On April 27th, 1968, barely three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King delivered a speech to an audience of peace activists. It was entitled “Ten Commandments on Vietnam” and drew from the notes enfolded in King’s pockets when he was murdered. These commandments commanded the people to reject the ideological consensus of the ruling elite for a War Economy, and to see the world from the perspective of humanity and children who long for peace and self-determination. Coretta Scott King explained how her husband saw the problem of racism and poverty at home and militarism abroad as two sides of the same coin: “The bombs we drop on the people of Vietnam continue to explode at home with all of their devastating potential.”1 Scott King was one of a long tradition in the Black Freedom Struggle who saw freedom, full employment, and peace as inseparable. They fought for a Peace Industrial Economy of the welfare state, rather than the warfare state.
Despite their tireless efforts, the vision of Coretta Scott King and the Black Freedom Struggle did not come to be. The War Economy elite extended their influence over Congress, labor unions, universities, and large swathes of the American people. They took over the American government apparatus and turned it into a warfare state, a form of state capitalism that directed America’s natural, economic, and human resources towards never ending wars. They successfully sold the lie that a permanent War Economy would bring prosperity to all Americans. The result was disinvestment in American cities and infrastructure, human potential squandered in crime and violence, and the deindustrialization and devastation of the American working class.
Today, the war consensus is breaking after decades of tacit approval. The deindustrialized masses register their anger in populist movements which reject the ruling elite and its institutions. Students march for Gaza, rejecting their war-beholden university leadership. America teeters between two choices: a continuation of racism, poverty, and war, versus a revolution of democracy, economic justice, and peace. In this context of mass disillusionment, a crisis of legitimacy unforeseen in the American body politic, we must return to the tradition of Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Ron Dellums, and others who fought to educate the people about the reality behind the War Economy and the possibility of an American renewal via a Peace Industrial Economy.
The Origins of the War Economy: Not Bread and Roses, but Guns and Butter
The War Economy had its origins in the post-World War II order. The founding assumption of the War Economy was that America could have guns (defense spending) and butter (domestic programs), an assumption with disastrous consequences. Many Americans drew the conclusion that World War II restored prosperity by employing over 50 million Americans and thus ending the Great Depression. Congressional leadership eagerly accepted the conviction that a permanent War Economy could sustain economic growth. Presidents seeking to stimulate the economy sought to do so through the military budget, like John F. Kennedy did in 1961. The very idea of the Cold War provided the basis of a permanent War Economy because there was no termination in view. The Korean War gave the public the first legitimation for military build-up rather than conversion to a peacetime economy. The military budget jumped from $13 billion in 1950, $47 billion in 1961, $87 billion in 1974, to $265 billion in 1984.2 It stands at $847 billion as of 2023.
The War Economy had tacit support across the political spectrum. Conservatives supported the War Economy as indispensable in the fight against communism. Liberals justified military spending as a Keynesian strategy of government spending to create jobs. The Trotskyite Left saw the War Economy as an inevitable part of capitalism, and painted efforts to stop it as reformist and bourgeois.
As a result of the War Economy, a technical and administrative managerial class prospered, especially those connected to universities. In 1899 there were 10 administrative, technical, and clerical workers for every 100 production workers. By 1978, there were 42 such workers per 100 production workers. This professional managerial class grew without any correlation to increase in productivity or profit. By contrast, the vast majority of the American people suffered through disinvestment and deindustrialization, most especially the poor and working classes.
What is the War Economy: Guns Eat Butter and Belch Death
In his book The War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, Columbia Engineering professor Seymour Melman explains that the War Economy is a fundamentally parasitic economy. Rather than corporate control of the government, as is alleged by some leftists, it is state capitalist governmental control of the economy for war rather than for productive enterprise.
Melman explains that even though the Gross National Product (GNP), the conventional measure of economic growth, has been steadily increasing, not all of that GNP is economically productive. The War Economy is in fact parasitic, because its products do not result in economic use value in terms of higher standards of living via consumer goods and services; nor does it benefit further production, as in machinery or tools for manufacturing. Moreover, the War Economy is cost and subsidy maximizing because it is not subject to the regulation of the market: defense industries have an endless supply of money impervious to inflation, poor performance and product design, and poor management. This results in uncounted loss for the productive economy as valuable resources are poured into industries of death.
