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Common to the explanations suggested so far is the assumption that we should collapse into over-production and unemployment were it not for some special offsetting factor, intended – as in the case of planning – or not – as in the others. The thesis offered here shares the assumption. Where it differs is in locating outside the causal loop itself the mechanism which sets it turning. [1]
The argument for seeing a permanent threat of overproduction (not a threat of permanent over-production) as inseparable from capitalism rests on three empirical propositions : that the relations between different capitals are by and large competitive; that an individual capital’s competitive strength is more or less related to the size and scope of its operations; and that decisions affecting the size and deployment of individual capitals are taken privately by individuals and groups which form a small segment of the society which has to live with the consequences. Were it not for the first two there would be no compulsion on each capital to grow as fast as it might through ‘accumulation’ (that is, saving and investment) and ‘concentration’ (that is, merger and takeover): were it not for the third, growth would never stumble far beyond society’s offtake. Together they also define the mechanism for attaining, and retaining, stability as one that augments offtake while moderating the rate of expansion that would result. Ideally, it should do this without altering too grossly the relations between individual capitals.
Such a mechanism is to be found in a permanent arms budget. In so far as capital is taxed to sustain expenditure on arms it is deprived of resources that might otherwise go towards further investment; in so far as expenditure on arms is expenditure on a fast-wasting end-product it constitutes a net addition to the market for ‘end’ goods. Since one obvious result of such expenditure is high employment and, as a direct consequence of that, rates of growth amongst the highest ever, the dampening effect of such taxation is not readily apparent. But it is not absent. Were capital left alone to invest its entire pretax profit, the state creating demand as and when necessary, growth rates would be very much higher. Finally, since arms are a ‘luxury’ in the sense that they are not used, either as instruments of production or as means of subsistence, in the production of other commodities, their production has no effect on profit rates overall, as will be explained in a moment.
The addition made by arms budgets to world spending is stupendous. In 1962, well before the war in Vietnam jerked up American (and Russian) military outlays, a United Nations study concluded that something like $120 billion (£43,000 million) was being spent annually on military account. This was equivalent to between eight and nine per cent of the world’s output of all goods and services at the time, and to at least two thirds, if not the whole of the entire national income of all backward countries. It was very near the value of the world’s annual exports of all commodities. Even more breathtaking is the comparison with investments: arms expenditure corresponded to about one half of gross capital formation throughout the world. [2]
Its significance varies enormously: eighty-five per cent of the total expenditure was made by seven countries – Britain, Canada, China, France, West Germany, Russia and the United States. [3] In the countries of western capitalism military expenditure as a proportion of gross domestic product ranged from nearly ten per cent in the US to just under three per cent in Denmark (Britain – 6.5 per cent); and as a proportion of gross domestic fixed capital formation from nearly sixty per cent in the US to twelve per cent in Norway (Britain forty-two per cent). [4] In none was it immaterial as a market or – and this is even more important – in comparison with the resources devoted to investment.
Some industries rely heavily on arms expenditure. In the United States at the end of the fifties more than nine tenths of final demand for aircraft and parts was on government, overwhelmingly military, account; as was nearly three fifths of the demand for non-ferrous metals; over half the demand for chemicals and electronic goods; over one third the demand for communication equipment and scientific instruments; and so on down a list of eighteen major industries one tenth or more of whose final demand stemmed from government procurement In France, the list ranged from seventy-two per cent in aircraft and parts down to eleven per cent in optical and photographic equipment. [5] In Britain, a similar list would include the aircraft industry to the extent of seventy per cent of output, industrial electronics and radio communications (thirty-five per cent each), shipbuilding (twenty-three per cent) and a number of others. [6]
The impact of arms expenditure on stability and investment is no less direct. It is heavily concentrated on the capital goods industries which are responsible for the big swings in the traditional business cycle. It provides a floor to the downswings and has, in the US, been deliberately used in this way. The fact that much of this capital equipment has no alternative use and is therefore normally included in the contract price for military supplies both removes the risk element from investment and provides the wherewithal to keep it at a high level.
