A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

half the world’s military expenditures, and over 1,000 bases round the
world) and the military-industrial complex continues to pay a key role,
although from now on under the control of finance. The ascendancy of
finance over the US armament companies is growing and this can be
seen by the taking over of the ownership structure of their capital by institutional
investors, themselves prisoners of the great financial oligopolies.
At the beginning of the 2000s this proportion reached 95 per cent
of the capital of Lockheed Martin, 75 per cent of General Dynamics, 65
per cent of Boeing, etc. It is the same thing for the private military companies;
an increasingly large number of them have passed under the
control of finance as the State ‘outsources’ its defence activities. MPRI
has been bought up by L-3 Communications, Vinnell by Carlyle, DynCorp
by Veritas and so on.
Military expenditure has become a major source of profit for capital in a
context in which the use of armed forces is the strategy imposed on
the world by US high finance as a condition for its reproduction, in which
militarization is a mode of existence for capitalism, and in which the role
of the (neoliberal) State is fundamental for capital (because it is indeed
the State that goes to war on behalf of capital and it is the governmental
agencies that allocate astronomical amounts of military contracts to the
transnational armament companies, via their lobbying (e.g. General Electric,
ITT).
Moreover, it is significant that the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq were
launched at a very specific time: the year 2001 was already a time of
crisis (just as 1913 and 1938 were crisis years). It was a crisis that
emerged just as changes were taking place in US monetary policy, following
the worsening of the country’s internal and external debts – the
first because of the need for financing linked partially to the imperialist
wars, the second being due in part to out-sourcing, above all to China.
Thus, following the slowing down of growth in 2000, the Fed greatly reduced
its interest rate (from 6.5 per cent in December 2000 to 1.75 per
cent in December 2001, then to 1 per cent in mid-2003, and it was kept
at this very low level until mid-2004. It was precisely at this time, when
real interest rates had become negative, that the mechanisms of the
sub-prime crisis were set up, with greater and greater risk-taking, espe-
96