MYTH OF CAPITALIST PEACE

War huh yeah what is it good for absolutely nothing Adam Smith 1969. if it seems like we can't get enough of War right now that's because it's true we love war and everyone thinks it's great but back in the old days people used to think war was bad what people only one people men in funny wigs and tall socks during the Enlightenment liberal thinkers were the first to come up with the idea of having a conscience and morals except when it came to non-white people and women who they cleverly figured out aren't people and therefore deserve jacket nonetheless the early thinkers of liberalism figured out doing good things and not doing bad things, but instead of being all sad about war liberals also figured out how to fix the world and stop war from happening entirely free trade from the first thinkers of liberalism Smith Montesquieu Voltaire Hume Conte to the greatest thinker of our time Bush Jr the idea that Global capitalist free trade means peace and good times for all has well and truly endured and the momentum of freedom is growing we have reached a moment of tremendous promise and the United States will seize this moment for the sake of peace across the globe free markets and trade have helped defeat poverty and taught men and women the habits of Liberty so I propose the establishment of a U.S Middle East free trade area within a decade to bring the Middle East into an expanding circle of opportunity look I'm playing it up a bit but the liberal thesis really isn't that complicated war is bad for business and business is good for business so if countries begin trading together and make it easier by dropping things like tariffs embracing capitalism and the Invisible Hand of the market peace will endure because War becomes just too costly by comparison boom just like that the idea is that a Global Network of mutual interdependence ensures the aggressor in any given conflict can't trigger a war without suffering domestic economic repercussions and that means the appeal of War spoils progressively gives way to what we used to call Peace dividends back in the 2000s everyone's happy and the thing about the capitalist peace theory is that if you think of it in very narrow terms it can kind of make sense there's some logic to it and within very specific parameters there's even some not terrible research backing it up but then there's the other side of the freely traded coin capitalist piece is BS really it's a simple story covering up a brutal reality one of colonialism imperialism exploitation and of course profit let's start with recent history and a pretty unfortunate piece of evidence for the Defenders of capitalist peace what you're looking at right now is a graph it's a graph of BP Chevron Texaco Exxon and other oil companies Returns on Equity relative to the average for a Fortune 500 company what's interesting about this graph is whenever these companies start doing badly and not making as much profit as other Fortune 500 companies suddenly out of nowhere who could have seen this coming and energy conflict begins in the Middle East and then not long after but completely out of nowhere again they all suddenly start performing really well eating up market share and getting returns that the average Fortune 500 company can't the researchers behind this graph actually discovered three things about what it says one every energy conflict in the Middle East was preceded by oil companies having a dip in profits relative to the average two every energy conflict was followed by a period during which the oil companies beat the average and three this is the really damning one with only one exception in 1997 oil companies never managed to beat the average without an energy conflict first taking place to simplify all that and state the most obvious thing about wars in the Middle East war is profitable and peace actively sucks but of course Wars are complicated events and never a matter of one single thing but if I didn't know any better I'd be inclined to say that conflicts in the Middle East weren't thwarted by capitalism nor did they teach people the habits of Liberty and peace so much as they grew the profits of a handful of companies in the Imperial core sadly unfortunately for my shot in the dark guess about why Wars start there is absolutely no evidence of people serving in senior government positions during these wars who benefited from or had any sort of important role in the arms and fossil fuel industry the thing is Wars can be cheap Wars can often even be profitable for a range of domestic Industries unlike what capitalist peace assumes it's not always the case that war is the more costly option not just that we know for a fact that corporations exert a tremendous amount of control over government policy so even if Wars are bad for a lot of people so long as they're good for the few with power Wars just happen pair private interests with states that have the muscle to fight Wars free of consequence and all companies need to figure out is an excuse to start one now for those who defend the capitalist peace Theory the fact that these wars are being waged for capitalist profit and in the case of many Middle Eastern Wars to force free trade agreements isn't necessarily a contradiction free trade trumps everything so they might even argue that one war right now in exchange for peace and profit forever is a good trade-off but obviously this is a no good very bad new gross argument it's never just one quick war in fact it's been centuries of long and brutal conflict let's talk about the enlightenment again liberal philosophies development historically coincides pretty closely with colonialism and the age of European Empires while philosophy Bros waxed poetic about equality a regime of horror that many of them fully condoned or at minimum considered inevitable was busy plundering the rest of the world piece by piece and it wasn't an accident that the two worked together European capitalists got into colonialism not just for fun not just because they could now that they had their better ships and guns but because they needed to domestic capitalist markets steadily become less profitable and the best solution to that entropy problem is and always has been expansion that was on the material front but they needed justification for what would just be straight up murder and for that the liberal philosopher's rhetoric of bringing civilization and trade to the rest of the globe gave them a clear conscience Wars just became part of the process by which capitalism already associated with the ideas of civilization and freedom and soon enough peace would come to take over the world let me rephrase the point is colonialism didn't the point is colonialism didn't come out of nowhere profit demanded that Wars had to be waged just like today powerful countries and the companies that made them up wanted their hands on foreign resources people and markets we don't usually think of colonization as a process of War making nearly as much as we do a process of domination because that second part lasted a lot longer but it's important to mention all the wars that happen for capitalism to expand because that usually gets glossed over in the capitalist peace Theory many places just didn't want so-called free trade or capitalism and getting them to enter the