22 February 2023. War | Monopolies
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1: War and the civilian
I came across some old notes, from a talk by the military historian Anthony Beevor in 2015, and I think that when I took them I’d hoped they might be historical. But the Ukraine war has dragged them sharply into the present. The anniversary of that war seems a good moment to share those notes, and my reflections on them now.
Listening to Anthony Beevor on the subject of war over the last 75 years, it became clear that his real subject was the role of the city in modern warfare, or even the rise of the city in war.
He started with the observation that although the Napoleonic war covered much of the land mass of Europe, there was hardly any urban fighting.
One reason: commanders knew how quickly discipline broke down when troops found alcohol, and it was much easier for them to desert. Similarly, World War 1 created its own military landscape.
This all changed with World War II, although—like other aspects of World War II—it was presaged by theSpanish Civil War. In 1940, with Paris about to fall, Churchill urged Weygand and Petain to fight the Germans street by street. In Beevor’s account, they were appalled.
Weygand, a career officer, had been the French Ambassador to Spain during the civil war, and had seen anarchists take control of Barcelona during the urban fighting there. Beevor didn’t mention it, but it’s possible that his view was also shaped by the history of the Paris Commune, 70 years earlier.
And so it fell to Stalingrad to be the example of urban fighting. Hitler’s ambition to capture Stalingrad came partly from the prestige of capturing the city that Stalin had named for himself, by Beevor’s account, and partly to distract from the Wehrmacht’s failure to seize the oilfields to the south.
(Soviet soldiers at the battle for Stalingrad, via snl.no. CC BY SA 3.0)
Neither side was experienced in such fighting. Indeed, the Luftwaffe’s success in bombing much of the city created ideal defensive terrain. The U.S. Army got their first taste of urban warfare in Aachen, on the German border, after Hitler ordered that the city was to be held at all costs.
Artillery turned out to be the best form of attack, in the same way, perhaps that the British had pounded the centre of Dublin during the 1916 uprising and also insisted that the Irish Free State shell the IRA when they occupied the Four Courts.
Fast forward, then, to the Second Iraq War and the rise of ISL a decade afterwards. Before that war there was something of a media frenzy about he possibility that the attack on Baghdad might look something like Stalingrad. It didn’t happen. Saddam’s wide straight avenues were good territory for armoured regiments, targeted bombing left most of the city intact, and Iraqi soldiers melted away in the face of the Coalition’s overwhelming firepower.
All of this history, coupled with the relentless growth of cities in the Global South, led some military strategists to conclude that in future all warfare would be urban warfare.
National Interest ran an article around the same time as Beevor gave his talk setting out this argument. In case there was any doubt, it was headlined, ‘Battleground Metropolis: The Future of Urban Warfare’:
The rise of megacities , urban areas with populations of 10 million or more, significantly complicates fighting in urban terrain. While some of the largest cities in the world (projected in 2030) are relatively secure—Tokyo, Shanghai and Beijing—others, like New Delhi, Karachi and Lagos, will likely be centers of unrest.
You can draw your own conclusions about the kinds of assumptions that sit behind this sweeping urban classification, but for National Interest the implications were clear:
As cities grow to megacity status, we should expect this urbanization to strain urban municipal infrastructure and create divisions in society , all of which will lead to greater socio-economic and socio-political friction, thereby generating a greater chance of conflict... Poor governance in great urban areas will become a fertile breeding ground for organized crime, terrorism and other forms of violence. They will threaten the interests of locals, the United States, its partners and allies
The National Interest article pointed towards lighter, but more lethal, weapons, much more ‘smart’ tech-driven capability, and more specialist troops. Back at the talk, there was some discussion from the audience as to whether doctrine and equipment would move towards lighter vehicles, or whether this idea of future urban warfare was already out of date.
Beevor, back then, probably wouldn’t have been aware of Assad’s attacks on rebel city areas, backed by Russian artillery, but all of this discussion has come into a sharp and depressing focus because of the war in Ukraine.
The attacks on cities there have been more reminiscent of World War II, intended to destroy urban infrastructure, worsen their living conditions, and wreck their morale. The Russians have been using artillery, missiles, and drones to do this, rather than bombers, but the principle goes back to the early theory of war from the air: that the bomber will always get through. HG Wells’ story The Shape of Things to Come, made into a film in the 1930s, used this as a starting point, and the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin used it in a speech in 1932.
(Still from ‘Things to Come’ (1936)
The last part of this hypothesis has turned out to be wrong, whenever it has been tested, and it seems that it’s turning out to be wrong in Ukraine as well. Indeed, it also looks as if heavier vehicles not lighter ones, fighting in fairly conventional ways, may be decisive. In Ukraine, Russia’s aerial attacks on cities, civilians, and civilian infrastructure look like a substitute for an effective military capacity rather than a new doctrine.
I think I conclude a couple of things from this. The first is that civilians will continue to be targets for military actions, and that will continue to come from the air. But no-one orchestrating these attacks should expect them to destroy civilian morale. Even in the extreme case of Syria they were used mostly as a form of collective punishment for those who had dared oppose Assad’s regime.
The second is that military analysts are subject to the same futures fads as everyone else. No matter how poor your urban governance, no matter how unruly your cities, you aren’t’t going to call in America or its allies, as the National Interest article suggests. Because nothing says ‘I’ve lost control of my sovereign territory’ quite like asking foreign troops to help with your governance problems.
One of the things we also learnt from wars, from Algiers to northern Ireland, and more recent conflicts elsewhere, is that troops are not well-placed in such situations. In an age of asymmetric warfare they become targets for all kinds of improvised devices. You end up with cycles of reprisals that make the prospects for peace more distant.
