Violence, profits and power: Globalization, the warfare-welfare state and the rise and demise of the New Deal world order

This is an inquiry into the Anglo-American hegemonic transition and rise and demise of the New Deal world order. The thesis is that militarism proved critical in the rise of East Asia and Western Europe, while locking the US into a path dependent process of militarization. Militarism was instrumental in the rise and demise of the New Deal world order, the loss of the peace dividend and globalization. The empirical base of the work is an analysis of high finance, military industrialization and race-ethnic-class formation in the development of the National Security State Corporate Complex (NSSCC)---denoting the fusion of private corporate power and public state bureaucracy---and rise and demise of the New Deal world order. The origins of this NSSCC are traced to the formation of an embryonic military-industrial complex and Anglo-American Establishment during the corporate restructuring, militarized financial expansion, overseas imperialism, and war preparedness movements around the turn of the century. This war collectivism, became the model for US hegemony on the enlarged social foundations of the US warfare-welfare state.; The thesis adjudicates the debate between state autonomy, class dominance and world-system theorists as to the primary logic of the modern world. While the contradictions between the pursuit of power and profit are examined, this investigation analyzes the centrality of profit and synthesis of violence, profits and power in entwined processes of politico-military competition, capital accumulation and waves of state-corporate globalization. Due to the internalization of allied protection costs, militarism played a much larger role in US capitalist enterprises and state management of global hegemony than during Britain's hundred years' peace in Europe. Changes in the global/regional geopolitical economy of military spending over the centuries are explored in terms of multiple functions of deflecting class struggle towards overseas expansion while supporting capital accumulation and military power projection capability to defend global state-corporate interests. This account of the changing geopolitical economy of militarism is used to analyze the fiscal crisis of the warfare-welfare state, the right turn of the Anglo-American Establishment, the rise of the New Right and the demise of the New Deal world order.