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From The New International, Vol. X No. 2, February 1944, pp. 58–59.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Some time ago an article appeared in The New International giving a tentative estimate, based upon war expenditures and budget outlays, of the cost of the Second World War. This strictly monetary estimate, in the neighborhood of three hundred billion dollars, has naturally been greatly exceeded by the subsequent speed-up of the war and its indefinite prolongation.
The fact remains, nevertheless, that the real costs of the war – measured in legitimate social and economic terms – are but faintly suggested in such a financial approach. While it reveals clearly that all imperialist powers involved spend the overwhelming portion of their governmental incomes (from sixty to ninety per cent) on direct war items, it gives no real idea of what the war means from a broad social point of view. In the international struggle for world mastery the bourgeoisie uses up (destroys) among other things, the following sources of human wealth and production:
(1) The potential labor power and production in all fields of those men and women who are killed during the war because of fighting, bombing of civilians, starvation, famine, disease, etc. Considering that this has already added up to between fifteen and twenty million, we can see how here alone a great source of human progress has been annihilated.
(2) The potential labor power and production in all fields of those men and women removed from industry and agriculture and placed in the non-producing, but heavily-consuming, armed services. This amounts to between sixty and seventy million individuals, in the prime of their creative and productive life. Their entire energy, naturally, becomes devoted solely to the destruction of life and property.
(3) The wasted labor power and production of those engaged in war industries producing non-reproductive weapons, tools and machines, incapable in themselves of constructing a single useful item. A battleship cannot even reproduce itself, let alone create anything! Its sole function leads to further destruction of property values.
(4) The actual money represented by the war budgets of the various nations, representing sums removed from productive circulation and poured down the bottomless pit. Even this sum is not accurately known, concealed as it is in many ways.
(5) The value of the raw materials used in the war machines (flowing from every known material resource that lies in the earth), cannot be estimated. These raw materials, fashioned ultimately into means of destruction, produce further destruction. Thus, they have no utility value in the economic sense of the word.
(6) And, finally, there is the physical destruction during the war, of:
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Last updated on 13 August 2015