Nicholas Kristoff, in a New York Times op-ed (“Our Lefty Military,” June 16), lauds the “astonishingly liberal ethos” that governs the military internally — single-payer health insurance, job security, educational opportunities, free daycare — in support of Gen. Wesley Clark’s description of it as “the purest application of socialism there is.”
For me — an avowed libertarian socialist as well as a market anarchist — at least two howlers stand out here. First, when I think of “socialism,” I think of all the liberatory things originally associated with that term back in the days of the early working class and classical socialist movement in the nineteenth century: Empowerment of the working class, worker control of production, and all the rest. Last I heard, the U.S. military isn’t set up as a worker cooperative, with enlisted men electing officers, managing their own work, or voting on whether or not to go to war. Taking orders from a boss “because I said so” isn’t my idea of socialism.
Second, the primary external mission of the U.S. military is to keep the world — or rather the corporate pigs who claim to own it — safe from anything remotely resembling worker empowerment. To me, that’s pretty unsocialistic. For the past sixty-odd years since WWII (a lot longer, actually), the primary focus of American national security policy has been to protect feudal landed oligarchs from land reform, protect Western-owned corporations from nationalization, act as collector of last resort for the company store known as the World Bank, and enforce the draconian “intellectual property” protectionism which is the central bulwark of global corporate power today. Kristoff’s “socialist” military’s primary mission is keeping the world firmly in the hands of its corporate rulers.
Aside from that, I think Kristoff has it exactly backward: The military is almost a parody of American corporate culture. It’s riddled with hierarchy, with Taylorist/Weberian bureaucratic work rules and standard operating procedures, and all the irrationality that goes with them. The only difference is, the pointy-haired bosses wear a different kind of uniform. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Brazil,” or read Dilbert on a regular basis, you get the idea.
Kristoff has one point on his side: The differentials between production workers and senior management are a lot lower in the military than in present-day Corporate America. But that just means the military is structured more along the lines of old-style bureaucratic “Organization Man” capitalism of the sixties (as described by J.K. Galbraith), in which CEO salaries were typically only fifty times that of a production worker, rather than the current pathological model of cowboy capitalism where it’s more like five hundred.
The military, like the large corporation, is plagued by enormously high overhead costs (the cost of training a soldier), and enormously wasteful capital outlays. The military, like an oligopoly corporation, can afford to be so wasteful because it doesn’t bear the full cost of its own activities.
Corporate America’s prevailing management accounting system, invented almost a century ago by Donaldson Brown of DuPont and GM, equates consumption of inputs to creation of value. You know, like the Soviet centrally planned economy. Administrative costs like management salaries, along with wasteful capital expenditures, are incorporated — through the practice known as “overhead absorption” — into the transfer price of goods “sold” to inventory. And in an oligopoly market, the corporation is able to pass those costs — plus a profit markup — on to the customer through administered pricing. The military shares that pricing system, with its incentives to maximize costs (Paul Goodman called “the great kingdom of cost-plus”). Ever hear of those $600 toilet seats? But in the case of the military, the administered pricing is called “taxation.”
In short the military, like the large corporation, is a giant, bureaucratic, irrational, and authoritarian institution which can only survive through parasitism — enabled by the state — on the working class.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Nossa Instituição Militar Corporativa.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Our Corporate Military, Counterpunch, 06/24/11
I think the typical American big corporation is even more of a bureaucratic nightmare than the military. I remember after about 6 months working for my previous employer (a huge corporation) I was left scratching my head as to how it could possibly be that I had less red tape to deal with when I was in the army. Not that I'm defending the army mind you.
And your final paragraph really hits home. It was in a cost accounting class where I was exposed to the idea of inflating profits by simply producing more product – not actually selling it. And that this wasn't dishonest; it was in fact the way GAAP is actually intended to work. That was pretty much the last straw for me and I could no longer continue in an accounting major after that.
Back when the US auto industry was going strong, I used to hear reports that x number of US jobs were directly or indirectly related to auto production. "x" was a pretty sizable percentage of the total number of US jobs. The downside of course is that auto-related jobs fell almost in tandem with falling demand for US autos. As a consequence, large swaths of the US economy were affected negatively leading to massive layoffs and reorganizations. I'm sure there are academic studies and statistics describing the effects. My question is this: are there any comparable studies about the number of jobs directly or indirectly related to the military? Are there any statistical projections of what layoffs can be expected in the military-industrial-congressional-banking-media complex once the Iraq/Afganistan/Libya et al wars end? Assume that the wars end and that no replacement threats are created to preserve the status quo. What happens to wages when several hundred thousand discharged soldiers return to the US labor market? (Hint: wages go down). What happens when your Uncle Joe and Aunt Sally and thousands if not millions of others are laid off from defense-related companies whose primary revenue source, or a large part thereof, is the US government? Know of any novels with a similar plot?
