The feudal nobility used their position and acquisition of wealth, via rents and taxes, to obtain large retinues and private armies. But, the acquisition of these retinues and armies was a consequence of their position as nobility, and consequent accumulation of wealth, not vice versa. But, rather as with Crusoe's ownership of the sword being superseded by Friday's possession of the revolver, the military power of the nobility, based upon the cavalry, armour and stone fortifications, was superseded by the military power of the urban bourgeoisie. Where did that power come from? Again, it came from the economic power of that urban bourgeoisie, based on industry and commerce, its access to firearms and cannon that made the armour, cavalry and stone fortifications of the nobility obsolete.
“So, the revolver triumphs over the sword; and this will probably make even the most puerile lover of axioms comprehend that force is no mere act of the will, but requires the existence of very real preconditions for its functioning, especially, instruments, the more perfect of which vanquishes the less perfect; that further these instruments have to be produced, which at the same time implies that the producer of more perfect instruments of force, commonly called arms, vanquishes the producer of the less perfect instruments, and that, in a word, the triumph of force is based on the production of arms, and this in turn on production in general — therefore, on “economic power”, on the “economic situation”, on the material means which force has at its disposal.” (p 212)
As I have noted elsewhere, in relation to the lessons of the Chinese Revolution, this is important in relation, also, to the difference between proletarian revolution and peasant guerrilla war. As Trotsky noted, it is the ability to produce the arms required that is decisive, and it is the industrial proletariat, in the towns and cities that has that power. The peasantry, engaged in guerrilla warfare, does not. It can only acquire those arms by stealing them, which assumes they already exist, or else obtaining them from some ally. In the case of the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky notes that peasant detachments played an important role, but only on the basis of their subordination to their allies within the industrial proletariat that provided the weapons and so on. Elsewhere, such guerrilla bands have to rely on external allies, and often, those “allies” are simply using them as part of their own strategic objectives.
The same principle applies in relation to imperialism. The state that has superior weapons is able to conquer one that does not, but what determines its possession of those superior weapons is again its economy, its productive power. What has been seen, on numerous occasions, is that, in a war, it is not even the state that has the most weapons at the start of the war that is determinant, but the state that is able to produce more weapons, more quickly, and to produce the weapons best suited to the conditions of such a war once it has begun.
The same argument, used by Engels against Duhring, arises again. Why just because one state has superior weapons would it, necessarily, use them to conquer some other state? For Duhring, the answer is simply because it can, it is the nature of Man to do so. Yet, there is plenty of evidence that that is not true. For millennia, humans existed without engaging in such behaviour. Often, when one tribe engaged in conflict with another, it was, again, based on some objective, material antagonism, driven by economic interest. With Native American tribes, competition and conflict, which appears war-like, often took the form of “counting coup”. And, as Engels demonstrated, in “The Origin of The Family, Private Property and The State”, when one tribe raided another, and took prisoners, this was, also, usually, not to obtain slaves, but to replenish the depleted numbers of their own tribe. Even tribal lands and hunting-grounds were not off-limits to other tribes, who were allowed to pass through them on their seasonal migrations.
Moreover, as Marx notes, in The Poverty of Philosophy, even if we view such predatory activity of a more powerful tribe or nation, as a means of “pillaging” or stealing the surplus value produced by another nation, the means required to do this are completely different where the nation is a peasant economy, and that surplus takes the form of a surplus agricultural product, as against a nation whose economy has developed to the stage of stock-jobbing.
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