global economy on terms that Favored wealthier Nations took a lot of brutal Wars of Conquest while liberal thinkers developed the idea of gentle Commerce fostering peace all over the world capitalism which always required expansion actively became a catalyst for war instead of an obstacle to it so many European capitalist Nations became colonial empires not for kicks but because their economies required endless growth to survive but ignore for a second the wars that installed capitalism all around the world and let's talk peace real quick the point of peace is that it's not violence obviously people don't love war but with all the unnecessary suffering and death and that's actually a problem for the capitalist peace Theory because even if you discount the wars that made global capitalism possible the picture you're left with isn't actually less violent at best assuming capitalist peace theory is true and countries stop fighting with one another entirely violence in the age of global capitalism changed but didn't go away instead of violence between states the world was left with a permanent state of structural violence turned inward we live under a tremendously violent system that's just part of capitalism if you don't work you go hungry you end up homeless and cops decked out in literal military gear beat you up for the crime of being poor that's the reality of this economic system and it persists despite the fact that we have enough food for everyone enough housing for all and enough capacity to spread work equitably so that it's not nearly so unbearable this violence is completely unnecessary homelessness and hunger don't need to exist given how much we produce but they do simply because making life better and providing for everyone's needs unconditionally generates way less profit than artificial scarcity and Desperation and that's before you factor engendered and racialized violence violence against immigrants crackdowns on protests and all the overt uses of violence that police the strict hierarchy of this system for Society to get as top heavy as it is today without the bigger group of people overthrowing the smaller one a lot of completely unnecessary violence needs to be doled out and that's been true in every era of capitalism it's obvious but just take how capitalism brutalized the African continent in every Century since its arrival first slavery drained Africa of its labor force then Colonial capitalism setup shop for European companies to extract natural resources that hasn't really stopped and in fact skip a few decades and the World Trade Organization World Bank and imf's structural adjustment programs exacerbated these practices these free trade programs required developing countries to completely restructure their economies in favor of Western companies opening up their vast markets to foreign Capital adopting austerity politics that cut essential public services in health Agriculture and education they trapped developing economies in debt reimbursement schemes that drained them of their remaining wealth and just to remind you nobody elected the leaders of these institutions or take an even more recent example like NAFTA free trade between North American states completely destroyed union labor and Mexican agriculture while increasing both malnutrition and unemployment [Music] the extremely long-winded point I'm making is that even if you believed that free trade reduces the likelihood of war the fact remains that everywhere capitalism has extended its logic people were brought into incredibly violent social structures whether that was under Colonial powers or decentralized markets violence doesn't just go away with free trade it turns inward countries might might fight each other less I'll get to that in a second but violence and the threat of its use structures every part of human existence in this Arrangement capitalist peace is still capitalism and peace is just not a word that applies to the kind of Brute Force this relies on but let's get back to the original claim liberals make global capitalism really reduced the likelihood of War just plain boring war two countries duking it out once countries are in a Free Trade Agreement does it stop that yes or no maybe but probably not in truth a lot of research has been devoted to this question and it's not settled that's partly because free trade isn't a binary switch countries can turn on and off and also because bilateralism and multilateralism have very different effects on a country's incentives add to that confounding variables like nuclear arsenals American global hegemony unequal exchange non-capitalist trade agreements and the offshoring of conflicts in proxy wars and it's really hard to Clearly say this one thing is what reduces the incidence of War but forget all that at best liberalized trade seems like it can only delay War temporarily and here we can turn to World War one and Lenin's theory of imperialism to understand why like we just talked about before World War One all the capitalist imperialist powers in Europe went out colonizing the planet and spread out like white supremacist butter on toast English French German Russian and other Empires slowly took over more and more of the planet in search of new markets resources and cheap if not outright free labor and in the process their economies became more entangled with one another money moved all over the place it was a global trading Bonanza and there were European companies everywhere this was the first era of globalized free trade after mercantilism and for a while it actually kind of worked it provided economic growth and accrued power for these Empires thanks to the seemingly endless exploitation on the horizon the problem is that unlimited growth is necessary for this system to work peacefully eventually you run out of room physically and metaphorically Market saturate like a sponge in order to grow once the whole world was covered countries couldn't just find new people to subjugate or land to plunder growth now had to be at some other country's expense and that's precisely the situation capitalist powers found themselves in on the eve of World War One a bunch of European Alexanders wept for there were no more worlds left to conquer and triggered partly by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand these countries seized the opportunity to go at each other's throats in the hopes of weakening and taking over someone else's Empire to satisfy their own need to grow and I'm using World War one as an example but this problem didn't just disappear today as the world's largest economy in the world compete in international markets is it oily natural gas semiconductors or something else with incredibly porous edges Capitals flow in proxy wars everywhere and tensions continue escalation among otherwise loyal someone will eventually become a business partner must get this victory foreign peace human rights and democracy all are good values, but they are not the reason Wars are fought in a very cliche way for example, Saudi Arabia would not be a multi-billion dollar business partner and a military ally with us, if only could not tolerate injustice anywhere the world is always looking for profit, why could ever capitalism prevent that capitalism does not lead to peace capitalism and peace are incompatible.