23.01.2025

War, politics, economics

Starting with Carl von Clausewitz and a critical examination of what he actually said. Mike Macnair looks at pre-capitalist and capitalist times and the relationship between war and business

Let’s begin with a discussion of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous tag that “war is the continuation of politics by other means” or “the continuation of policy by other means” (either “politics” or “policy”, because the German word Clausewitz used, Politik, can be translated into English as either).

Why begin with Clausewitz? In the first place, Lenin read Clausewitz in 1915 and deployed the famous tag (in both forms) in published arguments about World War I.¹ Trotsky too deployed Clausewitz, not only in his military writings, but also (this tag) in relation to other wars.²

More generally, Clausewitz’s tag - whichever way we read it - has things to say to us that allow us to escape from moralistic judgments either of identifying the ‘aggressor’ (futile, given that truth is notoriously war’s first casualty) or of ‘siding with the oppressed’ (often equally misleading, given that ‘oppressed’ nations not infrequently serve as proxies in great-power conflicts).

Here I will start with what Clausewitz actually said in the several passages, and in that context a small part of the academic discussions of what it might have meant and how useful or not it might be; and then move on from one aspect of Clausewitz’s discussion - his idea of politics as an extension of business - to speculate about war as an economic phenomenon.

Other means

Clausewitz died in 1831, and his book Vom Kriege (On war) was published posthumously in 1832. He left, shortly before his death, a note indicating that he did not think this was a finished work: it was notes from which a finished work could be produced.³ This note, generally dated July 10 1827, includes one of the versions of the famous tag: “… der Krieg nichts ist als die fortgesetzte Staatspolitik mit anderen Mitteln” (“War is nothing but the continuation of state policy by other means”).⁴

A different form appears in chapter one, section 24:

Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln. So sehen wir also, daß der Krieg nicht bloß ein politischer Akt, sondern ein wahres politisches Instrument ist, eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs, ein Durchführen desselben mit anderen Mitteln.

(War is a mere continuation of policy by other means. We see, therefore, that war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to war relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses.)

Chapter 1 is generally accepted to be a part of the text Clausewitz thought he had finalised. Here Politik rather than Staatspolitik. And ein politischer Akt, and ein wahres politisches Instrument …, eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs: “a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce”. This must be ‘politics’ rather than ‘policy’. The translator has given ‘commerce’ for Verkehr: it is more common to translate this as ‘intercourse’, but we will see later overtones that might imply preferring ‘commerce’.

Section 26 of the same chapter is different:

… bei der einen Art Krieg die Politik ganz zu verschwinden scheint, während sie bei der anderen Art sehr bestimmt hervortritt, so kann man doch behaupten, daß die eine so politisch sei wie die andere; denn betrachtet man die Politik wie die Intelligenz des personifizierten Staates, so muß unter allen Konstellationen, die ihr Kalkül aufzufassen hat, doch auch diejenige begriffen sein können, wo die Natur aller Verhältnisse einen Krieg der ersten Art bedingt.

(… in one kind of war the political element seems almost to disappear, whilst in another kind it occupies a very prominent place, we may still affirm that the one is as political as the other; for if we regard the state policy as the intelligence of the personified state, then amongst all the constellations in the political sky which it has to compute, those must be included which arise when the nature of its relations imposes the necessity of a great war.)

Die Politik here must be translated as ‘policy’ - the translator has added ‘state’ to emphasise the point: only ‘policy’ rather than ‘politics’ could plausibly be called “the intelligence of the personified state”.

In short. Vom Kriege was not a fully revised text. In a series of usages of the tag, whether Clausewitz is appropriately translated as referring to ‘policy’ or ‘politics’ varies with context and is not entirely clear.

