In the popular imaginary, war is thought of as two gigantic armies clashing in titanic tests of

strength. World Wars One and Two are, in essence, what constitutes the intuitive sense of war. And yet,
for at least three decades, such conflicts have become anachronisms. The 1973 Yom Kippur War saw the
last major tank battle and the Iran-Iraq War of the Eighties was the last total war. Interstate wars not to
mention total wars are obsolete as an organizing dynamic in the capitalist world-system.
Contemporary wars have instead been couched in terms of humanitarian interventions to
protect vulnerable populations, rogue state interdictions or counterinsurgencies. That is, wars which are
not wars but take place between states or multilateral coalitions against nonstate actors or rogue states
declared criminal. Of these two, Im interested in armed conflict against non-state actors because I think
it typifies war in modern capitalism. It is not that the politics of rogue states is unimportant but rather
(1) post-intervention insurgencies tend to be much more important than the actual fight against rogue
states armies which are beaten relatively quickly (2) Projecting into the future, Western militaries
especially American military has turned away from interventionism toward drone warfare and the kinds
of combat that Im interested in.
In order to understand the logic of war, we must look at the combatants and battlefields of
modern war constituted by the class subjectivities of modern capitalism. In particular I want to isolate
the emergence of a globalized bourgeoisie as against a ghettoized surplus population. It is this latter
population which forms not only the cadre and political legitimacy of various insurgent groups but is
ultimately the object of managerial violence and policing.
First, I will look at the global bourgeoisie. Accounts of the rise of the bourgeoisie that has
escaped national boundaries is associated with the transnational capitalist class literature found in the
works of Leslie Sklair, William Robinson and others. While I agree with many of their claims regarding
the importance of trade and FDI flows, multinational production and especially the hegemony of finance
capitalism, I not only do not want to cover old ground but find their neo-Gramscian accounts to devolve
too much into class voluntarism. Instead, I want to provide a macro-history in which capitalism emerges
as a global social totality. While capitalism spread as a world-system during the industrial revolution and
arguably before, it did so through exchange and market relations. It is only in course of the 20
th
century
that social basis of production transforms globally and capital remakes the world in its own image.
The subsumption of society occurs earliest in nineteenth century Britain and America but
generalizes in 20
th
century Europe during postwar reconstruction when bourgeois hegemony totalizes.
Stalinist modernization was a powerful lever of primitive accumulation for a predominantly peasant
state and the Red Army extended state capitalist development into Eastern Europe. The final part of the
story is postcolonial independence since import-substitution modernization was the postcolonial states
attempt at transforming their societies into bourgeois capitalist societies proper. After World War II,
there were three main historical configuration of capitalism- Atlantic Fordism, Stalinism and Third World
developmentalism- all united by the logic of capital.
This was, however, not yet a world in which hegemonic rivalry had been superseded at a global
or regional level since neither Stalinist states nor Third World states had their societies subsumed by
capitalism but were rather in the transition. In the Soviet Union, the bureaucracy the role that an
organic bourgeoisie would have and the Third World was experiencing in the twentieth century its own
bourgeois revolution. And, I think it is in the stage of the transition to capitalism that hegemonic
rivalry is important either because (1) the bourgeoisie achieves dominance without hegemony and the
resultant alliances with pre-capitalist classes and centralized state-forms might translate to aggressive
foreign policies such as the Prussian Junker classes before World War I (2) leading states fall behind in
competition with new developers leading to imperialism or military balancing in order to recoup losses
such as 19
th
century Britain vis--vis Germany after the formers industrial base declined (3) societies
under the whip of external necessity to transform their production process engage in alliance behavior
in order to survive the military-geopolitical and economic pressures of advanced capitalist powers. An
example that James Allinson writes about is Hashemite Jordan. (4) states such as Israel where the
military is the only functioning institution for modernization leading to a state in which capitalism occurs
under the logic of war-driven accumulation.
The crisis of the 1970s began to transform this situation outside Europe. Land reform,
industrialization and importantly the turn to export-driven economic development led to dominance
WITH hegemony for the bourgeoisie in the ex-colonies. Increasingly, hegemonic rivalry became obsolete
and replaced by states committed to delivering high growth rates and political stability. But, I end in
1991 for a very important reason. While I think dtente and economic stagnation in the Soviet Union
effectively ended its battle for hegemony, there was still competition and proxy wars between the USSR
and the US in the eighties namely in Afghanistan. Furthermore, geopolitics in the colonies was in
transition from classical interstate rivalry into a world where armed combat is dominated by non-state
insurgents. So, India and Pakistan fight their last true war in 1971 but in 1986 India stages one of its
largest military mobilizations to which Pakistan responds. Camp David effectively ends the Arab-Israeli
conflict as a rivalry for dominance of the Middle East-North African regional system; however, the
Lebanese Civil War stands as a transition whereby Syria and Israel engage in combat but the real stakes
of that conflict are about decapitating the PLO and it is clear that Syria does not truly desire hegemony
except insofar as it can politically control Lebanon. It was the collapse of the USSR that marks the
political integration of the world into the capitalist international order by the Soviet bloc and it truly
pacifies postcolonial geopolitics by disqualifying a superpower patron.
