If we place the war against Iraq in a historical context, we can see that war is a structural component of capitalist development.

From the "Conquest" that marked the beginning of the world economy, to the colonization process of the 18th and 19th centuries, which brought the populations and resources of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East under the hegemony of European and American capital, through WWII which ensured US capital access to the world market, war has constantly been on the agenda. War is a means to acquire economic assets, change class relations, and re-launch the accumulation process. Indeed, in the history of capitalism, war has been economic development by other means, a cost of production, escalating in proportion to the resistance it had to break.

In the case of the United States, since WWII the guarantor of world accumulation, hardly a decade has gone by without a war, whether conducted through the direct involvement of US troops, or under the umbrella of the United Nations, or through proxy armies (as in case of Angola, El Salvador, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Panama) or, more surreptitiously, through death squads, and the politics of mass torture and assassination, as in the cases of Argentina, Chile, and, prior to that, Brazil (to name the most outstanding cases).

In this context, I argue that war is on the agenda today because of the crisis of the globalization project that was launched in the 1970s and 1980s through the politics of structural adjustment and trade liberalization.

Hailed as the pathway to "economic recovery," twenty years later these policies have shown they cannot deliver. Far from it, in every country in which they have been applied, they have produced unprecedented levels of impoverishment, social protest, and a process of economic and political re-colonization that can no longer be disguised. Thus, the temptations for governments to drop out of the globalization deal has continued to increase and so has the need to use force to convince them to stay the course. The turning point was the period between 1997 and 2001, which witnessed first the "Asian Crisis" and later the failure of the WTO meeting in Seattle to produce a trade agreement, demonstrating that resistance to the prescriptions of the IMF and the World Bank was building at both the grassroots and governmental levels. Since then, opposition to globalization has continued to intensify. Witness the Hugo Chavez "revolution" in Venezuela, Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner's opposition to the dictates of the IMF in Argentina and his recent decision to pay only 30 cents out of every dollar on Argentina's external debt. Witness also the victory of the left in Uruguay, and the constant mass protests against the privatization of public utilities and the payment of the debt that have taken place in recent years in Bolivia (800 protests since President Carlos Mesa's appointment in the fall of 2003). The resistance to privatization in Peru, and the mass mobilization of indigenous people in Ecuador against Occidental Petroleum are further expressions of the globalization crisis. No wonder these days we are told that Al Qaeda might enter the US through the Mexican border!

Africa, War and Structural Adjustment

In Africa as well we see the coincidence between the implementation of the structural adjustment programs (SAPs), introduced in the 1980s by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the development of a state of constant warfare. The situation in Africa shows that structural adjustment generates war, and war, in turn, completes the work of structural adjustment, as it makes the countries affected dependent on international capital, and the powers that represent it, beginning with the US, the European Union (EU) and the UN. In other words, to paraphrase Clausewitz, "structural adjustment is war by other means."

There are many ways in which structural adjustment promotes war. This economic restructuring was presumably meant to boost productivity, eliminate inefficiency, and increase Africa's competitive edge in the global market. But the opposite has occurred. More than a decade after its adoption, local economies have collapsed, foreign investment has not materialized, and the only productive activities in place in most African countries are once again, as in the colonial period, mineral extraction and export-oriented agriculture, that contributes to the gluts in the global market, while Africans do not have enough food to eat.

In this context of generalized economic bankruptcy, violent rivalries have exploded everywhere among different factions of the African ruling class, who, unable to enrich themselves through the exploitation of labor, are now fighting for access to state power as the key condition for the accumulation of wealth. State power, in fact, is the key to the appropriation and sale on the international market of either the national assets and resources (land, gold, diamonds, oil, timber), or the assets possessed by rival or weaker groups. Thus, war has become the necessary underbelly of a new mercantile economy, or (according to some) an "economy of plunder" (Bayart et al. 1999), thriving with the complicity of foreign companies and international agencies, who (for all their complaints about "corruption") benefit from it.