I’ve told you before: that’s not feudal. The confusion is closely analogous to confusing actually existing capitalism and a truly free market, so much so that a freed up feudal institutional structure would actually be a good basis for a freed up and long term viable society. So the confusion can’t simply be hand waved away as just being using common parlance, any more than using the terms “capitalism” and “free market” interchangeably can be; each confusion is actually obscuring something very material, and each instance of it further entrenches the confusion.
Todd S. wrote:-
Even so, that’s not sound accounting. If you just do that with nothing further, you book a profit in that period but a loss in a later period if you have to scrap or distress sell the inventory. What you are supposed to do is make a realistic provision against that for new inventory in the period in which it is produced, and then charge against that rather than against profit and loss if a write down is necessary later. That makes charges against profit and loss match periods better.
[…] Article by Kevin Carson. —————————————————————————————————— […]
To P.M. Lawrence. Please define feudalism. Why is it confusingly analogous to actually existing capitalism versus a free market?
Just saw this piece posted on Counterpunch. Alright Kevin and C4SS!
Joda, feudalism is covered pretty well by authors like Ganshof, e.g. in his book Feudalism. It is simply the (emergent) system arising from feudal relations between persons (mostly natural persons, but also occasionally entities like monasteries), which are those in which one person pledges some defined service or services to another in return for others, usually commitments of tribute or military service on specific occasions in return for land tenure or something similar like the right to fish or gather fuel in a certain area.
This is not a form of contract in the modern sense, as a modern might misread it, because in a contract if one party does not deliver then the other need not; here, promises are exchanged, and then each promise is binding whether or not the other is honoured – though, of course, it was prudent and common to word promises so that they were disabled as, when and if the reciprocal promises were dishonoured. Also, the underlying sanction was honour, in that someone whose promises were worthless wouldn’t find anyone to deal with, whereas contracts of the modern sort are backed by an external legal system enforced by the state.
And feudalism is not confusingly analogous to actually existing capitalism versus a free market; it’s not confusingly analogous to anything. Confusing feudalism, which has no state backing, with landed oligarchs – often state backed – is closely (I didn’t write “confusingly”) analogous to confusing actually existing capitalism and a truly free market. Historically, the confusion arose because states bought out the independence of feudal magnates with new, state backed positions, and then people like the French revolutionaries miscalled that feudal. (I will omit discussion of Livery and Maintenance, sometimes called Bastard Feudalism, that came in between the two.)
The earlier, genuine feudal system was imperfect itself, not because it was feudal but because the people going into it had the unbalanced power relations of warlords and peasants in the Dark Ages, and because it had institutions like primogeniture and strategic marriages that aggravated rather than smoothing out imbalances over later generations. Think of a Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai scenario in which the protectors stay on in return for a retainer, making the arrangement permanent, and with something like it happening in every village. Usually, peasants gave up their land in return for protection – freely, albeit in the face of raiders – and then leased it back; that was real protection from unrelated threats, not a protection racket in which the threat was itself from those individuals being paid off (it was, however, from the class of such individuals – so that class eroded as its members made such deals). The feudalism that resulted is subject to the same sort of criticism that Chesterton made of capitalism when he advocated Distributism: “too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists” – meaning that it would be better if everybody went into it with something and ended up with a meaningful stake, and the proportionality was maintained over time. I have sketchy ideas about how to achieve that last, involving endowed charities, inheritance rules, wait lists and such like.
I wholeheartedly agree that it isn't sound accounting. But it's also required by US GAAP. What exactly was your point?
Todd S., I should also have quoted the part where you said this sort of thing made you give up on accounting. The point I wanted to bring out was that accounting can be sound. It’s just the political and bureaucratic thumbs on the scale that make the trouble, so you should have been upset with those and not with accounting. Even the traditional and prudent valuing of inventory at the lower of cost and selling price, and not recognising a profit until actual sale (a timing issue), would have prevented booking profits from notional internal sales; that’s a dodge comparable to using faulty transfer prices more generally.
And how long is it going to take my reply to Joda to get through moderation?
Kristoff is an ignorant reactionary who knows not of what he speaks.
What the military is more an example of is how universal health care is NOT socialist and that it aids in the running of an organization. Last I heard, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and other nations with universal health care are NOT socialist nations, they are Republican socially Democratic nations.
Peace,
Tex Shelters