Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Profitable business

There's no doubt about it: war is unquestionably the most profitable 
business to be in. It's more profitable than car sales or kitchen 
renovations or even property speculation.

In what other business do your customers spend up big because the money is 
coming out of the public purse and not their own pockets, and then 
systematically destroy all the hugely expensive things they just bought so 
they all have to be replaced?

In what other business do your customers demand that you replace what they 
have destroyed not with more of the same but with bigger, more expensive 
versions which they will pay you to create and then buy from you once you 
have created them?

They'll even pay you to create versions they might want to buy; if they 
don' t buy the finished version you're still ahead. You can't lose!

And if you can get the government to indulge in a war with the right kind 
of enemy, you can end up with an entire country that has to have its 
infrastructure replaced, because its previous infrastructure was destroyed 
in the process of eliminating your back catalogue.

The opportunities for profit-making are just endless.

Of course none of this is new. It was widely recognised in the 19th 
century, but except among people actually in the business, it was generally 
frowned upon. Armament manufacturers in particular were actually castigated 
as "warmongers", as though making enormous amounts of money out of death 
and destruction on a grand scale was not nice.

What is new, over the last half century, is the frequency of wars. As soon 
as one stops another starts. Until now we have the USA, the country with 
the most weapons and the most profitable arms industry, actually merging 
them all together in an official policy of "endless war".

The business of war is now the national business of the USA. Which is 
probably not unrelated to the fact that every other business in the USA 
seems to be in the process of going down the gurgler.

The Economic Policy Institute, a US labour movement think-tank, says that 
3.3 million jobs have disappeared there since 2001 [the government admits 
to "only" 2.7 million]. That is the biggest sustained job loss since the 
Great Depression.

On September 5, the US Labor Department announced that an additional 93,000 
jobs had been lost in August. So many jobs have vanished that many 
unemployed people have simply given up the hopeless task of looking for 
work and are no longer counted by US officials as "unemployed".

This, it is widely acknowledged, accounts for the fact that the largely 
fictional official unemployment rate fell last month from 6.2 to 6.1 
percent. It certainly wasn't because people suddenly found work!

What makes the present situation different to the 1930s, however, is that 
this time US business is simply unable to bring those lost jobs back. Talk 
of economic recovery remains just that: talk.

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that the US Federal 
Reserve Bank had concluded that "the vast majority of the 2.7 million job 
losses since the 2001 recession began were the result of permanent changes 
in the US economy and are not coming back, which means the labour market 
will not regain strength until new positions are created in novel and 
dynamic economic sectors".

Just what those "novel and dynamic economic sectors" might be remains to be 
seen. In the meantime, US businesses are voting with their feet and 
shifting their operations to low wage countries.

And this trend is set to continue and to be extended to include so-called 
white collar, high-tech and service industry jobs, not just jobs in the 
manufacturing sector. US "trend-analysis" firm Forrester Research Inc, 
predicts that "another 3.3 million jobs will be permanently moved overseas 
by 2015" (Workers' World).

Marx's associate Frederick Engels, foresaw this process as long ago as 
1880, when he wrote (in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific): "If the 
introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions 
of manual workers by a few machine workers, improvement in machinery means 
the displacement of more and more of the machine workers themselves."

Further down he adds: "Thus it comes about that the overwork of some 
becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that 
modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, 
forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, 
and in doing so destroys its own home market."

This process got into high gear in the early 1980s. High-tech stocks began 
to boom as computers replaced workers and millions of jobs went out of 
existence.

The process continued during the late '80s, when Bush senior was President. 
Jobs continued to be lost but business was making profits, so the spin 
meisters of capitalism coined the term "jobless recovery" to try to make 
people think all was well.

And it seems that, except in the armaments business, the US is still having 
a "jobless recovery". But that kind of recovery is as fictitious as 
official US unemployment figures.

No matter how many wars Bush and co organise, the US economy won't recover 
until control over it is wrested from the corporations and vested instead 
in the hands of the people.