We have seen how high employment puts a premium on technical innovation and intensive investment; at one remove, on research. It is here that military outlays are of overwhelming weight as a proportion of the total, accounting for fifty-two per cent of all expenditure on research and development in the US (1962-3), thirty-nine per cent in Britain (1961-2), thirty per cent in France (1961) and fifteen per cent (‘partial estimate’) in Germany (1964). [7] No less than 300,000 qualified scientists are engaged on research and development for military and space purposes in the OECD area, mainly in six countries (those listed plus Canada and Belgium). [8] In Britain, 10,000 were so engaged in 1959, or one fifth of the total in research and development, supported by another 30,000 or so unqualified research workers. [9]
A lot of the research is wasted. Most is tied to contracts for particular weapons or pieces of equipment; much is scrapped when an order is cancelled (only six out of the sixteen pieces of electronic and navigational equipment developed for the British TSR-2 were salvaged from its wreckage in 1966). Costs escalate more than effort since, in the words of the Committee of Public Accounts in Britain, the Government, is ‘placed at a considerable disadvantage in the price negotiations, by not having the information available to the contractor about the costs of earlier production’. [10] Purposes are sometimes confounded by the natural desire of procurement officers to make a soft landing in civvy street on retirement – 1,462 retired officers, 251 of them former generals and admirals, were on the payrolls of the 720 largest military suppliers in the US in 1960. And the largest part of the research output is kept under wraps.
Yet the ‘spin-off’ has not been negligible. Military research has been crucial in developing civilian products like air navigation systems, transport aircraft, computers, drugs, diesel locomotives (from submarine diesels), reinforced glass and so on. Long production runs for military purposes have brought other products, such as solar cells and infra-red detectors, down to mass price-ranges. Military use has perfected techniques of general use, such as gas turbines, hydraulic transmission, ultrasonic welding and a host of others. More important than all, concludes the OECD report [11], is the fact that
... the results of military and space research have had, and will continue to have, a greater influence on civilian innovation by stimulating the general rate of technological advance. For example, the requirements of military and space research, especially for guidance and control, have led to fundamental and applied research in such fields as semi-conductors, micro-circuitry, micro-modules, energy-conversion and physical metallurgy, which are bound to have an impact on civilian technology ... In addition, techniques of planning, such as operational research, Progress Evaluation Review Technique (PERT), systems engineering and value engineering – developed initially for military and space purposes – will lead to a general increase in productive efficiency, and to a more rapid identification of opportunities for innovation. And finally, the high standard of performance and reliability required of military and space systems has led to the development of techniques of measurement, testing and control which will serve to increase the quality and reliability of products and components. In the field of electronics, this is particularly important.
As for arms expenditure and international trade, the United Nations study already quoted estimated the average annual military demand by industrial countries for some internationally-traded materials in 1958 and 1959 as 8.6 per cent of total world output of crude oil, three per cent of crude rubber, 15.2 per cent of copper, 10.3 per cent of nickel, 9.6 per cent of tin, 9.4 per cent of lead and zinc, 7.5 per cent of molybdenum, 6.8 per cent of bauxite, 5.1 per cent of iron ore, 2.7 per cent of manganese and 2.3 per cent of chromite. [12]
The defence pork-barrel is very much a giant-company concern. In the United States, despite official attempts to expand the supplies network, the largest one hundred companies consistently receive three quarters of all arms outlay. In Britain, the eighteen largest companies (10,000 or more workers each) of those that replied to the EIU’s questionnaire, with seventy-one per cent of total employment in the sample, had 75.2 per cent of total employment on arms production. It is not surprising. Only the biggest firms have the technical and technological resources to cope with the sophistication and sheer volume of arms production, or the financial base to tie down resources for the time it takes. But once they can cope, growth is guaranteed. The major arms contracts are so enormous that ‘even the pretence of open tendering for orders could not be seriously kept up in some of the most valuable and important government contracts’. [13] ‘It is estimated,’ a US Assistant Secretary of Defense told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 1963, ‘that to establish a new production source on the Polaris missile, for example, would require up to three years and an investment of over $100 million in facilities and special tooling.’ [14] And although government auditing techniques are being perfected constantly to cope with the new dependence on single supply sources, the time-and-materials, or cost-plus, basis for major contracts removes almost all traces of risk to income – and to growth. Sometimes, guarantees are so open-ended and performance so poorly-policed that contractors go berserk and create new risks for themselves, as did Ferranti with its Bloodhound missile contract in Britain, when the firm was ultimately made to disgorge no less than £4½ million of its uncovenanted profit on a £13 million contract in 1964, or Bristol Siddeley which returned £4 million out of a £16½ million contract in 1967. Normally, however, capital is more restrained and the risks to growth suitably anaesthetized.
