The Vendors of Violence

There’s a lot of hypocritical cant pouring out of the western alliance (WA) via its compliant legacy and social media, about the operation of the Wagner Group – the corporatised private army that has been contracted by the Russian state to advance its interests in various parts of the world. (1)

The problems posed for the Russian state by Wagner were very likely exacerbated by its owner's personality and personal ambitions. Once Yevgeny Prigozhin came out of the corporate shadows, he began to act as though he was a national hero and an experienced military leader and tactician. His public profile, and allegations of Wagner’s brutality, compounded the civil-legal problems created by the use of a large and visible military contractor in Ukraine once the Donbas region was formally incorporated into the Russian state.

It’s also very likely that he stomped on the toes of both career politicians and high ranking members of the Russian military. 

As always with its propaganda, the WA, and the US especially, act as though they never use such tactics, let alone acknowledge they were initiators, and are still the key enablers of the privatised military industry which has emerged over the past half century.

The WA’s propaganda – the dissemination of which is enabled by a largely compliant legacy, and easily manipulated social media – obscures the fact that since the end of WW2, its vast military-industrial complex has expanded into the creation of cohorts of powerful private contractors, used by governments or corporate entities, to carry out military-style activities inside other nations. 

The propaganda machine also obscures the fact that those activities always benefit the WA’s (and especially the American) vast military-industrial complex.

In truth, this is not new, it’s a step back into the overt use of violence in pursuit of private or corporate profit, and it flows from the demented logic behind corporate capitalism’s drive to commodify everything. From intangibles like debt and influence, to pornography and prostitution, murder and mayhem – everything can be turned into a commodity to be bought and sold in the global marketplace.

The modern state

The modern bureaucratic state is a relatively recent form of governance, and it was a necessary component of the rise to dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Although capitalism grew in tandem with the nation state, initially it controlled the direction the state took, ensuring that it essentially acted as an enabler. 

However, as the power of the various institutions of the state grew, and as it democratised in various ways and degrees, it also served as a brake on capitalist excesses and abuses of power. 

Neo-liberal capitalism, led by US corporate and finance capitalism, needed to rein in the state and return it to its essential role of protecting and enabling capitalist enterprises, whilst maintaining the appearance of democracy and protection of formal rights and civil liberties. 

The first step was to remove state controls over the movement of capital in order to freely shift investment to economic zones where profit could be maximised through more intense exploitation of labour and extraction of natural resources, and the weakening or removal of laws governing environmental hazards. 

Working class and other great liberatory movements and collectives came under heavy attack. (2)

The public’s trust in state owned and run enterprises and institutions was undermined in order to ensure the cementing in of the myth of the greater efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of the private sector. 

Most crucially, the monopoly of the state in the control of coercive agencies such as the military, the police, and prison service – had to be broken.

The redrafting of key clauses in the social contract and selling it to the masses was enabled by the numerical expansion and increase in the power and status of a managerial-professional class – the coordinators and system adjusters whose stake in the economic status quo ensures that most don’t see or acknowledge, let alone question, its rotten core.

This social and economic buffer zone has been crucial in the creation and implementation of the ideology of the aspirational individual, and the promotion of interest groups within the left’s collectives. Latterly this has taken the form of the promotion of groups loosely bound together by identity, moving steadily towards the zenith of hyper-individualism, the ideology of gender identity. (3)

The Vendors of Violence

Given there’s always the possibility that even a fully corporate-compliant state may not act as quickly or decisively enough in the desired direction, coercive and violent services can now be purchased openly from corporations in the form of land, sea, and air militarised forces, and/or security in suits. 

This is not a new phenomenon, like neo-liberalism’s move to the use of contracted out labour, it is a return to older arrangements. 

The idea of the armed forces of the state fighting in common cause against a common enemy is both a heavily mythologised, and a relatively recent, phenomenon.

In feudal Europe, aristocrats or wealthy merchants provided the manpower for their own battles and their ruler’s wars, from among men who owed them fealty of some sort. The most hapless of these feudal conscripts usually wore their own clothes with some sort of token to distinguish them as being on one side or the other. 

Until the agricultural and early industrial revolutions there were practical limits on how many men could be wasted in battle, or how long they could be away from the land or other vital enterprises. It took major advances in both primary and secondary production to “free up” labour, and to create the wealth needed to provide uniforms, arms, and training. 

Prior to the formation of fully state-funded and controlled standing armies and the move to functional battle dress in the twentieth century, most soldiers wore their aristocratic master’s colours, which are still seen in regimental dress uniforms in Europe. 

The precursors of the English navy were privateers, pirates who preyed on Spanish treasure ships and were granted license to so by the English Crown. In effect these privateers carried out acts of undeclared war which the Crown and state could disavow if necessary.

The men who massacred unarmed people at Peterloo in 1817, were a mix of a relatively new state controlled army and private militias formed by landowners and business owners. 

The English and Dutch East Indies companies were the organisational and ideological precursors of the transnational corporations which now dominate the globe. They operated almost completely independently of any state. In pursuit of private profit, they deployed their own armies and navies,  minted their own money, made their own laws, and employed their own bureaucracies to govern the lands they had stolen. 

