On Thu, 25 Apr 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Going further back, didn't Luxemburg see military spending as a > solution to capitalism's underconsumption problems? Malthus saw There's also a nice bit on this in Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. Technological formula can be states as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system." This probably isn't strictly relevant, but hey, when we were pounding Baghdad and James Baker said it was about "Jobs," he probably didn't know all that he was saying. And who could deny the futurist aestheticization of war (recall all of those those slick tomahawk and patriot missiles?) that Benjamin goes on to cite: "War is beautiful because it initiates the dreampt-of metalization of the human body." Paul Cheney Columbia U.