Finally – planning. Military spending has been crucial here. Official evidence to the effect that planning in the United States was in direct response to Russia’s ballistic missile breakthrough has already been quoted [15]; as was evidence that close supervision over private industry is becoming part of any big contract; and that modern methods of auditing and control stem directly from military needs. The same might be said of that increasingly essential tool of most large-scale planning exercises – the computer. Born out of the Second World War, its most sophisticated applications are still in military spheres, whether in solving design problems, playing ‘war games’ or in stock and production control – reason enough for the biggest computers to be denied export permits from the United States.
These direct effects of arms spending link up with one another in a number of ways, and together seem to go on a perpetual round without need for further stimuli. Yet not all the problems are tidied away. These might not be the only set of facts that could explain stability. Any academic economists should be able to construct a model in which savings and investment are exactly matched, and demand set at the point of full employment. The techniques present no difficulty. Non-academics have been at pains, with Strachey, to point out more pragmatically that ‘Defence spending could be replaced by other forms of government spending ... houses, roads, dams, power-stations, schools, etc., etc.’, or the government ‘could probably effect the same purpose simply by cutting down the taxes on the smaller incomes’. [16] And there is no reason in logic to doubt them.
But capitalist reality is more intractable than planners’ pens and paper. For one thing too much productive expenditure by the state is ruled out. Seen from the individual capitalist’s corner, such expenditure would be a straight invasion of his preserve by an immensely more powerful and materially resourceful competitor; as such it needs to be fought off. Seen from that of the system, it would lead to such a rapid build-up of the capital-labour (value) ratio, to use one mode of expression, or to such a low marginal productivity of capital, to use another, and to such a low average rate of profit as a consequence, that the smallest rise in real wages would precipitate bankruptcy and slump. Shorn of technicalities, too much productive expenditure on the part of the state would both upset the balance between individual capitals and accentuate the system’s bias towards over-production.
Only the last requires any explanation. It was a commonplace of classical political economy, that – to put it very roughly – in the long run and despite much offsetting growing intensity of capital would force down the rate of profit in a closed economy. The argument rested on two assumptions, both realistic: all output flows back into the system as productive consumption – ideally, there are no leakages and no choice other than to allocate total output between what would now be called investment and necessary consumption; second, that in a closed system like this the allocation would swing progressively in favour of investment (increasing capital intensity or – in Marx – raising the organic composition of capital). The first assumption is the pivotal one. If dropped, and the ratio of the returns to capital and to labour becomes indeterminate, the second falls and the ‘law’ with it.