Besides murder abroad, the War Economy’s most destructive impact is to rob an economically productive economy of civilian goods and services. By 1971, for every dollar of private corporate capital, the budget of the Department of Defense received $1.06. More than half of all Research and Development was applied to military and defense related activity. During the 1950s and 60s, the federal government enlarged funds for schools that would revise curricula to serve the military economy, while curricula and technical research in civilian engineering like power engineering was de-emphasized. Science departments gave the greatest prestige to theoretical research over practical applicability like civil engineering, with renewed facilities for graduate schools and money for graduate students. Research and Development was steered to warfare rather than raising the productivity of capital and labor.
Funding for military-related R&D laid the basis for what is known today as the knowledge economy, an economy that emphasizes the production of “knowledge” over the production of consumer goods. Elite university credentials, which became even more out of reach to the masses through skyrocketing tuition, were the only possible path to economic stability. Defense and aerospace spending dwarfed spending for civilian technology, health, and basic research. Funds for universities poured into cities at the same time that money poured out of cities, underlying urban renewal programs in the 60s that displaced, and continue to displace, thousands of Black people.3
In 1971, the United States went off the gold standard in response to depleted gold reserves from Vietnam War spending. The U.S. dollar became the global reserve currency, and the Federal Reserve printed money with impunity. Inflation skyrocketed, leading the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates with disastrous effects for poor and working class consumers. The U.S. balance of trade took a nosedive after the U.S. made its own fiat currency the global reserve. Dollarization meant increased imports and decreased exports; with more dollars flowing out to the global economy, companies were incentivized to export American jobs overseas. A “strong dollar” by definition meant a weak industrial base.
Disinvestment in the civilian economy in favor of the War Economy was catastrophic for American industry. The United States was once the leader in modern mass-production through innovations like the assembly line. The American auto industry was admired the world over, including by socialist nations like the Soviet Union and China, for its efficiency, productivity and ability to generate high standards of living for the working class. By the 1960s, the U.S. lost its production edge, failing to keep up with standardization techniques and modern design that had advanced in other industrialized nations. The same happened with steel, civilian electronics, commercial aircrafts, metallurgical technology, and machine-tools, which are the basis of productivity in a modern industrial system. As Melman writes, “…the relatively poor condition of the plant and equipment in many U.S. industries is no mystery. U.S. policy traded off renewal of the main productive assets of the economy for the operation of the military system.”4
Industrial regions that were places of working-class power and striving like Detroit and Chicago (the so-called “Rust Belt”) were disinvested and their tax dollars siphoned to areas with concentrated defense projects like California, Virginia, and Texas (the so-called “Sun Belt”).
Because American industry was so outdated and skilled manpower was so lacking, it became unattractive for investors and noncompetitive on the world stage. Millions of steelworkers, machinists, garment workers, auto workers, ship workers, shoe workers, carpenters, and electrical workers lost their jobs. By some estimates, as many as 32 million jobs were lost in the 1970s and 80s. Deindustrialization devastated working class communities, laying waste to whole neighborhoods and regions as male breadwinners in particular lost the ability to provide for themselves and their families. Black workers, who were only beginning to gain a foothold into what was a path to economic stability, were the most devastated.
Another terrible consequence of the War Economy was the deterioration of America’s cities. Inner cities were denied improvements in education, health care, housing, vocational training, and skills training in favor of the development of the war-knowledge economy. The result was increased costs in jails, police, fires, welfare, and courts. As Melman says, “…the proximate effects of aggressive military adventurism include profound deterioration within the United States as represented by mass drug addiction and the breakdown of minimal requirements of human community.”5
As anti-war Congressman Ron Dellums wrote in 1986:
“Military spending destroys more jobs than it creates. Working class people cannot eat M-X missiles; our youth cannot learn from B-1 bombers; the sick cannot be healed with Trident submarines; the elderly cannot be housed or cared for in M-1 tanks; we cannot reverse the increase in, and feminization of, poverty with Pershing II and Cruise missiles. Our economy and society will continue to suffer so long as weapons contractors and the Pentagon consume an increasing share of our natural resources.”6
Most Americans could not connect the War Economy with the wanton destruction of disinvestment and industrial decline. A consensus grew among certain industries, major universities, trade unions, and regions of the United States that benefited from defense spending. Economic orthodoxy obscured the connection. The War Economy ideology held that it was possible to have guns AND butter, even though resources were limited, leading to unchecked printing of the dollar and inflation. It held that the War Economy would spur economic growth, when in fact it retarded it. It held that the War Economy would uplift all, even though it benefited only certain pockets of the country (the “Sun Belt”) at the expense of others. It held that military research would have positive spillover effects on civilian economies, but the opposite turned out to be true.
