Evolution of the Means of Destruction

Discussion

Wolfgang Streeck, introducing a historical-materialist theory on the evolution of the means of destruction:

"In 1855, at the height of the Crimean War, Engels produced an extensively researched overview of the development of armaments in all European states.footnote7 As an industrialist, he found it useful not only to compare the progress of the destructive technologies of the time with that of the productive technologies, but to consider their inter-relationship. One question was whether military technology benefited more from civilian technology or vice versa—which of the two led the other. From a political-economic perspective, military technology could be no more than a by-product of its civilian counterpart. But couldn’t industrial mass production, based on standardized components—the essential prerequisite for what would become the ‘Fordist’ mode of production—be traced back to a certain Samuel Colt, whose invention allowed him to deliver 130,000 revolvers to the Northern states in the Civil War? Even more relevant for historical materialism was the question of whether, analogizing from the development of the means of production, the progress from hand-mill to steam-mill, one should postulate the ‘relatively autonomous’ development of what we might call the means of destruction—the replacement of the sword by the machine gun—as a second, parallel strand of historical development, entangled with the first but not identical to it." (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii123/articles/wolfgang-streeck-engels-s-second-theory)