Marx pointed to existing leaks – capitalist personal consumption (‘luxuries’) and gold production – but realistically chose to ignore them. He was, after all, hewing a system from brute rock, and they were neither here nor there in practice at the time. Later non-Marxist theorists within the classical tradition, forced to refine the model and also writing in a more affluent age, probed deeper into this non-productive ‘Department III’. Von Bortkiewicz showed, in a paper published in 1907, that the capital-labour (value) ratio in luxury goods production (for the personal consumption of capitalists) has no part in determining the rate of profit. [17] Sraffa, in by far the most ambitious refinement of a ‘classical’ system to date, showed more generally that
‘luxury’ products which are not used, whether as instruments of production or as articles of subsistence, in the production of others ... have no part in (he determination of the system. Their role is purely passive. If an invention were to reduce by half the quantity of each of the means of production which are required to produce a unit of a ‘luxury’ commodity of this type, the commodity itself would be halved in price, but there would be no further consequences; the price-relations of the other products and the rate of profits would remain unaffected. But if such a change occurred in the production of a commodity of the opposite type, which does enter the means of production, all prices would be affected and the rate of profits would be changed. [18]
While Sraffa characteristically refrains from adducing examples, nothing conforms so closely to the concept of ‘luxuries’ as arms – which cannot under any circumstances enter the production of other commodities – and certainly nothing can begin to compare in size and significance. Seen from the angle of the system, that is of pure theory, arms production is the key, and seemingly permanent, offset to the ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’.
But this is only one constraint on the state’s freedom to adopt non-military production as a stabilizer – and the less convincing perhaps for being argued from first principles. A second, practical one, is that arms production has a ‘domino effect’: starting in one country, it proliferates inexorably through the system, compelling the other major economies to enter a competitive arms race, and so pulling them into the stabilizer’s sphere of operations.
There seems to be no other way. While the planlessness, or competitiveness, or ‘anarchy of production’ within each national sphere has been tempered by government intervention, so that spontaneous decisions of individual capitals are to some extent pre-ordained by decisions covering a wider sphere, anarchy remains very nearly absolute internationally. Even for small economies, tightly constrained though they be, there are no coercive authorities more extensive than the nation state. Internationally, the system still forms in the classic manner through constant, mutual adjustment by national capitals. This is why so homogeneous a set as the countries of mature western capitalism still need to regulate their relations by means of gold – the very essence of classic capitalist mysticism about social relations. It is why the even more homogeneous set of East European countries have been unable to do more than inch beyond bilateral trading as the characteristic expression of their mutual relations. The void between competitive reality and the illusion of collaboration within closely knit blocs is immense. Between them it is immeasurable.
In the circumstances any country opting for high employment and stability through productive investments or even unproductive ‘hole-filling’ public works is bound to suffer in world competition. High employment might be achieved, but it might be achieved in isolation; and the result would almost certainly be a degree of inflation that would prise the single economy out of world markets. For it to endure, the ability of others to undermine it must be contained and high employment itself exported, and what better compulsion to ‘buy’ it than an external military threat?
It is this logic that makes nonsense of substituting a space race for an arms race. Leaving aside peaceful fall-outs like satellite communications which are no different in economic effect to any other productive investment, advances in space technology are either of potential military value and therefore demand a matching effort as insistently as, say, military nuclear or rocket technology, or they can be ignored as being a particularly effective form of hole-filling. In practice, it is the military potential that provides the dollars or the roubles on which to hang the ballyhoo of national prestige.
None of this implies that an arms budget was ever adopted anywhere as a means of securing an international environment conducive to stability. One can admit that governments usually step up their arms bills under protest; that the major steps have not necessarily coincided with economic downturns; that, in short, the situation has often been seen as unfortunate, restrictive, imposed from outside or whatever; one can admit that the initial plunge into a permanent arms economy was random -without affecting the issue. The important point is that the very existence of national military machines of the current size, however happened upon, both increases the chance of economic stability and compels other states to adopt a definite type of response and behaviour which requires no policing by some overall authority. The sum of these responses constitutes a system whose elements are both interdependent and independent of each other, held together by mutual compulsion – in short, a traditional capitalist system.