Regardless, the result of the process whereby capital remakes society in its image has been the
pacification of rivalry over military and/or political leadership over a regional or global system even if
not geopolitical conflict in the form of policy incompatibilities. Instead, there has been a tendency
toward bilateral or multilateral treaties, densely interconnected institutions or security arrangements
military alliances, joint-defense pacts. At worst, there is a cold peace because formalized settlement is
domestically unviable or a cease-fire enforced by peacekeepers. All this has been led by the financial
and military power of the American state which is the most powerful state in the system of capitalist
states.
Ahh.. but poor capitalism it generalizes itself not through its prowess but crisis and it is out of
the logic of crisis that a more positive account of armed conflict in capitalism begins. The postwar
Bretton Woods systems initially saw the promotion of a liberal order in which trade and production
internationalization was associated with high rates of growth in all industrializing countries. The US ran
balance of payments deficits designed to stimulate the international economy and massive technology
transfers were given the Western European and East Asian states considered the frontline in the
defense against communism. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Western Europe and Japan completed their
economic recoveries saturating their internal markets which forced them to look to export markets to
sustain growth. The subsequent rise in worldwide competition led to a crisis whereby the global
economy became wracked by persistent overcapacity which it could not shake out. Despite
financialization of the economy and a reduction in the share of income going to labor, the rate of profit
has generally failed to recover in excess of the previous rate (outside a brief boom in the 1990s) instead
creating a trend toward higher unemployment or wage stagnation.
Overcapacity in manufacturing has underwritten system-wide deindustrialization. The latter
began in the US in the 1970s before generalizing in the 1980s and 1990s. Neoliberal reform hollowed
out industrial manufacturing as a share of GDP replaced by employment in the service sector and
informal economy. Deindustrialization has not been restricted to the core industrialized countries of the
West but even those countries considered industrializing whereby peak employment rates have been
proportionally smaller to those achieve by the early industrializers. Deindustrialization has been the
outcome of industrys very dynamism as labor-saving accumulations have thrown people out of the
formal sector creating a world in which, to quote Jan Breman, labor almost disappears from sight in a
landscape dominated by capital.
The subjectivity of these populations has variously been conceived of as the precariat or
immaterial labor but instead I will utilize Marxs concept of consolidated surplus population in Chapter
25 of Volume 1 and Im influenced by its interpretation by Aaron Benanav in Endnotes journal. Chapter
25 is initially an account of the determinations of the wage rate. Marx shows how the maintenance of a
level of employment keeps wages in line with the needs of accumulation. The industrial reserve army of
unemployed contractsa s the demand for labor rises causing wages to rise. Rising wages cut into
profitability causing accumulation to slow down. As demand for labor falls, the reserve army grows and
wage gains evaporate. However, if the industrial army regulates the labor market, the unemployed
increasingly outgrow this function reasserting themselves as absolutely redundant to the valorization
process. The dynamic growth of capitalism tends to throw off labor without it being absorbed back into
new industries. These populations are not completely outside capitalist social relations. Capital might
not need these workers, but they still need to work. They are thus thrust into abject forms of wage
slavery. This crisis expresses the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. On the
one hand, it reduces people to workers. On the other hand, they cannot be workers since, by working,
they undermine the possibility of their reproduction as workers.
The general law has been taken up and abandoned as the immiseration thesis. It was held that
Marxs prediction of rising unemployment and immiseration had been contradicted by capitalisms
history. After Marxs death, the industrial working class both grew in size and saw its living standards
rise. The rise of new industries that were simultaneously labor- and capital-absorbent did put off the
decline of Marxs secular trajectory for more than half a century. Currently, surplus capital in money
markets masks some of the tendency toward absolute immiseration through working class debt and by
preventing the bottom from falling out on global aggregate demand. And yet, debt has not stopped
wage moderation or rising unemployment. Informal employment constitutes half to three-quarters of all
non-agricultural employment in the low-GDP countries and is increasing as a share of employment in
high GDP countries. Microelectronics or informational technologies have been unable to absorb labor in
replacement of industrial decline and indeed multiply the problem by making industrial production
more efficient. The industrial proletariat is increasingly a small share of the overall workforce. To quote
Jan Breman again: a point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into
the labor process becomes stigmatize as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that
cannot be include now or in the future, in economy and society. This metamorphosis is, in my opinion at
least, the real crisis of world capitalism.
