Our hidden history

In 1914, at the outbreak of war, 4 million Europeans were in the armed forces. By 1918 there were 20 Million in uniform. This was war on a new scale. At Waterloo Napoleon deployed 260 guns which each fired about 100 rounds. On the opening day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 British artillery fired 1 million rounds. In 1915 France was producing 200,000 rounds per day, while even the Russians expanded shell output from 450,000 a month in 1915 to 4.5 million in 1916.

One effect of such production was a common tendency for big business to become involved in directing the war economy. In Germany the former head of AEG (German General Electric) was in charge of allocating raw materials during the First World War. In the US the War Industries Board created in July 1917 was staffed by businessmen drawn from the major companies and banks which controlled war orders. In each state big business used its involvement in running the war effort to increase its power.

Russia's budget grew from 4,000 million roubles in 1914 to 30,000 million in 1916. The Russian government responded by printing paper money, unleashing inflation. By March 1917 the rouble fell to a quarter of its gold value and by November to less than a tenth. Rather than accept increasingly worthless paper money, the peasants hung onto their crops rather than selling them. Food was in short supply in the cities and prices rocketed. This led to the bread riots in Petrograd which led to the February Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar. Similar pressures were undermining the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By July 1918 the real income of workers in Vienna and Budapest had fallen by over 80 percent.

The war had also increased the size of the working class. The number of women employed in manufacturing in Britain increased by 36 percent between 1914 and 1918 In Russia 6 million people crowded into the cities. The war ended in the east with the Bolshevik Revolution. In the west it ended with the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in Austria-Hungary and then revolution in Germany.

Redrawing the map

The years between the First and Second World Wars were little more than an armed truce, almost bound to break down as Germany and Russia re-emerged as major powers. The Second World War was fought over the redivision of the world. The atrocities of the First World War were multiplied many times to grotesque levels, into the assembly line death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, through the firebombing of Japanese and German cities, to the use of the atomic bomb.

The economics of the war outweighed that of the First World War. In the end control of basic raw materials, the ability to produce tanks, ships, planes and trucks, determined the outcome. Between 1941 and 1945 the US economy went through the greatest economic expansion ever known. Gross national production increased by 50 percent while war production increased from 2 percent of output to 40 percent between 1941 and 1943. The War Production Board was created in January 1942. The military could state what it required but this body, staffed by businessmen seconded from and paid by their companies, placed the orders. Representatives of the giant firms which dominated particular sectors of the economy controlled those very sectors during wartime. In 1939 manufacturing plant in the US had cost about $40 billion to construct. By June 1945 $26 billion in new plant and equipment had been added to that. Two thirds of the cost of this expansion was met by the state and was afterwards handed on to big business at knockdown prices.

The Second World War played a major role in shaping the world of US dominated transnational capital we know today. During the Korean War seconded businessmen directed the war effort, placing orders with the very companies who still paid their salaries. By 1959 the 72 largest military contractors had hired over 1400 retired officers to sell arms to their colleagues still in uniform. The Cold War between the US and Russia which followed the Second World War meant that peace in the developed capitalist world rested on a deadly nuclear balance. But in the Third World, war became an annual reality. Aside from a war fought between proxies of the superpowers in Korea, the US and its allies found themselves drawn into a series of wars against national liberation movements which they perceived threatened their interests.

The US developed a series of alliances, above all Nato, across the world to counter the Eastern bloc, to tie in its allies and to secure compliant regimes elsewhere. In Indochina it found itself having to take over responsibility from the defeated colonial power, France, for the war against the Communist led liberation movement in Vietnam. Washington was trying to prop up a corrupt and discredited regime in South Vietnam which had no popular base and was incapable of prosecuting the war. As it became more and more immersed in Vietnam something else began to matter. For, as the US deputy commander in Saigon stated, 'our credibility worldwide also became an important US interest.' As Gabriel Kolko pointed out in A Century of War, 'In Vietnam, utilising purportedly the most sophisticated planning techniques that US big business and the Harvard Business School had perfected, it immediately lost control and track of the war's costs, information that it had to have to forestall the later political backlash that proved decisive.' Kolko added that 'during the Vietnam War the amount of munitions employed for every year that one soldier was exposed to combat was 26 times more intensive than in the Second World War.'