The Black Freedom Movement Wages a Challenge of Peace and Freedom
The Black Freedom Movement rejected the ideological consensus for war in favor of peace. It identified with the darker nations of the world, who rejected the Cold War and Pax Americana imposed by American military intervention and economic domination. It advocated instead for full employment and investment in human beings. Figures like W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois and Paul Robeson, and later Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, the Black Political Convention, and Ron Dellums waged the struggle for a Peace Industrial Economy for many decades.
One of the first groups to reject the ideology of the War Economy was the Nation of Islam, which rejected American white supremacy at home and abroad. From its inception in the 1930s, the Nation of Islam refused to fight in white supremacist wars and exposed their demonic nature to the Black masses. As Muhammad Ali said, “The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.… If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow.” Their current leader, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, is a steadfast voice for peace. For their truth-telling, the Nation continues to endure political and actual assassinations by the War Economy State.
In 1948, at the Progressive Party Convention, Shirley Graham Du Bois said she and her people demanded:
“PEACE without battleships, atomic bombs and lynch ropes; PEACE without murderers masked as statesmen; PEACE without military conscription and mangled, torn bodies lingering on in veterans’ hospitals; PEACE in which to work and build. We would use Science for human uplift and not for death; we want Peace which, by saving in the next years all that has been squandered in the hell of war, will mean health to our sick, homes to our homeless, education for our children, food for the hungry, and clothes to the naked. In this great land of ours with its mighty rivers and limitless resources, we Americans, a nation of free and equal men and women, would lead the world into the CENTURY OF PEACE!”7
Coretta Scott King attended this conference as one of the 150 African American delegates.8
The Civil Rights Movement took up the torch of Du Bois and Robeson, who were harassed and erased by the McCarthyist persecution of the War Economy State. It is often forgotten that the famous 1963 March on Washington was a march for freedom and jobs, since the economic well-being of the American people was inseparable from their human rights. United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuthers (who died in a suspicious plane crash in 1970 after coming out against the pro-war agenda of AFL-CIO leader George Meany) argued, “If we can have full employment for negative ends of war, why can’t we have jobs for every American in the pursuit of peace.”9
Momentously, on April 4th, 1967, a year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came out against the U.S. War in Vietnam. He identified the War Economy as the enemy of the poor, a “demonic destructive suction tube” taking away energies and funds needed to rehabilitate the poor and bring true Democracy to America.
His comrade and wife, Coretta Scott King, was a longtime member of Women’s Strike for Peace and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She believed women, who had a special stake in the creation and fulfillment of human life, constituted a powerful force for a peace economy. She fought for a full employment economy via the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill and the National Committee for Full Employment and Full Employment Action Council. As Coretta Scott King said in 1975, “This nation has never honestly dealt with the question of a peacetime economy and what it means in terms of the development within the country. We’ve had much greater employment during the times when we’ve been engaged in war.… We recognize that in the urgency of the unemployment crisis there must be immediate solutions, jobs must be provided by the government.”10
Deeply influenced by the formulations of Dr. King, Congressman Ron Dellums and the Congressional Black Caucus were a consistent voice against the expansion of the War Economy. For example, in 1986 Dellums advocated for an alternative defense budget that was $66 billion less than Reagan’s proposal. It had seven policy spending goals: reducing the risk of nuclear war, cutting interventionist forces, reducing the number of troops in Europe and Asia, eliminating unnecessary weapons, eliminating waste, funding programs for military families, and initiating capital investment and employment conversion programs to help the nation transition from a War Economy to a Peace Industrial Economy.11,12
Peace activists drew direct connections between the cost of missiles and missile systems, tanks, rockets, nuclear powered aircraft carriers, nuclear warcrafts, and cuts to mass-transit systems, Social Security, guaranteed student loans, veterans’ medical care and housing, subsidized lunches for school children, Amtrak modernization, sewage treatment to meet minimum Clean Water Act, AIDS research, infrastructure repairs, bridges and roads, low-income housing, toxic-waste cleanup, and food-stamps. They developed programs of conversion of wartime industries like the airframe industries into houses, electrical vehicles, and railroad cars, and the reconstruction of depleted industries. They fought for a true War on Poverty that would invest heavily in education, health, nutrition, jobs and manpower, crime, delinquency and riot prevention, quality of environment, natural resource development, urban development, transportation upgrades, and science and space exploration.13
The Crack in the White Supremacist Consensus for War
The nation failed to heed the prophetic voice of the Black Freedom Struggle. America continued arms buildup even after the end of the Cold War, with disastrous wars and military interventions. Hundreds of American military bases stain the Earth, sucking resources from the American people and denying the darker nations development and self-determination.