A further source of warfare in Africa has been the brutal impoverishment into which structural adjustment has plunged the majority of the population. While intensifying social protest, this, over the years, has torn the social fabric as millions of people have been forced to leave their villages and go abroad in search of new sources of livelihood; and the struggle for survival has laid the ground-work for the fomenting and manipulation of local antagonisms and the recruitment of the unemployed (particularly the youth), by warring parties. Many "tribal" and religious conflicts in Africa (no less than the "ethnic" conflicts in Yugoslavia) have been rooted in these processes. From the mass expulsions of immigrants and religious riots in Nigeria in the early and mid-1980s, to the "clan" wars in Somalia in the early 1990s, to the bloody wars between the state and the fundamentalists in Algeria, in the background of most contemporary African conflicts there have been the World Bank's and the IMF's "conditionalities," that have wrecked peoples' lives and undermined the conditions for social reproduction and social solidarity.

There is no doubt, for instance, that the youths who have been fighting the numerous African wars of recent years are the same who two decades ago could have been in school, and could have hoped to make a living through trade or a job in the public sector, and could have looked at the future with the hope of being able to contribute to their families' well-being. Similarly, the appearance of child-soldiers in the 1980s and 1990s would never have been possible if, in many countries, the extended family had not been undermined by financial hardships, and millions of children were not without a place to go except for the street and had instead someone to provide for their needs.

War has not only been a consequence of economic change; it has also been a means to produce it. Two objectives stand out when we consider the prevailing patterns of war in Africa, and the way in which warfare intersects with globalization. First, war forces people off the land, i.e., it separates the producers from the means of production, a condition for the expansion of the global labor market. War also reclaims the land for capitalist use, boosting the production of cash crops and export-oriented agriculture. Particularly in Africa, where communal land tenure is still widespread, this has been a major goal of the World Bank, whose raison d'être as an institution has been the capitalization of agriculture. Thus, it is hard today to see millions of refugees or famine victims fleeing their localities without thinking of the satisfaction this must bring to World Bank officers as well as agribusiness companies, who surely see the hand of progress working through it.

War also undermines people's opposition to market reforms by reshaping the territory and disrupting the social networks that provide the basis for resistance. Significant here is the correlation--frequent in contemporary Africa--between anti-IMF protest and conflict. This is most visible perhaps in Algeria, when the rise of anti-government Islamic fundamentalism dates from the anti-IMF uprising of 1988, when thousands of young people took over the streets of the capital for several days in the most intense and widespread protest since the heyday of the anti-colonial struggle.

External intervention--often seizing local struggles and turning them into global conflicts--has played a major role in this context. This can be seen even in the case of military interventions by the US that are usually read through the prism of "geo-politics" and the Cold War, such as the support given by the Reagan Administration to the governments of Sudan and Somalia, and to UNITA in Angola. Both in the Sudan and Somalia SAPs were underway since the early 1980s when both countries were among the major recipients of US military aid. In the Sudan, US military assistance strengthened the hand of the regime of Colonel Jaafar an Nimeiri against the coalition of forces that were opposing the cuts demanded by the IMF; even though, in the end, it could not stem the uprising that in 1985 was to depose him. In Somalia, US military aid helped Siad Barre's attack on the Isaaks, an episode in the ongoing war waged by national and international agencies over the last decade against Africa's pastoralist groups.

In Angola too, US military aid to UNITA served to force the government not just to renounce socialism and the help of Cuban troops, but to negotiate with the IMF, and it undoubtedly strengthened the bargaining power of the oil companies operating in the country.

In Africa too, globalization is in shambles. As timid as it may seem, the growing revival of Pan-Africanism and the move to a West African currency -- the Eco -- spurring regional development and creating alternatives to the dollar, are exemplary in this context (see Koomson 2004).

International Capital’s Aims

Through war, international capital aims to regain control over the world economy. It is important to stress here that the war drive began already with the Clinton Administration, as demonstrated by its attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, the war against Yugoslavia in 1999, and the escalation of the military budget in the same year. Notice also that support for a politics of military interventionism grew in US/EU political circles after the collapse of state socialism in 1989, which promised to clear the way to a new imperial drive. "Humanitarian intervention"--the slogan of the 1990s--was the ideological justification for such a move. The number of countries that by means of warfare have been brought under the trusteeship of the UN/US, and the network of military bases by means of which the US has been girdling the planet, are the political and physical manifestation of this project, as is the prospect of an unlimited "war against terror."

