Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 War as peace, peace as pacification
- 2 War on waste; or, international law as primitive accumulation
- 3 ‘O effeminacy! effeminacy!’: martial power, masculine power, liberal peace
- 4 The police of civilisation: war as civilising offensive
- 5 Air power as police power I
- 6 Air power as police power II
- 7 Under the sign of security: trauma, terror, resilience
- Notes
- Index
2 - War on waste; or, international law as primitive accumulation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 War as peace, peace as pacification
- 2 War on waste; or, international law as primitive accumulation
- 3 ‘O effeminacy! effeminacy!’: martial power, masculine power, liberal peace
- 4 The police of civilisation: war as civilising offensive
- 5 Air power as police power I
- 6 Air power as police power II
- 7 Under the sign of security: trauma, terror, resilience
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Waste is a religious thing.
There is a curious connection between weapons and waste … Because waste is the secret history, the underhistory …
Don DeLillo, Underworld (1998)In the chapter on the genesis of industrial capital in Volume 1 of Capital, Marx writes:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield … These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Violence is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
Marx here highlights the fact that capitalism is not a spontaneous order and that, in contrast to the myth of an idyllic origin of private property, in actual history'conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part' (C1, p. 874).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- War Power, Police Power , pp. 48 - 87Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014