Once adopted, if only by chance, an arms economy becomes necessary. It is not merely that a system of mutual compulsion through military threat is more imperative than any other, but that it becomes difficult to unscramble military from economic competition. They fuse. As appears to be happening now, with Russia and the United States adopting the frighteningly expensive anti-ballistic missile systems (ABMs) – deployment of the US Nike-X system in earnest could cost anywhere between $30 and $50 billion – the arms race might be speeded up not for any real increase in military effectiveness, but in order to increase the cost for the competitor. As The Times Defence Correspondent put it, the decision to introduce the systems now available to both sides
makes sense only if they mean to declare all-out economic war against each other, both confident that the basic advantages of their respective economic systems would win in the end; both confident that the pressure of this crippling new weapons burden would cause the other side’s economy to break first’. [19]
It is even rational in the disenchanted logic of military-economic strategy to see in peace an offensive weapon capable of disrupting industry, and requiring therefore the ‘hot-line-cold-storage’ counter-strategy of stockpiling to the next bout of hostilities. On the other hand, the original decision to raise the ante could equally well be a rational response on the part of either the US or Russia to a real or imagined threat from outside the system of major deterrence, say from China, and the equally rational mutual suspicion that ensues regardless of cause. Although earnestly meant at the time, McNamara’s assurance – following China’s H-Bomb explosion of June 1967 – that ‘light’ ABM systems on both sides would not ‘destabilize’ Russian-American relations expressed hope rather than conviction. In the event it was a hope quickly snuffed.
That is between ‘enemies’ as it were. As for relations between ‘friends’, members of the western coalition have teamed that common defence can be made to stretch beyond common interest and be used as a cover for the particular interests of particular industries in particular countries. Under a two-year agreement ending 30 June 1967, Germany promised to buy 5,400 million marks’ worth of arms and equipment from the United States to offset American military expenditure in Germany. Ten months before the end of the period, orders for nearly one half of the total were still not placed, and no more were in sight, for, as the Economist pointed out, ‘Germany’s obligation to buy so much military equipment from America ... constitutes a grave disadvantage to German industry, particularly the aircraft industry’. [20] It also constitutes a grave disadvantage to British industry forlornly looking for a niche in the German arms market.
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of arms production and sales as the cutting edge of international competition in general. The US’s successes in engrossing the western market for sophisticated weaponry and in exploiting its predominance, in ways as different as binding the NATO alliance or preventing French sales of aircraft to South Africa, has probably done more to foster European unity than anything else. At the second-class-power level, we are told that ‘Britain’s special position [in the US] will last only so long as her native military technology is kept going’, and warned that ‘there are signs that France will soon, if she does not already, command more American respect and interest in cooperation in the field’ of military nucleonics. [21] Perhaps most convincing of all is the way arms sales have been organized as an integral part of inter- and intra-bloc competition. The United States have their arms-salesman in chief, in Henry Kuss, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, recipient of the Meritorious Civilian Service Medal in recognition of his bulging order books (about $5½ billion in 1967; six hundred per cent up in ten years), and head of a staff of twenty-seven civilians who handle what are called ‘international logistics negotiations’. The British Labour Government have found it possible to appoint a Minister for Disarmament and a Head of Defence Sales, the latter – on loan from his own fast-growing arms firm – with powers to set up special export lines, to influence design ‘at the formative stages’ [22], to control delivery dates, utilize the diplomatic service and so on. For, explained the Foreign Secretary, ‘until we can get a widespread measure of disarmament by international agreement, it is reasonable that this country should have a reasonable share of the arms market’. [23] Germany, wedded to private enterprise in this matter has had ‘Waffen-und Luftrüstungs AG’ active in newly independent countries since 1963; France is officially busy, particularly amongst the victims of international boycotts from Israel to South Africa. And so on merrily.
Not all is competition all the time. East-West relations are punctuated by agreements which have contained the worst hazards so far – spiking Cuba’s missiles in 1961, a limited test-ban treaty in 1963, a Middle Eastern settlement in 1967, perhaps a non-proliferation treaty soon. It is conceivable, though unlikely, that they might contain the horrendous waste and nonsense of the ABM systems. But the agreements are best understood as attempts to bring new technical and political factors into the system of mutual compulsion rather than as an approach to collaboration around shared purposes. Amongst allies agreement is naturally more common, but hardly less unstable. Given the changing kaleidoscopes of advantage as seen from national capitals, how long will the President remain willing to waive the Buy American Act on which sales of British war material to the US depend? Or how long can the West European countries rely on the US’s voluntary exclusion from East European markets? In the latter case at least, the sands are rapidly running out.
