In 1944, writing from a position at the heart of the wartime state, Marxist economist Ed Sard made an astute and even uncanny prediction: “We are now being prepared to recognize as a legitimate economic activity peacetime expenditures for war of a sizable nature. Herein lies the real importance of the psychological preparations now under way for World War III.”
In these sentences, Sard anticipated not only the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War decades but the emergence of the postwar military-industrial complex. For the first time in the nation’s history, permanent war-production industries became a significant feature of the peacetime economy.
Militarization, whether overt or more subtle in its operation, infused all aspects of American life. Just as Sard predicted, the state no longer needed a hot war to justify its investment in the war machine.
Marcel van der Linden’s tribute rightly lauds Sard’s prescience. Certainly, as van der Linden notes, these keen insights were aided by Sard’s direct access to the internal data of the War Production Board. His position as editor of the publication Statistics of War Production provided the raw material from which Sard was able to divine the shape of things to come.
Having said that, if some aspects of Sard’s predictions were uncannily on the nose, others fell short. His theory of the permanent war economy has faced many decades of theoretical critique and empirical challenge, and now is a good time for an overall assessment.
Here it is important to note that in the permanent war economy…
Auteur: Hanna Goldberg
