internal culture of war and exploitation

Internal culture of war and exploitation
(Coordinator Comment)

If there is one overall trend that has been steady and certain over recent centuries it is the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, both within and between countries. No matter what language you wish to use, whether it be the language of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, or the theories of Nobel Prize winning economists from the heart of the capitalist class, it is clear that this is the result of exploitation of workers by capitalists. Over time the state has always played a central role; in the words of Engels (1884): "The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital." At each stage of this history, exploitation has been enforced by the internal culture of war.

During the first centuries of the American colonies and the new republic of the United States, internal intervention was used to prevent slaves from rebelling in the South This is described in my 1995 article in the Journal of Peace Research, Internal Military Interventions in the United States.

Although slavery was abolished in most countries by the end of the 19th Century, its place was taken by the exploitation of industrial and agricultural wage workers. At this point the internal culture of war was transformed to prevent and suppress workers' strikes, revolts and revolutions, as described further in my article cited above.

In recent years there has been a convergence of neo-colonialism and the capitalist exploitation of industrial and agricultural wage workers. Industrial enterprises in the North (Europe and United States) have largely re-located into countries of the South, decreasing the industrial class struggle within the North and re-locating it to the South.

The internal culture of war is a taboo topic, as discussed elsewhere in these Dialogues.