There is an enormous academic literature on the tag. For example, military historians Michael Howard and Peter Paret produced in 1976 a translation of On war, which is constructed on the basis that Politik is policy. Hew Strachan in 2022 offered a critique of this reasoning, on the basis that the systematised translation of Politik as ‘policy’ reflected the ideas of US and British military thinkers in the cold war period about the proper relations of the army and the civil power.⁵ Conversely, several authors have argued for Politik as primarily translatable as ‘politics’, with various implications - chiefly upgrading the significance of civil war and other non-state forms of war to the theory of war as such.⁶

Of particular interest to us, I think, is David Keen’s 1998 The economic functions of violence in civil wars, and some of Keen’s later work on wars and artificial crisis as modes of exploitation - not in the technical Marxist sense, but in a sense more analogous to straightforward theft and robbery. The idea is that it is actually more useful to think of war as about economics and economic interests than to think of it as about policy as “the intelligence of the personified state”.⁷

Another bit of Clausewitz adds something to the issue. In book 2, chapter three, we find:

Der Krieg ist ein Akt des menschlichen Verkehrs. Wir sagen also, der Krieg gehört nicht in das Gebiet der Künste und Wissenschaften, sondern in das Gebiet des gesellschaftlichen Lebens. Er ist ein Konflikt großer Interessen, der sich blutig löst, und nur darin ist er von den anderen verschieden. Besser als mit irgendeiner Kunst ließe er sich mit dem Handel vergleichen, der auch ein Konflikt menschlicher Interessen und Tätigkeiten ist, und viel näher steht ihm die Politik, die ihrerseits wieder als eine Art Handel in größerem Maßstabe angesehen werden kann.

(War is part of the intercourse of the human race. We say, therefore, war belongs not to the province of arts and sciences, but to the province of social life. It is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others. It would be better, instead of comparing it with any art, to liken it to trade, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still more like state policy, which again, on its part, may be looked upon as a kind of trade on a great scale.)

Verkehr again, here translated as ‘intercourse’ rather than ‘commerce’, and geselleschaftlichen Lebens (‘social life’). We can sometimes translate Gesellschaft as ‘economy’, as the later German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), contrasted it to Gemeinschaft. Handel, translated here as ‘trade’, perhaps might be better as ‘business’. There is an interesting idea in this passage that business or trade is inherently conflictual. This is clearly correct in the sense that contracting parties have conflicting interests, and for that matter, businesses are in competition with one with another.

Then Clausewitz goes on to argue that Politik (the translator has added ‘state’) “may be seen as a kind of trade” or better, “a business skill”, on a “great scale. This again, has to be ‘policy’ rather than ‘politics’. What is this policy that is business on a large scale? The answer is that it is within the framework of mercantilism or ‘cameralism’, the conception of the relation of the state and economy that was taught in German universities all through the 18th century, and right down to the middle and to some extent to the later 19th century.⁸ Each of the states is in competition with each other to attract businesses, which will then produce increased tax revenues.

Economic

I move back to the passage from book two, chapter three, quoted above: war as business conflict of interests and competition, carried to the scale of the state. What follows is highly speculative.

I want to be careful about this. I do not want to say that all wars are motivated by economics. No doubt some wars are. At other times the immediate motivations may be purely ideological. For example, it is fairly clear that why the United States invaded Iraq was a combination of George W Bush’s unfinished business, or rather his father’s unfinished business from 1991, plus a bunch of neocons coming up with the fantasy that the US was going to create a bastion of democracy in the Middle East by reconstructing Iraq along the lines of the reconstruction of Germany after World War II (but without a Marshall Plan) …

It is more useful, in my view, to think about wars as having economic effects. Those may well be more determinative about what the practical significance of wars is than the ideological motivations. As I said, grand-scale speculation. So I look now in extreme outline at the economic effects of war in classical antiquity, in European feudalism and in capitalism.

