WeeklyWorker

19.03.2026
Bayeux Tapestry: 1066 and all that

Madmen versus Marx

Private property and war go hand-in-hand. Capitalism in turn has made wars ever bigger and ever more dangerous. How do we rescue human civilisation? Ted Reese outlines some of his answers

Colin Drumm, a relatively well known historian of money, recently claimed that Marxism cannot explain why ‘Judeo-Christian’ conservatives like Mike Huckabee “want to fulfil prophecy and bring on armageddon”. He says: “The ‘critique of capitalism’ is not a very useful lens for understanding the world. It’s long past time to accept this.”1

To be sure, Marx’s critique of capitalism cannot ‘explain everything’ on its own. It cannot, for instance, precisely explain why Judeo-Christian conservatives are culturally and neurologically habituated to beliefs they were brought up with from birth. Then again, it does explain why such beliefs came into being - the emergence of private property and the need of its owners to justify terror waged on people excluded from it. What it also does, more relevantly - which Drumm’s ‘Madmen of history’ theory does not - is explain why such fanatics are more likely to carry out their threat in the near future than they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

War has been a permanent feature of the capitalist epoch because of, fairly obviously, competition between capitalists. Less obviously perhaps is the rising intensity of competition - thus war is driven by the nature of capital accumulation, which tends to become ever more challenging, as the system ages.2

Capital

Marxists have always pointed out that, as capital accumulates, the rate of profit tends to fall, since the innovation, acceleration and expansion of commodity production naturally devalues the average commodity - less labour time is required, producing less profit per commodity. The overall mass of accumulated profit tends to rise, but at a slowing rate. The general rate of profit therefore tends to decline historically ever closer towards zero.3

The dual character of the commodity makes capitalist crises inevitable. At certain points in the ‘business cycle’ there arises an underproduction of profit/exchange value, which is also expressed as an ‘overaccumulation’ or surplus of capital - capital that cannot be reinvested profitably. Capital itself fetters accumulation. Marx’s identification of capitalism’s inherent barrier to production and his contention that it tends to grow ever more formidable is again empirically provable today. The amount of capital sitting idle in US money market funds is now around $8 trillion, for example - the size of the combined nominal gross domestic product of the UK and Germany - having risen steeply in the run-up to the last three major US recessions (and again, ominously, over the past three years).

Productive (commodity-producing) capitalist enterprises therefore slow down or reduce output - or are bankrupted, shut down and abandoned or sold off on the cheap. The devaluation of commodities subsequently devalues productive capital.

Before that subsequent devaluation, the growth of surplus capital and the slowdown of production increases relative scarcity and therefore inflation, raising the price of borrowing, investment, mergers and acquisitions. The devaluation of productive capital, though - expressed, for example, through cut-price sales and panic selling - then makes previously unaffordable capital affordable again, and at least some of the surplus money capital sitting on the sidelines finds new investment. Falling prices enable an acceleration in productive expansion and innovation.

The capitalist is compelled to find new investments - accumulate more capital - in order to offset the depreciation of his capital by raising productivity and his mass of profit; and fend off competition. Mergers and acquisitions, where two or more companies combine their capital into one - subsuming a competitor or enabling the defeat of a third - provide a kind of ‘short cut’ to accumulation and create economies of scale - a greater amount of production at a relatively lower cost. Like innovation, mergers accelerate during a recession, partly because surviving companies - riding out a crisis, thanks to their bigger cash reserves - can buy the capital from the bankrupted at bargain prices.

Amid falling prices, pioneers who cornered markets and secured the most customers by providing new/better/cheaper products see some rivals catch up; while new start-ups (often spin-offs from state research and development, with much lower overheads and greater flexibility and less bureaucracy) threaten to invent new market-leading products.

Domestic competition and the limited size of the domestic workforce compel capitalists to export surplus capital overseas - which often meets with resistance from local populations, national domestic capitalists or other multi/trans-national capitalist corporations. As the number of corporations and capitalist nations suffering from (rising) surplus capital grows, competition on the world market again intensifies. Taking over the capital of rivals, preferably ones that are definitively weaker, becomes increasingly necessary.

Another way to expand the ownership of capital when surplus capital cannot find a profitable outlet is to force countries to privatise their state/public industry, assets and funds. Look at imperialism’s endeavours in Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, for example. For these reasons, the outbreak of war becomes more and more likely and their frequency tends to rise. Capitalists rely on the military power of the nation-state in which they are based, since nation-states can raise and/or redirect taxes - and borrow money on a scale individual capitalists or corporations cannot.

Drumm’s desire to strip away socioeconomic context from the problem of saving humanity from madmen leaves us with the options of accepting annihilation or cutting off the head of the snake before allowing it to grow back bigger - the perpetual conundrum capitalist reformists always leave behind for future generations to deal with. That option is no longer available.

Imperialism’s extreme military power is not invincible and is in fact self-exhausting. The outlay on militaries and warmongering is increasingly expensive.4 The expansion and devaluation of commodities also expands the money supply and devalues money, reducing its relative purchasing power - the US dollar has fallen by 98% since 1913 - and arms monopolists suffering from rising surplus capital tend to slow down production and innovation and therefore raise prices (private R&D in the US has become almost totally dependent on state facilities). Innovation also creates new needs and capacities, compelling the state to purchase an ever-greater range of weapons and equipment. Then there are inflation-meeting pay rises for personnel - perhaps inflation-busting, where the demand for skilled personnel rises and/or the supply of personnel falls short (problems commonly arising from the overworking and abandoning of personnel, and by capitalism’s increasing inability to educate a sufficiently large skilled workforce).

