Kaldor's ‘the military in development’ — a comment

Mary Kaldor's article is a tour de fbrce in its attempt to explore 'The military in development ' (World Development, June 1976). She implies that a fresh approach is necessary since those of modernization theorists and Marxists 1 'both fail to explain the differences in the behaviour of military institutions in Third World countries'. The former, in Kaldor's view, 'have explained the military's political tendencies by reference to inherent institutional characteristics sometimes making confusing use of the term 'class', and they have explained the military's economic impact in terms of direct absorption or mobilization of resources'. Marxists, in contrast, 'have treated the military as a more or less neutral instrument of the ruling class and looked at the economic impact of the military in terms of its role in preserving a social system characterized by a particular allocation of resources'. According to Kaldor, 'very little has been written about the role of the military in the process of historical change from a Marxist perspective'. She sets out to reconstruct Marxist theory, therefore, from a limited number of sources: Karl Liebknecht's Militarism and Anti-Militarism; Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (from which she quotes a single line to illustrate Engels' technological determinism); Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire o¢" Louis Bonaparte; and recent papers by a Marxist study collective in Hamburg, which see the role of the military in the world-wide allocation of resources 'as a mechanism for extracting surplus product in the periphery in order to support capitalist accumulation in the metropolis' . Kaldor ignores a considerable amount of additional material, particularly by Engels, which ought not to be neglected in setting out the classical Marxist position. Three chapters in Anti-Duhring entitled 'The force theory' and an unfinished study which applies this theory to Bismarck's policy of 'Blood and Iron', entitled The Role o f Force in History (first translated into English in 1968) are directly concerned with the application of force in the course of economic development. A brief summary of these and other works, as well as some of Marx and Engels correspondence, will suggest why Marxists have treated the military 'as a more or less neutral institution of the ruling class'. Kaldor's objections to such a treatment appear to be misinformed. Her rendering of the Marxist position suffers as a consequence. So, too, does her attempt at what appears to be an arbitration of the Marxist and 'modernization' positions. When it becomes clearer why Marxists have treated the military as a neutral instrument of the ruling class it becomes clearer why the Marxist approach may best facilitate theorizing about the military in development. Kaldor is also concerned with the role of the military in the allocation of resources and with the impact of Western-type weapons systems in underdeveloped countries. Our comments on this theme question both her conclusion of a 'strong association' between high military spending and high rates of industrial growth in light of the evidence, and how great a positive impact on industrialization the permanent arms economy might reasonably be expected to have.