In classical antiquity, war had the effect of large-scale slave-taking. Two patterns can be seen. The Mesopotamian states, and the Iranian states that succeeded them, took prisoner the whole population of a city, or large groups of people, and deported them into fairly distant areas, to set up new cities under state control. Thus, for example, the 597 BCE Babylonian captivity of the Jews by the neo-Babylonian empire. In 55 BCE, the Romans suffered a catastrophic military defeat at Carrhae (modern Harran, in south-eastern Turkey), and the prisoners of war were deported by the victorious Parthians to Merv (modern Mary, Turkmenistan). In 256 CE the Sasanian king, Shapur I, took the Roman city of Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) and deported the prisoners to set up Gundeshapur, in modern Khuzestan, Iran. For a final example, in 540 CE the Sasanian king, Khosrow I, took Antioch and other Roman cities and deported the prisoners to create ‘Wēh Antīōk Khosrow’ (‘Khosrow’s new better Antioch’), a new town near Ctesiphon on the Tigris (in modern Iraq).⁹

The other pattern is the Greeks and Romans; we have more detailed information about the Romans. The Institutes of Justinian gives a clear statement of a much older rule: “Things again which we capture from the enemy at once become ours by the law of nations, so that by this rule even free men become our slaves, though, if they escape from our power and return to their own people, they recover their previous condition.”¹⁰

The jurist, Pomponius, writing in the mid-100s CE - commenting on a book by Quintus Mucius Scaevola, writing in around 100 BCE - says:

if we have neither friendship nor hospitium with a particular people, nor a treaty made for the purpose of friendship, they are not precisely enemies, but that which passes from us into their hands becomes their property, and a freeman of ours who is captured by them becomes their slave, and similarly if anything of theirs passes into our hands ...¹¹

I think this is quite important for understanding the Roman state. Private-enterprise slave-raiding across the border with anybody who has not got a peace treaty with the Romans will generate slaves, and in fact we know that the Romans raided Ireland for slaves and, conversely, the Irish raided Roman Britain for slaves. Carl Harper’s 2011 book, Slavery in the late Roman world, AD 275-425 draws on the extensive evidence of the slave trade, slave prices, and so on, to show the persistence of slavery in the later Roman empire. This private quality concerns not only slave-taking, but also slave ownership, which extended a long way down the social scale.

So the Mesopotamian and later Iranian states took whole groups of prisoners of war or city populations, and set them up as state-controlled cities. The Romans in contrast (and the Greeks as well) took individuals and then sold them off to be privately owned slaves distributed among the general population. The economic effect here is straightforward. The society acquires skilled labour by capture. (It was skilled workers mainly held in slavery. The unskilled labour for the harvest season, and so on, was mainly hired.)

In European feudalism, we can see war functioning economically in two ways, one of which is taking land and the other simple looting of movables. Both aristocracy and peasantry are land-hungry. Either primogeniture, as in England and a number of other places, means the eldest son gets the lot, and the younger ones have to go out and make a fortune; or, alternatively, equal inheritance means the land is divided and subdivided and sub-subdivided, so that the holdings of every individual child are small, and there is a powerful aspiration to get more. The church has an equivalent, which is hunger for pilgrims, because pilgrims produce income like the modern tourist industry. Part of the crusades involved getting control of the pilgrimage/tourist trade to Jerusalem.

Robert Bartlett’s 1993 book, The making of Europe: conquest, colonization and cultural change, 950-1350, displays the process. For example, the English expand into eastern Wales, southern Scotland and Ireland. In Germany in the Drang nach Osten (drive to the east) Germany expands eastwards, but also you get German towns all across eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, the other sort of feudal warfare is raiding: ‘chevauchées’, mounted plundering expeditions, and very famously carried out throughout the Hundred Years War in the 1300s by the English in France, but starting much earlier.¹² Richard W Kaeuper’s 1988 War, justice and public order: England and France in the later Middle Ages makes the point that the state, both in England and France, had a choice between ‘war-state’, which is taking your barons and knights off on expeditions to loot neighbouring countries; or, on the other hand, ‘law-state’, attempting to subject them to legal rules and control their behaviour at home. I have given English and French examples because it is easier to do so, but one can see the same dynamic elsewhere.