The assimilation of arms competition into the total economy has far-reaching consequences. The arms budget’s flexibility as a stabilizer within each national economy is set at risk by its mediation between economies. To expand armaments for good national economic reasons as the US was doing in 1960-61 to offset approaching recession invites retaliatory escalation for equally good international strategic reasons. There is nothing to ensure that escalation stops at the point of stability. Even if the unlikely occurs and it does stop there for one country, it would require a heroic coincidence for that to be a point of stability for others, if only because of the different sizes, structures, stages of development, sets of alliances and suchlike of the national economies grouped around a shared military technology. So that at any one time, some would be favouring a reduction in armaments to safeguard their civilian competitive position, others standing pat and others pushing for further expenditure. The current disarray of NATO, with France withdrawn, the US, Britain and Germany squabbling over support costs and nuclear sharing, the US straining to jack up European arms expenditure and Europe resisting, hardly requires a different explanation. For that matter, neither does the confusion in the Warsaw Pact, where Rumania is successfully gaulling Russia. In both cases, there seems no way of harnessing strategic and economic expediency so that they pull in the same direction.
Nor can there be. In a war economy the limits to the outlay on arms are set by physical resources and the willingness of the population to endure slaughter and privation. In an arms economy, the capacity of the economy to compete overall, in destructive potential as well as in more traditional forms, adds a further major constraint, and with it a nest of complications.
One is the difficulty of gauging a ‘necessary’ defence effort As it is, all but the super-powers are being squeezed out by the growing cost and complexity of the key weapons systems. Military expenditure has also taken a hard knock from the suicidal nature of much ‘defence’ equipment. Even apart from these, the fact that limited preparedness – the sort implicit in an arms economy – does not necessarily draw fire, has not yet done so, makes the setting of the limits subject to endless debate, particularly amongst the lesser members of the western coalition that are least able to stand the economic pace and most attracted to the new opportunities for trade with the Eastern bloc. The stage is set for a slow competitive erosion of arms expenditure. The facts are eloquent. Neither Cuba nor Vietnam has reversed the declining trend in western arms expenditure -as a proportion of government spending they have dropped from twenty-five per cent in 1955 to seventeen per cent in 1965, and as a proportion of gross national product, from 7.2 per cent in 1953 to four per cent (unweighted averages). This is scarcely a stable situation.
A related difficulty is the freer play for recessionary tendencies allowed by a declining ceiling on arms outlay. This can be exaggerated. Even in its classic, laissez-faire period, the changing ratio of consumption to an economy’s investible surplus put a floor to downswings. The higher the floor, the smaller, though more frequent, the swings. That floor is raised at any level of arms outlay – and very much more than would appear from the normal index used (defence expenditure as a proportion of GNP) because at any level it is a substantial part of the investible surplus. For reasons given in this chapter it is also more effective than any other in sustaining the seemingly self-levitating causal loop of high employment, growth and so on with which this essay began. Yet there is no denying the danger to overall stability of a decline in relative outlay.
The existence of a ceiling on outlay is important for another reason. It provides a massive incentive to increases in productivity (measured in potential deaths per dollar) and so leads to the arms industries becoming increasingly specialist and divorced from general engineering practice. As the OECD report already quoted states:
... the direct transfer to the civilian sector of products and techniques developed for military and space purposes is very small compared with the total magnitude of military and space Research and Development. Furthermore, the technological requirements of defence and space are diverging from those of civilian industry, which means that the possibilities of such direct transfer will tend to diminish. [24]
Coupled with this specialization and partly as a consequence, go a rising capital- and technological-intensity in the arms industries. On both counts they become less able to underpin full employment even at the same level of relative expenditure. At a declining one, and given the existence of some technological spin-off to civilian productivity, which makes the need more exacting, their potency as an offset becomes increasingly questionable.