War defeats social movements, expropriates people from their lands, gives capital control over the planet's natural resources: oil, water, mineral, land, and seeds. Not surprisingly, the map of military intervention today is, to a large extent, also the map of oil. One of the main objectives for international capital is the liberalization of the oil industry, oil being the only vital commodity that is not privatized. Significantly, the US has invaded Iraq at the very moment when the country was preparing to return to the world oil market and was concluding deals with France and Russia for the development of its oil industry (ibid.). Oil is also the reason for the large investment the US has made in the war against the FARC in Colombia; for its renewed military support to Indonesia (under the guise of aid to the populations struck by the tsunami); for its attempted destabilization of Venezuela, which will continue, especially if Venezuela's negotiations with China for oil exploration result in an agreement. Darfur as well would not elicit much attention were oil not involved.

Not last, war has a terror function: terror plays at the level of international policy the same function that capital punishment plays at the level of domestic policy. It intimidates people and governments into compliance, punishes transgressions, and warns of coming retaliations. In this sense, there is also a connection between the re-launching of war in foreign policy and the renewed use of torture. We can dismiss in fact the idea that torture is a means to acquire essential information. The Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria disposed of that fallacy already in 1764, when he argued that as far as truth-finding is concerned, torture is as good as the medieval ordeal. The function of torture is to terrorize--this much has been learned from the experience of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s--and so is the function of war, which above all must convince workers across the world that no alternative exists to capitalism.  

Given this analysis of roots of war, what should be the strategy of an anti-war movement?

The first caveat is against any personalization of the war policy, of the type that led to the campaign in support of Kerry's election, which was based on the assumption that "everything is better than Bush." We also have to abandon the idea that salvation may come from Europe, presumably the soil where a more enlightened variety of capitalism is flourishing. If Chirac and Schroeder fail to support Bush' s war drive more openly, it is because they face a more combative working class; consequently they cannot divert as much of the surplus to military spending, nor can they cut workers' entitlements as easily as the US government can. In France, Germany, and Italy, workers of all ages and from all sectors (public and private) have gone to the streets over and over again to protest the attacks on pensions, to defend the 35 hours work week, and to demand that bankrupt companies not be allowed to "dump" their workers. This is something we have not seen in the US, which is why the US government can more confidently produce a military budget of $500 billion dollars and create a devastating hole in public resources through its tax cuts. This is where the anti-war movement in the United States must concentrate its efforts; for the beast of war will not be stopped unless it is denied the resources it feeds upon: money and soldiers. This implies that it is crucial that we see the continuity, in our analyses and strategy, between military and economic policy, both on the domestic and international level.

Thus, the success of the antiwar movement in the United States will depend on its capacity to build a mobilization against the cuts in Social Security, education, medical care and other social entitlements. The same movement must also include among its strategic priorities the reversal of the politics of mass incarceration and the use of the death penalty which, long before September 11 and the Patriot Act, have disenfranchised thousands of African Americans and being instrumental to the maintenance and creation of profound inequalities and divisions within the American working class. At the international level, the antiwar movement must join with the antigloblization movement in the opposition to the policies as structural adjustment and economic liberalization. As I have argued, to the extent that these policies are in crisis and resistance to them continues to intensify, their implementation will be premised on a state of permanent warfare.

That war is once again today the handmaid of economic policy is well and provocatively demonstrated by Paul Wolfowitz's appointment as President of the World Bank, as it is by whispers coming from the corridors of power suggesting that the Bush Administration has no need at present for its staff of economists and little interest even in replacing those who retire. Clearly, the Bush Administration's task at the moment is to redraw the map of power relations globally and domestically, and historical record demonstrates that organizing war is a primary step in this direction.                  

References

Bayart, Jean-Francois et al. (1999) The Criminalization of the State in Africa, Oxford: The International African Institute, in association with James Curry.

Beccaria, Cesare. 1764. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments.

Federici, Silvia. 2000. “War, Globalization, and Reproduction” Peace & Change 25(2):153.

Koomson, George. 2004. "West African Eco, slated to be functioning 2007," African Agenda, 7 (5&6): 5-6. (Published by the Third World Network, Africa, Accra)  See also "Eco is a reality, says treasurer of West African Parliament" and "West Africa's Secret Currency" in the same issue.