Capitalist war

The normality of capitalist war is obscured to us because there is a delusional idea that comes originally from Immanuel Kant’s 1795 book, Perpetual peace, that the interest of business is peace. This resurfaces in the left as a result of Max Beer (in the 1890s) seeing the British Liberal Party in the mid-19th century as being anti-war and anti-imperialist, which was quite deeply misleading. Karl Kautsky picked up on Beer’s argument, and therefore declared that industrial capitalism was anti-war and anti-imperialist, and from this argument the left got the mistaken idea that war and imperialism is a feature of the decline of capitalism, rather than a normal feature of capitalism.¹³

There is an enormous literature about imperialism and an important literature about ‘geopolitical economy’ that is more directly relevant to present concerns. But to engage with this would mean a whole other article. I just use my own long series on ‘Imperialism and the state’ from 2022 as a rough way of framing the issue.¹⁴ And here I suggest thinking of war as enclosure; war as competition seeking monopoly; and war as economic stimulus.

We start with one of the classic books about enclosure, Robert Allen’s 1992 Enclosure and the yeoman, the agricultural development of the south Midlands 1450-1850. What Allen shows is that the argument of enclosure advocates, that enclosure was necessary for efficient agricultural development, turns out to have been untrue. A lot of the agricultural improvement, at least in the area that Allen studied, took place through the operations of yeoman farmers. The enclosures, rather, arose because the 18th century saw a centralisation of agricultural finance in the hands of the landed gentry, so that the gentry became the finance capitalist superstructure of a capitalist tenant-farmer class. Enclosure, then, is the expropriation of the small farmer in favour of the creation of large, capitalist farms, and this process also has the effect of creating a proletariat by driving the workers off the land. This last point is familiar Marx, though the reasoning is somewhat different.

Enclosure’s role in creating a proletariat is also visible in colonial contexts. Chapter six of William Clare Roberts’s 2018 Marxist inferno: the political theory of ‘Capital’ explores the explicit discussion of the political economy in connection with the settlement of south Australia. Similar forms of expropriation through legal creation of ‘property rights’ out of prior pre-capitalist social superiorities can be seen in several other parts of the colonial world.¹⁵

A much more recent example of the indirect effects of wars - and proxy-war operations - as a form of ‘enclosure’ can be seen Immanuel Ness’s 2023 book, Migration as economic imperialism. The point is that, in spite of all the talk about controlling immigration, the reality is that the imperialist countries are inflicting death and destruction on ‘third world’ countries, both through International Monetary Fund ‘structural adjustment’ programmes and through direct interventions and proxy-war operations and, as a result of doing that, expropriating from the possibilities of work and business in their own countries the more skilled and advanced sections of the working classes and the middle classes from these countries, thereby driving migration to the imperialist countries. This is actually, in a sense, a return to the slave-taking of the classical antiquity in that what is involved is the direct appropriation of labour being dragged or pushed out of the countries that are devastated by war, and as a result pulled into the imperialist countries, where they could be used to make up for ‘skill gaps’, and so on.

I do not think this leads to the conclusion that leftists should favour immigration controls, because, of course, the effect, as we have seen, is not in fact to reduce migration, but simply to increase the power of capital over migrant labour.¹⁶ The general point - that wars and proxy wars, by driving migration, increase the supply of labour available to capital - is fundamental.

Competition

Secondly, there is war as competition between capitalists seeking monopoly. We can start on this with the Venetian-Genoese wars, which ran between the mid-13th and late 14th centuries as direct wars, but continued in effect with Venetian-Spanish conflicts in the 16th century after Genoa became a client of Spain. It is clear enough that the outcome of the wars entailed control of segments of trade.¹⁷ Similarly, the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652-54, 1665-67, 1672‑74, and 1780-84 very transparently resulted in economic consequences (tending over the whole series to strengthen British control, in spite of episodic defeats), irrespective of their substantial ideological aspects.¹⁸ It is 18th century versions of this sort of war that Clausewitz sees as “state policy, which again, on its part, may be looked upon as a kind of trade on a great scale”.

