It was reported recently that
the IMF expects Russian economic growth to be higher than that of all advanced
economies this year. Despite all the sanctions imposed by ‘the West’ and the costs
of the war in Ukraine the Russian economy is doing rather well. It helps, of
course, that ‘the West’, including the UK, is effectively breaching those sanctions
on a large scale both by continuing
to buy Russian oil after it’s been processed elsewhere, and by selling
manufactured goods to Russian allies which then pass them on to Russia.
Sanctions may be well-intentioned, but the capitalist desire for profit is, as ever,
finding ways of avoiding them in pursuit of its own interests.
But there’s more to
it than that. One of the points noted by the IMF is that part of the growth is
down to the very high levels of expenditure by the state. It’s not something
that anyone who listened for a moment to the Labour-Tory financial consensus
would expect. In the UK we are told, from the Labour-Tory shared ideological
perspective, that state expenditure actually impedes economic growth and must
be reduced in order to cut taxes and incentivise those paying less tax to invest
in new capacity, even if it’s more likely in practice that the money will
simply be transferred to offshore tax havens. But the empirical truth, as
demonstrated by Russia, is that state expenditure can and does lead directly to
economic growth, in some circumstances at least. It would be preferable – for the
planet and most of humanity, even if not for capitalists and oligarchs – if that
expenditure wasn’t on munitions. But ‘capitalists and oligarchs’ is a not
insignificant caveat: in simple terms, war
is good for capitalism. It helps address the problems of over-production by
building large scale destruction into the economic mix. And it is almost always
funded by the creation of new money by states, money which then flows into the
pockets of those who own the means of production. Misery for the many leads to profit
for the few.
It's part of the
context for the announcement by Sunak this week that the UK will increase its
expenditure on armaments to 2.5% of GDP over the remainder of the decade. Like
anything Sunak says now, it’s not something that he expects to be around to
deliver: making promises that he won’t have to keep costs nothing. In this
case, though, it’s a promise which Labour seems keen to match, even if they caveat
the timescale a little by talking about “as soon as resources allow”.
There are, of course, multiple ways of achieving the stated objective. Causing
a recession and reducing GDP whilst holding military expenditure at current
levels would work mathematically, and I wouldn’t put it past either of them to
be able to achieve that. Incompetent procurement – simply paying more for the
same amount of munitions – is another; and that’s almost guaranteed, given the officially-admitted
incompetent UK approach to military procurement. Purchasing armaments is not
enough, though: capitalist logic requires not just their purchase, but their
use and destruction so that more can be purchased, even if few will voice that
sentiment aloud.
Let us suppose that,
between Starmer and Sunak, they manage to sort out procurement, avoid
recession, and increase military expenditure (probably by cutting expenditure
elsewhere, given their joint commitment to the nonsense about balanced budgets),
the question we should be asking is this: does that make war more likely or less
likely? History tells us that some wars
are started entirely by design (even if the outcome is often not that which was
expected) – such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine – whilst others happen more
by accident. The politicians talk about ‘deterring’ enemies, but one person’s
deterrent is another’s provocation; people who feel threatened can just as
easily decide to get their retaliation in first rather than wait to be attacked.
The danger is that talk of
being in a ‘pre-war’ situation and needing to consider conscription
makes a drift into war more, rather than less, likely. Individual steps which might each seem logical in themselves risk building into a disaster. They are leading
us to the brink of a self-fulfilling prophecy with no obvious route back.
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