The costs of the war in Indochina were disastrous. Inflation trebled between 1965 and 1970 following the escalation of America's war effort. A massive budget deficit opened up and the dollar weakened internationally. The Johnson administration was forced to cut back on its 'war on poverty' welfare programme.

Relatively small numbers of US servicemen saw action in Vietnam (2.5 million men about 10 percent of those eligible to be drafted). Of the 543,000 US troops in Vietnam in 1968 just 80,000 or 14 percent were combat troops. In 1968 a majority among these were either seriously injured or killed. Yet those in action were overwhelmingly working class and black. Following the Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968 it was becoming apparent that the US could not win. Dissatisfaction multiplied both at home and in the US army in Vietnam itself, which began to disintegrate. That discontent was greatest among working people and black people who were doing the fighting and paying the price.

The subsequent defeat suffered haunts Washington to this day. The various interventions, from Grenada to the Gulf and from Bosnia to Kosovo, have done much to overcome the 'Vietnam syndrome'--the limit on US intervention imposed by that defeat--but the US military relies on technology rather than the deployment of ground troops, fearing the consequences of another Vietnam. The 1990-91 Gulf War saw a total discrepancy between the two sides. Some 700,000 US soldiers made up the bulk of the UN coalition and enjoyed total mastery of the air while facing just 183,000 Iraqis. Different branches of the US military took part in anarchic competition with each other while some 40 percent of the new 'smart' bombs missed their targets. An estimated 33,000 civilians died as a result of the war and the Shi'ite and Kurdish rebellions that followed. Over twice that number died in the six months after the war ended from hunger and disease. Those deaths continue, with the Iraqi population meeting the cost of UN sanctions and continued US and British bombing of the country.

New world disorder

The Gulf War followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. We were told this would herald a more stable 'new world order' with the US hegemonic. We were promised a 'peace dividend' as arms expenditure fell. In reality the US joint Chiefs of Staff stated in mid-1991 that there would be 'the intensification' of intractable conflicts between historical enemies, now fuelled by weapons of enormous destructiveness and less well constrained by the bipolar superpower alignments'.

That has been borne out. The 1990s ends with world-wide arms spending increasing. There is no sign of the number of wars waning. Growing economic competition between the US and China is reflected in military and political tensions. Various regional powers are keen to assert their influence--as is the case with Nigeria in west Africa and Australia in East Timor. Nato has expanded into eastern Europe, bordering directly onto Russia, and in Yugoslavia fought its first offensive 'out of region' war. America has formed a military alliance with states in the Caucasus, clearly aimed at Moscow, and with Japan and Taiwan, dearly aimed at Beijing. Meanwhile Russia has decided in the wake of the Nato's Balkan War to demonstrate its own capacity in Chechnya.

During the 1990s the US has doubled its share of the world's arms trade, capturing 44 percent of the market. Its arms sales help fuel regional arms races like that between Greece and Turkey or between two nuclear states, India and Pakistan. It's a crazy situation where the Pentagon has to plough billions of dollars into orders for the new F-22 fighter plane from Lockheed to outmatch the F-15s and F-16s the company has sold to other states. The US is engaged in an arms race with itself.

Lenin characterised the 20th century as being an age of wars and revolutions. Both parts of that prediction have been proved correct. We have witnessed the horror of constant war. But the century has also seen the most sustained offensive by an exploiting class against an exploited class. Just as capitalism breeds war, it also creates a working class and class struggle. And if capitalism is a global system so the working class is a global force.

War and revolution are combined in other ways. Because the costs of modern warfare affect each state in ways described above, war can also destabilise the countries involved. The First World War ended in revolution. One of its features was the way in which conscript troops were swept into the rapids of revolution while munitions workers played a leading role in strikes and the formation of soviets and workers' councils. The Second World War saw a massive radicalisation, with swathes of southern Europe being liberated by the resistance movements. In Italy this included all the major cities except Rome. This radicalisation was only contained with the help of Stalin. In the 1960s and 1970s the taste of defeat in Vietnam and the cost of the war created a massive radicalisation in the US. The Vietnamese victory became an inspiration for national liberation movements across the world. Defeat in a colonial war in Africa also led in April 1974 to the collapse of the fascist regime in Portugal, with sections of the army aligning with a powerful working class movement. In Iran during 1979 the US's key ally in the region, the Shah, was overthrown in an insurrection of almost classic type. The powerful army broke and the air force technicians were the first to join the revolution.