Moving into the 20th century, it is at least arguable that a major element of the background to World War I is British aggressive encirclement of Germany. Certainly the result of the war was elimination of German colonial possessions and the dismemberment of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires (predicted by the ex-leftist, Parvus, when he advised the Turkish government to join the ‘central powers’, Germany and Austria, in order to escape the yoke of Anglo-French control of Turkish finances, etc.)¹⁹

Coming up to the more recent, consider equally the effects of the American invasion of Iraq: serious damage to French and German commercial interests, because the prior partial lifting of sanctions had resulted in French and German contracts with the Iraqi regime. Consider equally the 2014 ‘Euromaidan’ coup, and its consequences down to and including the ongoing war in Ukraine. French and German interests, and European interests more generally, are savagely affected by cutting out Russian gas supplies. Equally, to the extent that sanctions actually operate, US capital will replace Russian sales of armaments, aerospace and nuclear power equipment, so that there is a straightforward US protectionist effect of this war, beginning already in 2014. These are just a few examples and there are many others.

That war can function as a form of capitalist competition seeking monopoly is familiar from standard Marxist work on imperialism - from the discussion in the Second International and the work of Bukharin and Lenin. My point is that this is not a novelty of the “highest stage”, but endemic to capitalist states as such.

Stimulus

Finally, there is war as stimulus. I discussed this in the last part of the series, ‘Imperialism and the state’. The point is that if we think of the world as a closed economy - which Marxist economic theorists generally posit - then war production does not produce a sustained stimulus, because taxes have to rise to pay for the arms or for the debt incurred to buy them.

But positing a closed economy is mistaken, because what we actually live in is a world of multiple states. And, if the result of war production is that arms production is carried on in the United States and paid for by other capitalist states (either directly or through events like the 1971 US dollar float or the 1985 Plaza Accord, allowing the US inflation-away of its debts), then the stimulus effect of the increase in production in armaments takes effect in the US and boosts its economy. But the depressive effect of the taxes to pay for the arms takes place somewhere else. For example, the US economy has been substantially stimulated by the Ukraine war, while European economies have been substantially depressed.

We need to think about all this as affecting not just the big wars like Ukraine, but also a lot of the small wars. I referred earlier to David Keen’s 1998 The economic functions of violence in civil wars. Keen has written more extensively on the economics of wars and disasters as beneficial for particular capitalist groups at the expense of other groups. He has a 2024 book out with Ruben Andersson, Wreckonomics, which attempts to generalise the theory beyond wars to the ‘war on drugs’ and so on. I think Wreckonomics is a little bit of an overgeneralisation.

Nonetheless, it is worthwhile thinking about the stimulative effects of war for the world hegemon state. The US does not only draw in migrants by promoting war elsewhere: by creating instability and insecurity elsewhere in the world, the US draws money into its financial system, which helps keep its economy afloat, in spite of the fact that the US runs an enormous state deficit. The same, of course, is true of the UK on a much smaller scale: that is, it is enabled to run a serious deficit in both visible and invisible trade partly because US wars and proxy wars attract hot money to the UK as a safe parking place.

We return finally to Clausewitz. War is a continuation of politics with other means (violence) added, but politics is a continuation of economics with state coercion added; and war can be seen to have profound economic effects, even where its overt motivations are superficial ideologies.

