Preface: War/Time

In advanced consumer societies, we are used to thinking of war as a disruption of the normal state of aff airs, as an irruption of irrational violence and destruction into an otherwise peaceful condition. Because we associate our peace with exhausting yet safety-enhanced cycles of production and consumption, we have become accustomed to thinking of war as the opposite of productivity—war as destruction in opposition to production, war as something diff erent from the everyday violence of our workaday lives, which happens at a distance, in other places and times, seen on screens. We are liable to acknowledge that war makes for profi ts, that there are and always have been war profi teers, but we are unlikely to grasp how the increasingly fragile prosperity of the United States and its client states might be predicated upon war, because we still think war in opposition to peace, prosperity, productivity. But there are arguments for, and demonstrations of, a state of aff airs in which war constitutes the very ground of our productivity and prosperity. Chalmers Johnson, for instance, argues that the United States economy (and thus that of its client states) has become a form of military Keynesianism, in which “the making and selling of weaponry has become our way of life.”1 Simply put, war-related technologies and military bases are a major worldwide employer and growth industry, and a highly regulated one at that. On a related tack, Naomi Klein’s discussions of disaster capitalism have shown how contemporary American-articulated global capitalism deliberately builds thoMas laMarre Preface