Barry Commoner once suggested that if we took the trillion annual dollars squandered on world military expenditure, we could feed, clothe, and educate the world’s population, and build a postgreenhouse economy freed from dependence on fossil fuels. As a cost-benefit analysis, this is ecologically persuasive. But such an analysis assumes that these disparate areas of social and economic life are not already linked in the first place—in other words, that institutional militarism, structural poverty, undereducation, and capital-intensive, hard energy production are not fundamentally linked in the world system of power relations. It is this kind of statistical calculation that generates the illusory promise of something like the ‘peace dividend’ in the wake of de-escalation of the Cold War. And yet, all too quickly, we find that ‘scarcity’ of some sort curiously prevents the reallocation to social programs of the vast economic resources devoted to the military, while noting that, in spite of this scarcity, there is always money to fight wars. It is not, then, simply a case of moving resources from one sector to another. Institutional militarism is much more than an obscene budgetary appropriation from the federal tax base. It is a highly complex embodiment of social, political, and cultural conditions of power, each with its own complex history. Militarism can no more be reduced to the testosterone factor—it’s a male thing—than it can be reduced to the specific economic need of capitalist production for market stability. If militarism is an ecological threat, the root problem lies: (a) in the social ecology of its own institutions, more profoundly undemocratic in their entire power structure than any comparably hierarchical, or authoritarian, political body: and (b) in the long, cumulative history of militarism’s hegemonic coordination of other institutions in society. All wars after the Gulf now demand urgent ecological analysis, not just because their consequences are physically damaging, and may imperil the survival of species on the planet—but also because they are rooted in a social ecology of domination that continues to sustain the power of some humans at the cost of the majority of others.
Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (Verso, 1994), p. 169.
