War, Capitalism, Ecology • Ill Will
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Faced with the war that has broken out in Ukraine, the philosopher-ecologist is lost. Overwhelmed by the events, he “does not know how to cope with the two tragedies at once,” that is, Ukraine and global warming. The only claim he advances is that our interest in the one ought not take precedence over our interest in the other. He makes no headway in grasping their relationship; yet they are, in fact, tightly linked, and even share a common origin. For him to recognize this, it would be necessary for Latour to admit the existence of capitalism, which is the framework wherein the two wars emerge and unfold.
Wars between States and those of class, race, and gender have always accompanied Capital’s development because, on the basis of primitive accumulation, they are the conditions of its existence. The formation of classes (of workers, slaves and the colonized, women) implies an extra-economic violence that founds domination as well as a violence that preserves it, stabilizing and reproducing the relations between victor and vanquished. There is no Capital without class war, race war, gender war, and without the State, which possesses the force and means of waging them! War and wars are not external realities, but are constitutive of the relation of Capital, even if we have forgotten this fact. Wars do not break out in capitalism because of some mean and nasty autocrats on one side and kind and friendly democrats on the other.
The war and the wars that we find at the onset of each cycle of accumulation, we also tend to rediscover at their end. Under capitalism, they provoke catastrophes and spread death to a degree that is scarcely comparable during other epochs. But there was a moment in the history of capitalism, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the relationship between war, the state, and Capital developed in such a way that its relative destructive power, which forms a condition of its development (its engine, says Schumpeter, in defining it as “creative destruction”), now became absolute. Absolute, because it places the very conditions of humanity at stake, alongside that of many other species.
The First World War and absolute destruction
Disciples of the Anthropocene disagree about the date of its commencement: the Neolithic, the conquest of the Americas, the Industrial Revolution, the great post-war acceleration, etc. They all carefully avoid confronting the rupture announced by the First World War, whose truly harmful consequences continue to act in our current affairs.
The great shift that forever altered the two-headed machine of State/capital in the 20th century occurred long before the outbreak of the 1929 financial crisis, during the war of 1914. The novelty of the Great War resided in the integration it accomplished between the State, economic monopolies, society, work, science, and technology. The cooperation of all these elements in the construction of a megamachine of production for war profoundly changed the function of each of them: in order to respond to “emergencies,” the State now accentuated executive power to the detriment of legislative and judiciary power, the economy experiences a similar concentration of political power in the form of the consolidation of monopolies, while society in its entirety (and not just the world of work) is mobilized for production; finally, scientific and technological innovation is now subsumed under the direct control of the State while undergoing a violent acceleration.
Ernst Junger, the “hero” of the First World War describes it thus: it constitutes less an “armed action” than a “gigantic work process.” By expanding an organization of production that concerned only a very small number of companies, the war became an occasion for the implication of all of society in production. “Countries were transformed into gigantic factories capable of mass-producing military services 24/7 so as to be ready to send them to the front where a bloody process of consumption, still completely mechanized, played the role of the market.”
The implication of every social function in the sphere of production (what Marxists speak of as the subsumption of society by Capital) was born in that moment and is marked, and will forever be marked, by war. Every form of activity, “even that of a house worker working at their sewing machine,” is destined for the war economy and participates in its total mobilization.