Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

War movies are not a favored genre in the United States these days. But there are exceptions that make it big in the box office. One is Blackhawk Down, directed by Scott Ridley, which depicted the big, botched raid to capture General Aidid in 1992 that ended with the bodies of U.S. Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The other is more recent, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare. These two popular films have one thing in common: they depict hubris and arrogance that end in chaotic defeat.

The popularity of these two films that are almost masochistic in their celebration of defeat is indicative of a larger social fact in the United States today—that there is no popular base for war, whether on the left, the center, the right, or the far right. The only ones rooting for military intervention and confrontation are the liberal internationalists, like Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and the neoconseratives, like Dick Cheney, who came together in the disastrous campaign to elect Kamala Harris president, and they are in total disarray. It was not only Biden’s horrible debate performance that sealed his and Harris’s fate. It was partly their unrelenting support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Equally important were their open-ended commitment to NATO’s war in Ukraine and their beating the drums of war in the Pacific. When Biden had all the other NATO heads of state join him onstage to pledge themselves to fight to the last Ukrainian during that fateful press conference last July, my reaction was that he was not only mentally dysfunctional, as revealed by his calling Zelensky Putin, but totally out of synch with the electorate when it came to foreign policy.

The End of Class Collaboration

One of the key reasons for the lack of a base for imperial war is something that Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, authors of Capital and Imperialism, enlighten us on in their dissection of the relationships that made the British Empire function for an extended period:

The functioning of the price system, in short, was such that a rise in workers’ share in the gross value of output could be accommodated without a decline in capitalists’ share through a squeeze on the share of the primary commodity producers. It is not some category of ‘super-profits’ but the very modus operandi of the system that accommodates workers at the expense of primary commodity producers, and imperialism is the entire arrangement that makes this possible.

The Patnaiks stress that this accommodation of the metropolitan working class must be seen not just in distributive terms, but also in terms of other mechanisms, such as state-led demand management that can function as a substitute external to the system for squeezing the colonies once they have ceased to exist.

In the post-colonial arrangement that prevailed after the Second World War, Keynesian state-led demand management became the substitute for pacifying the working class in the metropolis, with continual real rises in working class income coupled with parallel rises in the the rate of profit that were kept in balance partly by the high marginal tax rates imposed on the rich. It was in this context, the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism, that President John F Kennedy could make that classic statement of imperial cross-class consensus in his inaugural address in January 1961, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

The material and social........

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