The logic of surplus population and the logic of warfare interact at least at three levels: First,
class relations underpin the cadres and political legitimacy for many insurgent groups. Economic
privatization has allowed the stoking of and fomenting of local antagonisms and the recruitment of the
unemployed especially the youth by warring parties as for example in various sub-Saharan African
conflicts. In India, the 2004 renaissance of the Naxalite rebellion emerges as peasants are threatened
with displacement from the countryside by giant hydro, logging and mining projects. The endangered
peasants form the core fighting strength of the rebllion. A more specifically urban context is Hezbollah.
Starting in the 1960s, the predominantly Shia peasantry were displaced and urbanized. The initial
reaction to rising poverty among the newly minted Shia urban poor were not along sectarian lines as
the Communist Party held influence along with the moderate Islamist Party Amal. During the mid-1970s,
the Lebanese economy declined as the 1975 Civil War negatively affected output and investment and
the Israeli invasion in 1982 further depressed the economy leading to deep recession in 1983-1984.
Furthermore, Israeli intervention in 1978 reinvigorated the Shia movement of the deprived and the
Amal party began fighting the PLO to defend the nation. However, Israels 1982 invasion cemented the
perception among the Shia poor that neither the Left nor moderate Islamism could defend their
interests. This is the condition under which Hezbollah declares itself to the world in 1985 and why it has
strong popular support among the Lebanese working class and urban poor.
The second interaction is warfare accelerating the process of creating surplus populations
through internally displaced peoples and refugees. Im thinking in particular of modern settler-
colonialism particularly Gaza where liberalization of the Israeli economy was met by the post-First
Intifada decoupling of Palestinian labor and what Sara Roy calls the de-development of Gaza. We see
the consequences today in which, since 2005, Gazans have been left to starve such that the UN predicts
it will be literally uninhabitable by 2020. Note, settler-colonialism deflects to a certain extent my
argument while simultaneously bringing it to a similar place because we cannot say that it is the
impersonal logic of the market that is operating here but the hellfire and brimstone of occupation.
The third connection is urbanization because the process of creating surplus populations is
primarily an urban process. The application of capital-intensive techniques to agriculture and saturation
of export markets for agricultural goods have forced a large-scale migration of the peasantry while
increased productivity in industry has displaced them from manufacture leaving them to languish in
slums and ghettoes. Those populations are considered chaotic threats in urban enclaves who must be
policed and managed. Hence, an antagonism between the metropole and the slum emerges leading to a
situation in which shanty settlements are bulldozed by government planners, paramilitaries go into
favelas to clear them for modern infrastructure or real estate development, to address the purported
threat of disease or crime or, as in the case of Brazil and the Olympics, to just make these people
disappear. Gaza has been constructed out of city-scale refugee camps and the war in Afghanistan has
underwritten mass flight into the cities. The future of warfare lies, according to former Major Ralph
Peters, in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, industrial parks, and the sprawl of houses, shacks,
shelters that form the broken cities of our world.
1
In Peters account, it is not only Hezbollah in Beirut
or the Somali National Alliance in Mogadishu, but protestors in Los Angeles who are among the dramatis
personae of modern warfare. Warfare operates as a kind of accumulation through spatial
transformation- the subsumption of space through militarization.
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, at the same time, the accumulation of misery, agony of
toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole i.e. on the side of the class
that produces its own product in the form of capital. The world-historic emergence of capitalism has
ended the era of war-driven rivalry between capitalist states without thereby ushering in an era of
perpetual peace as liberals so long for. Instead, the explosion of a surplus population in slums, favelas,
banlieues and ghettoes constitute a threatening mass which must be policed and managed to ensure
stability. Here, then, are the conditions of the possibility for the emergence of the figure of the insurgent
and the counterinsurgent who typify war in the neoliberal period. I want to, at the end, risk hyperbole. It
seems to me that this form of warfare is the capitalist form of warfare proper. The wars we saw
between capitalist states or between capitalism and its outside was violence of a world order in statu
nascendi. It is not the warfare between capitalists but rather between capitalists and the poor to
manage them either through impersonal coercion or outright brute force which is truly the geopolitics
of force within the bourgeois mode of production.


1
Ralph Peters, Our Soldiers, Their Cities, Paramenters, Spring 1991, pp. 43-50,