It would be wilfully masochistic to attempt to illustrate the argument with figures just now when western unemployment (except in Britain and France) is near its nadir. But the US Administration’s obvious concern at the direction of change in employment in the sixties and seventies, as reflected in its evidence to the Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Manpower (1963) and in that body’s Report [25], is a fair pointer to what might happen. Another is the form unemployment takes in the here and now: rapid unplanned and unplannable technological change in the arms sector within a ceiling on expenditure, has contributed substantially to the formation of regional and industrial husks of unemployment that remain insensitive to general fiscal and monetary cures, as well as to the misery of unskilled strata unemployable by the high-flying, quick-changing technologies in use. Again, high boom and the technologically-regressive impact of the Vietnam war with its reversion to relatively labour-intensive products are obscuring the point, but the plight of the shipbuilding areas in Britain and in the US, the problems of the aircraft-manufacturing areas, even the problems of black Americans, owe at least something of their intensity to the changing tides of military expenditure and the increasing complexity of production for military use.
These potential sources of instability are embedded in the system. If discipline is faltering in both of the Cold War camps and the claims of non-military competition seem increasingly urgent; if, partly in consequence, military technology is becoming so specialist as to lose some of its economically stabilizing features, it is ultimately because unrestrained competition between independent economies results in uneven rates of growth and hence to a constantly changing international balance of military and economic power.
As yet these elements of instability are just a smudge on the horizon. So far, the weight of the arms economy has been on the side of stability, charging and recharging the more immediate causes of high employment, and well-being. Within that stability, however, it has nurtured a set of problems as intractable as any.
Chapter 4
Top of the page
1. ‘Causal loop’ might be thought too much of a good thing by now. But ‘vicious’ and ‘virtuous’ circles, the established currency, are at best incongruous in a context of material progress and social decay. The manufacture and use of napalm increase the users’ national income – in economese they are therefore most decidedly part of a ‘virtuous’ circle. But only in economese. Ordinary language takes greater care with its value judgements.
2. United Nations, Economic and Social Consequences of Disarmament, New York, 1962, p.3.
3. ibid., p.4.
4. ibid., Table 2-1, pp.55-7. In the UN study, the figures given for Britain are generally lower than in the more detailed report made by the Economist Intelligence Unit a year later, The Economic Effects of Disarmament, London: EIU, 1963. The discrepancy is not material to the argument, and no attempt is made to adjust the figures here.
5. OECD, Government and Technical Innovation, Paris, 1966. Table 1, p.27.
6. EIU, op. cit., pp.49, 65, 82, passim.
7. Government and Technical Innovation, Table p.30. The Economist Intelligence Unit, op. cit., p.27, gives a figure of forty-nine per cent for Britain, 1958-9 (59.2 per cent in 1955-6).
8. Government and Technical Innovation, p.29.
9. EIU, op. cit., p.32.
10. Second Report 1966-1967, HC 158, 5 August 1966, p.16. The quotation is from a section entitled Pricing of contracts for the Buccaneer Aircraft.
11. Government and Technical Innovation, pp.31-2.
12. loc. cit., Table 3-3, p.65.
13. Shonfield, op. cit., p.344.
14. Quoted ibid., p.344n.
15. See above, p.30.
16. Strachey, op. cit., pp.243, 244.
17. Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, On the Correction of Marx’s Fundamental Theoretical Construction in the Third Volume of Capital, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, translated and printed as an Appendix in P.M. Sweezy (ed.), Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of his System and Rudolf Hilferding’s, Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1949, and effectively summarized in P.M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, Dennis Dobson, 1949, pp.115-25.
18. Piero Sraffa, The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, Cambridge University Press, 1960, pp.7-8.
19. The Times, 10 May 1966. Emphasis added.
20. Economist, 21 May 1966, pp.809-10.
21. The Times, Defence Correspondent, 9 December 1966.
22. The Times, 12 May 1966.
23. Reported from the House of Commons, The Times, 24 May 1966.
24. Government and Technical Innovation, p.31.
25. Full Employment: Proposals for a Comprehensive Employment and Manpower Policy in the US, Washington, DC, 1963.
Last updated on 12.2.2005