Don’t Forget About The Bomb
I make no effort at hiding the fact that I have left-wing ideology and politics. Distributive justice, unions, taxing the heck out of corporations and all that. I do think that most left-wing thinkers and promoters are forgetting something important: international policy. In doing so, they forget about something even more critical: The Bomb. Here, the bomb refers to arms in general and especially nuclear payloads and other WMDs.
There is a distinct refusal, or outright disregard, about the importance that warfare and armaments have been in shaping how we view the world. This is not a moral judgment, WMDs are terrible for us. But they exist, and we have used them to win wars and create states. And do VERY nasty things. Right now, governments have exclusive rights to the ownership of these weapons and “mostly” know better than to employ WMDs as anything but a deterrent. I’m not saying they don’t want to use them; they just know they shouldn’t use them. I don’t buy the idea of a rogue state; this being the idea of a mad leader that overwhelms all government bodies and acts out of their own will and bombs and declares war all willy-nilly. Democracies and dictatorships alike are deliberate with the waging of war and what kinds of weapons they know they can use. Hitler wasn’t a madman; he was a failed painter and Disney fanboy that got some really bad ideas and was too charming for our good.
Why do I have this preamble? Nation-states are particular beasts. Leftist ideology, a lot of times, presumes the abolition of the state. The abolition of the state under leftist ideals would imply that: communities are smaller and managed on a smaller level, that laws and security would be collectively enforced for the betterment of the collective, and that the collective would be auto-sufficient. Now, this isn’t a debate about whether not communism is possible or not. But we have to take into consideration what would happen to the mechanisms of the state. As the modern nation-state encompasses a huge amount of territory, the abolition of the nation-state would mean the partition of the state into tiny pieces. Breurocracy would be rendered obsolete as whatever institutions are transformed into local entities that operate in territories the size of counties or cities. Thus, large-scale hierarchy and paperwork would be useless. You can probably cut down and redistribute workers as needed at an insular level. Many of them can be in charge of facilitating communications between territories. However, this would leave control to exclusively sovereign, local areas. So far, we have a theoretical solution to cutting down states.
It starts getting tricky when we consider police groups, intelligence agencies, and the army. Who would these entities answer to? Most likely, they would be spread out into other agencies, abolished, or turned into local defenders who respond to the territory itself. But, how do you determine the payload? What does one do with the weapons? Not just the guns, but the tanks, the bombs, the drones, the jets, the submarines, and the NUKES. These weapons are capable of destroying cities, eradicating resources, and turning people into mush or ashes. These things are also an environmental hazard, messing up the local ecosystem and contaminating water supplies. If these weapons get in the hands of groups that are dedicated to the eradication of the other, such as a bunch of racists, we will have terrorists with payloads that will threaten our existence. The nation-state has its flaws, but it has kept its payloads in their hands. At least when it comes to WMDs of course.
And this is one of my biggest fears, the idea that with the abolishing of the state that we will have a rise in terrorism. By the hammer and anvil of Robert Pape, we can’t allow leftist ideology to have such a glaring flaw! Radical leftists such as Laclau do not conceive of the end of the nation-state, but communist and anarchist ideology conclude in a scenario where large states do not exist. “Well we shouldn’t have built these WMDs in the first place,” says someone who forgets that hindsight is 20/20, but vision can go lower than 16/20. The natural response of states was to engage in major arms races and scare the life out of each other while trying to outlast and outkill each other. Right now, I cannot condone a theory that believes in the end of the state to go unchecked. If you conceive the end of the state, you need to consider what you will do with THE BOMB. THE BOMB is dangerous.
Honestly, and this is a reflection not done with much in-depth research but more personal experience, I don’t know of many leftist individuals who talk about weapons and their payload. Sure, there are the Gramscians such as Worth and Cox who try to develop similar kinds of issues as power and discourse take hold of the international system, but this group is small. And certainly, they aren’t popular whatsoever. If you, reader, happen to know of any theorist in this vein who is concerned about the problem of WMDs, let me know. Otherwise, those who care about WMDs tend to be center and right of center, as well as IR deviants.
I raise this point because when I watch Contrapoints, Thought Slime, Shaun, Philosophy Tube, or try to find current leftist media and thinkers, I come empty when it comes to the discussion of international policy and the idea of demilitarization. I spent quite a while trying to look for literature that reconciled left-wing politics with international relations during my time at U Chicago and, while present, was minimal. I’m not an anarchist, so the prospect of no state is horrifying. I want someone to tell them that our ideals depend on mapping a more coherent transition. I guess that someone is gonna have to be me. Doubt they’ll listen, though.