Mike Macnair spoke at Winter Communist University on January 17, this is an edited version. His talk can be found at youtube.com/watch?v=pfpsT5cU0ZY

1. DE Davis and WSG Kohn, ‘Lenin’s “Notebook on Clausewitz”’ Soviet Armed Forces Review Annual, (1977) pp188-229; ‘The collapse of the Second International’ (1915), chapter 3: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/iii.htm; ‘War and revolution’ speech, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14.htm.↩︎

2. Military writings: B Pearce (ed) How the revolution armed (five volumes) London 1979-81: eg, vol 1, pp211, 412; also ‘Learn to think’ (1938): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/05/think.htm.↩︎

3. This is debated, though. P Donker, ‘The genesis of Clausewitz’s On war reconsidered’ British Journal for Military History vol 2 (2016), pp101-17.↩︎

4. Here and in following quotes, German texts from clausewitzstudies.org/readings/VomKriege1832/_VKwholetext.htm; English translations from clausewitzstudies.org/readings/OnWar1873/TOC.htm.↩︎

5. C von Clausewitz On war Princeton NJ 1989; H Strachan, ‘Michael Howard and Clausewitz’ Journal of Strategic Studies vol 45 (2022), pp143-60.↩︎

6. Eg, I Roxborough, ‘Clausewitz and the sociology of war’ British Journal of Sociology vol 45 (1994), pp619-36; A Schu, ‘What is war?’ Revue française de science politique (English edition) vol 67 (2017), pp1-18; G Dimitriu, ‘Clausewitz and the politics of war: a contemporary theory’ Journal of Strategic Studies vol 43 (2020), pp645-85.↩︎

7. Adelphi papers vol 38 (1998); for some of Keen’s more recent work see, for example, Useful enemies New Haven 2012.↩︎

8. On the 17th-18th century, see, for instance, the review of recent work by PR Rössner: ‘Heckscher reloaded? Mercantilism, the state and Europe’s transition to industrialisation, 1600-1900’ Historical Journal vol 58 (2015), pp663-83; later 19th century: E Grimmer‑Scholem The rise of historical economics and social reform in Germany, 1864-1894 Oxford 2003.↩︎

9. For general reference with more examples, see S Shahbazi, E Kettenhofen, JR Perry, ‘Deportations’ Encyclopaedia Iranica, VII/3, pp297-312: www.iranicaonline.org/articles/deportations.↩︎

10. Institutes (534 CE) book 2. title 1. section 17.↩︎

11. Justinian Digest (promulgated 534 CE) book 49. title 15. section 5.2, Pomponius, Commentary on Quintus Mucius [Q Mucius Scaevola pontifex, The Civil Law] book 37.↩︎

12. Hundred years’ war: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevauchée; earlier: ‘Anonymous of Bethune’ (1220s), cited by John Gillingham in JS Loengard (ed) Magna Carta and the England of King John Woodbridge 2010, p30 (on war in Flanders in the 1200s-1210s).↩︎

13. See B Lewis and M Zurowski (trans) Karl Kautsky on colonialism London 2013 and my introduction there.↩︎

14. Weekly Worker supplements, March-April 2022: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1387/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-i (March 17); weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1388/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-ii (March 24); weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1390/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-iii (April 7); weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1391/supplement-imperialism-and-the-state-part-iv (April 14).↩︎

15. Eg, R Nichols Settling the frontier: land, law and society in the Peshawar valley, 1500-1900 Oxford 2001; L Kamel, ‘Whose land? Land tenure in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Palestine’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies vol 41 (2014), pp230-42; B Bhandar Colonial lives of property: law, land and racial regimes of ownership Durham NC 2018.↩︎

16. See on this point my 2006 Yürükoğlu memorial lecture, ‘Fortress the west’: t-k-p.net/yurukoglu/lectures/fortress_the_west.pdf.↩︎

17. There is a convenient summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian–Genoese_Wars.↩︎

18. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Dutch_Wars.↩︎

19. See, for example, S McMeekin The Berlin-Baghdad express: the Ottoman Empire and Germany’s bid for world power, 1898-1918 London 2011; C Clark The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 London 2013 (on Anglo-French and Russian sponsorship of Serbian nationalist terrorism); the contemporary ex-leftist authors are discussed in M Macnair, ‘Die Glocke or the inversion of theory: from anti-imperialism to pro-Germanism’ Critique vol 42 (2014), pp353-75.↩︎