China

The US’s nominal military spending keeps growing and yet its practical capacity is tending to shrink. Its stockpiles of munitions and critical materials - mostly supplied by China - are dwindling and its weapons and equipment are aging,5 since modernisation is increasingly unaffordable (something that is only partially addressed by increasing taxation and indebtedness; and/or redirecting spending from other governmental departments - hence recent moves by Nato nations to turn military spending up to 5% of GDP - but which obviously offers very definite limits).

Younger capitalist states with lower surpluses of capital may therefore be more innovative - producing more advanced, decentralised, nimble and automated equipment for far less money - even if they cannot match the absolute output and destructive capacity of older capitalist powers, which rely on scorched-earth tactics to compensate for the unwieldiness of their centralised nature.

This unfolding dynamic ensures that US imperialism must decline and face being eclipsed in a similar fashion to previous fallen empires - China has more or less already usurped the US productively, if not quite militarily - but also that capitalism must be eclipsed by world communism, since the decentralisation of the means of consumption and destruction empowers the working class to the eventual point at which its oppression is no longer enforceable.

War in and of itself slows down capital accumulation, in the sense that the capitalist state seizes value from capital and the public (through taxes) that might have been spent on productive capital and transfers it to unproductive, destructive armies.6 Weapons manufacturers, who are increasingly dependent on government contracts, subsidies and facilities,7 lobby for wars, since the demand for replenishment keeps state subsidies coming.

As rates of profit fall, private companies in general become increasingly dependent on subsidies, which means their ‘business models’ depend more and more on winning contracts that serve ‘security and defence’ (hence the rise of a particularly dystopian corporation like Palantir). The taxpayer and the tax base, which capital increasingly depends on, are therefore bled dryer and dryer - an unsustainable dynamic, which again ensures the eventual fall of capitalist states and empires.

The expense of prosecuting war needs to be offset by securing sufficient amounts of tribute - money, land, labour, factories, raw materials, value, etc. Rising debt-to-GDP - higher in the US since 2020 than at the end of World War II - suggests losses from the US’s warmongering increasingly outweigh the gains, despite the privatisations and land grabs and the fact that war destroys and cheapens surplus capital, opening up space for new accumulation (aided by the commercialisation of military inventions for the consumer market). It was World War II’s destruction that ended the Great Depression, not - as claimed by social democrats, Keynesians and proponents of Modern Monetary Theory - the state’s military spending.

With the ongoing automation revolution, including digitalisation and artificial intelligence, all these tendencies are accelerating - and the arms race accelerated by war in turn accelerates the automation revolution. As mergers and bankruptcies accelerate, fewer capitalists relative to total capital remain, and competition therefore again tends to intensify, since the overall mass of profit is relatively smaller. In turn, the compulsion to expand production via mergers and innovation, rather than with existing technology, also intensifies.

The threat of world war and nuclear armageddon will therefore tend to grow - outcomes that would, for one thing, put the achievements of capitalism to waste.

But war’s ability to regenerate capitalism is surely waning - not only because of the contemporary technical-economic dynamic (whereby automated production tends to diminish the profit incentive), but because a world war would probably destroy the habitability of the planet - either within a very short time frame or by accelerating global warming (itself a symptom of capitalist production, since capital needs to commodify nature at an ever-faster rate and non-renewable production - eg, fossil fuel - generates continual demand for capital, whereas renewable energy is built to last and its infinite capacity produces free and therefore unprofitable energy).

Only communism can preserve and advance the achievements of capitalism. Indeed, the automation revolution bringing about capital’s final devaluation necessitates a global communist economic system. That is, a singular, united economic system which ends competition and therefore makes war unnecessary.

The tendency for capital to merge naturally progresses towards a ‘final merger’, necessitating a publicly owned economy, since no exchange of ownership is required in a total monopoly.

Transition

The ‘tricky bit’, to say the least, is getting from where we are now - a world that is almost entirely capitalist - to global communism, without a humanity-ending counterrevolution.

How do we encourage and stimulate the defection of the working class and, perhaps decisively, sections of the capitalist class - as anticipated by Marx in The communist manifesto - over to the side of the revolution? In my view, such efforts should include the following:

Instead, we must offer to buy out the capitalist class via long-term debt payments - something that has always played a role amid the ascendence of a new ruling class and social system. The (former) capitalists can keep their houses and personal belongings. We will even cancel their mortgages and personal debt (along with everyone else’s). We just need to take the land and the banks, factories and mines, etc under state/public ownership.

  1. x.com/drumm_colin/status/1933905624095687119.↩︎

  2. Contemporary evidence is beginning to indicate that war - like states - did not really exist before the emergence of private property. See R Ferguson, ‘War is not part of human nature’ Scientific American September 1 2018.↩︎

  3. Deepankar Basu et al estimate that the ‘world’ rate of profit fell to below 12% in the 2010s.↩︎

  4. Of a below-inflation $6.1 billion defence funding increase in 2025, $5.6 billion went towards rising personnel costs. In 1980, a new F-16 Fighting Falcon cost $18.8 million. In 2024, the F-35A, a more advanced fighter, cost $82.5 million.↩︎

  5. The average age of the US air force’s fighter inventory rose from 10 years in 1980 to 24 in 2017. Likewise, the bomber force increased from under 20 years to 39 years; and the tanker fleet from 20 to 38 years.↩︎

  6. One reason for the post-World War I boom and the decline of US national debt was the return of military men to the productive workforce, whereas right now US military personnel are a relatively tiny part of the country’s population and the debt is rapidly snowballing.↩︎

  7. The UK think tank, Common Wealth, reported in July 2023 that BAE Systems pays just 14.35% of its own R&D costs and QinetiQ only 4.5%.↩︎