers operating within it in terms of the motivations of the imperialists themselves. Let us take the war in Ukraine as an example. As we have covered in recent livestreams profits are part of the motivations of the US, British, French and Germans in Ukraine. All of them have invested in acquiring Ukrainian land and natural resources but that is not the biggest motivating factor. The far bigger motivating factor is the prize of Russia itself and the ability to have unfettered access to that countries resources, to engage in a vast looting of it that the imperialists hope will revive their own flagging fortunes. This is admitted to tacitly even in the pieces in bourgeois journals like the NYT. The bigger strategic consideration is to isolate China and Iran in order break up emergent partnerships that could threaten the US’s place as the centre of the global system they had tried to impose since 1991.

All of these are factors which go into the calculations of the strategists of imperialism when considering any way and to boil it down to the profits of arms companies is foolishly reductive. We must not be afraid of presenting the truth to the working class. It is a classic mistake of the opportunists that they think workers are unable to understand complexity. The motivations of the ruling class must be presented as they are both in their horrendous implications and the multilayered motivations that lie behind them.