With the rise in the power and reach of the state, and the use of state funds to maintain standing armies, navies and, latterly, air forces, the operation of organised private armies was reduced, although mercenaries still operated as individuals and small groups.

The end of the cold war 

The principle that the state ought to have the monopoly on coercion i.e., the armed services, the police, and prison, has been under steady attack since the 1970s. These days, nation states, international organisations, corporations and individuals increasingly rely on a wide range of privately owned and controlled military and security services. 

The existence and rapid growth of this industry has been normalised in part by propaganda offensives and in part by the successful embedding of core facets of the Neo-liberal contract culture.

From the end of WW2 there was a drive to pour all direct government to government aid into the development of infrastructure that would not only make extraction of natural resources more efficient, it would enable the movement of armed forces, either of the state or private “security” agencies, to protect the activities of companies hoping to benefit from the infrastructural improvements.

With the shifts in the balance of power that followed the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the digital era and increasingly mechanised warfare, often involving civilian specialists, there was a reduction in the global numbers of military personnel, several millions in total, and a sell off of massive amounts of military hardware. 

As the neo-liberal era also resulted in a reduction in wider employment opportunities in the global north, corporate sharks, especially in the military-industrial complex, seized the opportunity to fill the gap in the market. 

The result was a rise of corporatised armed forces, literal vendors of violence, sometimes presenting as security services wearing civilian kit and bearing only side arms, and sometimes as full scale military, providing a wide range of land, sea, and air services to both government and private entities.

These corporate entities operate openly as legitimate businesses in an international market, most deploying the same sort of opaque financial arrangements that characterise other sorts of global corporations. Some are subsidiaries of larger public companies; some are branches of corporations within the wider military-industrial complex. 

As fully legal commercial entities, the corporate private armies of the twenty-first century enter into formal contracts with their clients and openly advertise their services, all prettied up with the requisite corporate jargon. These include combat and combat training, logistics, and post-conflict resolution, and might include a range of extra-judicial actions such as abduction, arrest without warrant, imprisonment without trial, or assassination.

Neo-liberal capitalism’s commodification of violence, and the positioning of the vendors of violence as legitimate businesses, are logical outflows of globalisation, out-sourcing, asset-stripping the public sector, and returning the state to its core role of enabling and protecting private corporate, profits. 

This is now a huge industry which openly markets and profits from violence and its existence and its increasing power should be giving all sane people pause.

The infamous Leopold II of Belgium privately purchased a vast tract of Africa, and brutally policed its indigenous people with a private army comprising for the most part, thuggish mercenaries. How much moral distance is there between his vile actions, and those of the latter-day vendors and purchasers of violence?

Ultimately, this shift back to the operation of privateers leaves open a number of huge moral-legal questions.

Who monitors them; who regulates and controls them; who ensures the civil-military balance in respect of public policy; who can and will take steps to rein them in, or to punish transgressors?  

What price human rights and international law in such a market place?

 

NOTES: 

1)The brutality of some of the Wagner operatives has been used by the WA in anti-Russian propaganda which, as always, is breath-taking in its level of both gall and dishonesty.

2) There is a contradiction at the heart of the labour-capital relations – the legal right to enter into an employment contract rests on the existence of the individual person operating freely in the employment market. However, that freedom always was, and remains, highly conditional, and never more so than when the might of capital confronts one worker or a small group of workers. In arguably the greatest of all power struggles – that between capital and labour – the more powerful the former, the weaker the latter becomes. To get any sort of balance of power, labour has to organise collectively and the wresting of all labour advances from private employers, and from the bureaucratic state itself, has come as the result of mass collective action. The promotion of individually negotiated employment contracts and the use of fully contracted out labour are retrograde steps aimed at undermining working class collectivism and rolling back labour advances. 

3) Whilst collectivism was the only viable response to the embedded power of capitalism, it exists in tension with the “free” individual created by capitalism, and with the struggles to establish, extend and protect the legal rights of the individual, and of groups of individuals with commonalities. It is no accident that over the past half century – as working class and other great liberatory movements and collectives have been under attack, and the role of the state in moderating capitalist excesses has been rolled back – the ideology of the individual, aspirational self, has been heavily promoted. Like finance capitalism itself, the attendant political movements, have been made possible by the digital revolution.  Like all that capitalism does, this promotion is short-termist – there is no long-term vision; all capitalism cares about is the maximisation of profit and the entrenchment of power, in the here and now. How far the identity politics pendulum will swing and how much damage it will cause on its inevitable return arc, depends on forces that the hyper-exploiters and their compliant minions have probably not calculated as they believe they will be able to manage the outcomes to their benefit. After all, not only have they destroyed, or divided and distracted their only viable opposition – working class collectivism -– they also have compliant state machines at their disposal across much of the globe. Gender identity ideology drags political action into loose and shifting coalitions of individuals who are bound together only by a subjective sense of self. Ahistorical, metaphysical, ineluctably individualist and individualising, gender identity ideology, and much of its praxis, is neo-liberalism’s creature.