Obviously the kinds of war being fought in Ukraine and these “governance” conflicts are completely different. One is an old-fashioned ‘back to the future’ kinetic war based on combined operations where the attacks on cities have little strategic value. They are somewhere between a propaganda sideshow and a form of punishment for resistance.
(War damage in Mariupol, 12 March 2022, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ukraine. Mvs.gov.ua. CC BY 4.0)
The others are usually a marker of a failure to resolve real political and economic conflicts by other means. They speak to a need identified in some work I did with Chatham House last year:
Transnational institutions for managing conflict resolution and responding to kinetic warfare are well established... (However) there is an opportunity to create new institutions or modify existing ones with a formal objective of pre-emptive monitoring and management of security risk, with the purpose of maintaining peace rather than having to intervene after conflict has broken out. These institutions should add a security perspective to the analysis of climate change impacts and the criticality of natural resources, identify potential trigger points for disputes, and seek to defuse them.
2: Reclaiming democracy from monopolists
Robert Kuttner, of The American Prospect sent out an email this week about the links between taking on monopolies and improving the quality of our democracies. It’s headlined ‘How monopoly destroys democracy’.
The monopoly bit first. He quotes Karl Polanyi, to the effect that in a capitalist economy everything is capable of being turned into a commodity. His example of this is a bit different. His granddaughter takes part in a sport called Cheer which is a cross between cheerleading and gymnastics.
(Cheerleaders at work. Via pxhere.com. CC0 public domain)
90% of Cheer activities are controlled by one company, Varsity, and the anti-monopolies writer Matt Stoller has been on their case:
Varsity controls virtually every single tournament, including the fees, who gets invited, and through its manipulation of the governing body for cheer, how they are organized. How did Varsity acquire such control? Mergers. Using an array of tactics, but mostly buying rivals starting in the early 2000s, and then accelerating into the 2010s.
And of course, Varsity does what all monopolists do: it extracts value from its customers:
One abuse among many: If your kid competes at an out-of-town tournament, you can only stay at an approved hotel, a practice known as play-to-stay... If middle school and high school sports competitions have been taken over by monopoly corporations, is anything safe?
So far, this sounds like the usual story of locust capitalism at work. It’s easier to extract value than to create it, even though it’s better for societies if firms can be bothered to create value. But since the Reagan administration changed the rules on competition regulation in the 1980s, monopolies have been booming.
So what’s the connection to democracy? Kuttner’s account goes like this:
Conventionally, the threats to democracy are mainly perils such as voter suppression and efforts to overturn election results by fraud or force. Those are genuine—but just as genuine is the increased corporate concentration that destroys communities, wipes out small business, disempowers workers, and leads to concentrations of income, wealth and power. The two forms of anti-democracy reinforce each other.
This was a theme of a recent speech by Senator Elizabeth Warren, given at an event called ‘Renewing the Democratic Republic’, which Kuttner points to. Some of the data in that speech are striking. In the agriculture sector, 30 years ago, the top four pork packers in the US controlled 36% of the market. Now it’s 70%. The share of the top four beef packers has climbed from 32% t0 85% in the same time.
Antitrust law carries severe penalties for a reason: competition is essential to our economy and to our democracy. Today, as giant corporations get even bigger and even more economically powerful, they amass more resources to spend on lobbying and campaign contributions. As their political power grows, they use that power to ensure that all the rules—including the antitrust rules—tilt in their favor. These giants damage more than our economy; they corrode the foundations of our democracy.
To his credit, President Biden has made anti-trust an important part of his platform, appointing anti-monopolists to the Federal Trade Commission (Lina Khan) and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department:
Monopolies are starting to be broken up, and other anti-competitive abuses banned. As David Dayen has reported , Biden tasked every major federal agency with using its powers to increase competition.
But this isn’t just a story about Washington. Kuttner suggests that there’s also been a shift in the political mood. Barry Lynn, of the Open Markets Institute, which jointly organised the conference at which Warren spoke, said:
“Just about every ill we face today is made worse by monopolization, soaring prices for our homes, our food, our health care or...ever-lower wages and ever worse jobs, surveillance, the destruction of the free press....”
He doesn’t mention it, but this also has quite a lot to do with the way that private equity capital has been allowed to take over significant swathes of the economy. Newspapers, for example, were regularly acquired for the value of their downtown property holdings. This isn’t just about monopoly, but also about types of finance capital.
As for Cheer, which is owned by the private equity company Bain Capital, the reason Matt Stoller was writing about them most recently is that they are currently on the end of a massive class-action suit. His coverage of the Cheer monopoly brought him into contact with the parents—many in ordinary jobs—who spent several thousand dollars a year helping their daughters pursue the sport:
Monopolization can often be complex... But this is cheerleading. There are no advanced technologies in cheer, no economies of scale and no fancy business jargon to demystify. Cheerleading is just team of (mostly) girls doing gymnastics together, trained at a common gym, with the equipment, training and travel paid by parents. Cheer as a business is thus a result purely of the business practices we have chosen to allow in our country.
Notes from readers: Politics
Ian Christie responded to my piece about the “rage against everything” march in Oxford last weekend with a note that set it in the context of the transition in the 1980s to neoliberal models of managing both economic life and society:
From the Depression until the late 70s, the Western democracies were based on an imperfect model of solidarity, mutuality, common purpose and inclusive economic growth. Ever since then we’ve been organised by elites who’ve endorsed or submitted to the social-Darwinist neoliberal model of competition and of sorting winners from losers. The main social product of this model is resentment, and we now have the means to coalesce very easily around resentment. There’s no need for any of that to make intellectual sense or be consistent. It just needs to be felt, and for resentments to go unaddressed.
j2t#428
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