The War Economy is built in a consensus of the elite, which is a consensus of white supremacy. As James Baldwin reminds us, racial hatred is ultimately a dehumanization of the self. The white supremacist denial of freedom for Black people at home and the darker nations abroad has had devastating effects for Americans of all colors, including white Americans.
The devastation has reached a point that the War Economy consensus is under threat. In 2016, Donald Trump astonished the political elites by defeating warmonger supreme, Hilary Clinton. The basis of his appeal to his deindustrialized white base was a rejection of the elite, a promise to bring the jobs back, and an attack on never-ending wars. While Trump is a long way from the beauty, clarity, and moral authority of the thinkers of the Black Freedom Struggle, his anti-elite movement, which is gaining legitimacy among Black and Latino working-class voters, registers the discontent of the dispossessed of this nation with the War Economy State.
Meanwhile, students march against American support for the War in Gaza. They defy their war-mongering Zionist university administrators, whom they see as morally bankrupt, and demand in no uncertain terms that the U.S. stop funding genocide. Youth shift their focus from their inner worlds and solipsistic identity-politics to the outer world and their responsibility to future generations.
In her profound grief, Coretta Scott King spoke to the peace movement as the heirs of her husband’s legacy. As she said in that 1968 speech,
“You who have worked with and loved my husband so much, you who have kept alive the burning issue of war in the American conscience, you who will not be deluded by talk of peace, but who press on in the knowledge that the work of peacemaking must continue until the last gun is silent.
I come to you in my grief only because you keep alive the work and dreams for which my husband gave his life. My husband arrived somewhere to his strength and inspiration from the love of all people who shared his dream, that I too now come hoping you might strengthen me for the lonely road ahead.”14
That road is no longer so lonely. Millions of Americans reject the War Economy and seek an alternative. The alternative lies in education for the truth about the stolen potential of the American people and the American renaissance that lies in the wings. The Black Freedom Struggle can lead us there, if we can believe in our capacity to build a Peace Industrial Economy through investment in humanity, most especially the children.
References:
- Coretta Scott King, “10 Commandments on Vietnam,” Speech, April 27, 1968. ↩︎
- Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 18. ↩︎
- Margaret P. O’Mara, “Beyond Town and Gown: University Economic Engagement and the Legacy of the Urban Crisis,” The Journal of Technology Transfer 37, no. 2 (July 30, 2010): 234–50, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-010-9185-4. ↩︎
- Melman, Permanent War, 67. ↩︎
- Melman, Permanent War, 125. ↩︎
- Ronald V. Dellums, “Welfare State vs. Warfare State,” The Black Scholar 17, no. 6 (November 1986): 38–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1986.11414442, 48. ↩︎
- Shirley Graham Du Bois, Shirley Graham’s Keynote Speech, 1948 (New York, NY: Progressive Party, 1948), 3. ↩︎
- David P. Stein, “‘This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, no. 1 (March 14, 2016): 80–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1162570, 83. ↩︎
- Walter Reuther, “Speech by Walter Reuther,” Motown Records. Speech presented at the Great March on Washington, August 28, 1963. ↩︎
- Stein, “This Nation,” 81. ↩︎
- Dellums, “Welfare State,” 47-9. ↩︎
- Sadly, the Congressional Black Caucus today has departed from the vision of people like Ron Dellums. They became part of what Glen Ford calls the Black misleadership class, and have supported U.S. military interests in Ukraine, Israel, and Venezuela. ↩︎
- Melman, Permanent War, 200-202. ↩︎
- King, “Ten Commandments.” ↩︎
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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