/lit/ - Literature

>By becoming unlimited, the military objective is no longer subordinated to the political goal of the state and tends to become autonomous. The war machine is no longer under state control, which introduces this “contradiction” that takes form in the Nazi and fascist war machines: they take the line of abolition of the movements without limits of war all the way. “In the development of capital, we find a problem that resonates with the possibility of contradiction between the limited political goal of war and the unlimited objective of total war.” The goal of Capital (production for Capital) is limited, while its objective (production for production) is unlimited. The limited goal and unlimited objective are therefore forced to enter into a contradiction for which Marx presents the expression in the chapter on the tendency for the profit rate to fall. “That’s part of the beauty of Marx’s text to show us that there is, in capitalism, a mechanism that works in such a way that the contradiction between unlimited objective and limited goal, between production for production and production for Capital, finds its resolution thanks to a typically capitalist process. This process is what Marx summarizes in the formula ‘periodical depreciation of capital and creation of new capital.’” Through this mechanism, Capital constantly resolves the contradiction at the same time as it proposes it in an expanded manner.

>War resolves the contradiction between its limited goal and its objective that has become unlimited in a similar way; and, like Capital, it only resolves it by expanding it. after almost escaping capital between the two world wars (fascisms), the war machine no longer took war as its objective but “peace.” The Nazis had made the war machine autonomous from the state, “but they still needed this war machine to operate in wars […]. In other words, they kept something of the old formula, that war would be the materialization of the war machine. I do not mean that today it is not like that, the war machine pursues wars, we see it all the time, but something nevertheless changed, it also needs war but not in the same way. The following situation tends to happen, […] the modern war machine would not even need to be materialized in real wars, since it would be war materialized itself. To put it another way, the war machine would not even need to have war as its object, since it finds its object in a peace of terror. It achieved its ultimate object suiting its character as total: peace.”

>Yet in the very act of countenancing destruction and massacre, war in all its disruptive spontaneity temporarily overcame the built-in limitations of the megamachine. Hence the sense of joyful release that so often has accompanied the outbreak of war, when the daily chains were removed and the maimed and dead to come were still to be counted. In the conquest of a country, or the taking of a city, the orderly virtues of civilization were turned upside down. Respect for property gave way to wanton destruction and robbery: sexual repression to officially encouraged rape: popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.

>In short, the oppressor and the oppressed, instead of fighting it out within the city, directed their aggression toward a common goal-an attack on a rival city. Thus the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve. Finally, war performed another function that was even more indispensable, if my hypothetical connection between anxiety, human sacrifice, and war prove defensible. War provided its own justification, by displacing neurotic anxiety with rational fear in the face of real danger. Once war broke out, there was solid reason for apprehension, terror, and compensatory displays of courage.

>Patently, a chronic state of war was a heavy price to pay for the boasted benefits of 'civilization.' Permanent improvement could come only by exorcising the myth of divine kingship, demounting its too-powerful megamachine and abating its ruthless exploitation of man-power.

>Psychologically healthy people have no need to indulge fantasies of absolute power; nor do they need to come to terms with reality by inflicting self-mutilation and prematurely courting death. But the critical weakness of an over-regimented institutional structure-and almost by definition 'civilization' was over-regimented from the beginning-is that it does not tend to produce psychologically healthy people. The rigid division of labor and the segregation of castes produce unbalanced characters, while the mechanical routine normalizes-and rewards-those compulsive personalities who are afraid to cope with the embarrassing riches of life.