The Strange Career of Donald Rumsfeld

Beasley, Betsy A.

doi:10.1215/01636545-7160065

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Booth et al (2001), Bury (2021), King (2006), Lachmann (2020), Moskos et al (2000) and Shaw (2005). b See, e.g. Beasley (2019), Cowen (2014) and Moore (2019). …”

Section: Regimes Of War-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In response to these crises, elites pursued a neoliberal project, aiming to "disembed capital from [a web of social and political] constraints" that had developed in the midtwentieth century" (Harvey, 2005: 9). Many of the strategies employed to overcome such constraints had used the Vietnam War as their testing ground: privatization of public services and just-in-time techniques gained popularity, and political struggles over wartime questions (such as the end of the draft) gave neoliberal ideologues early wins (Beasley, 2019;Cowen, 2006Cowen, , 2014Levinson, 2006). In the decades that followed, restructuring accelerated: production left its traditional centers for cheaper locales across borders, financialization transformed the organization of capitalist firms, Fordism was replaced with just-in-time production, and austerity wreaked havoc on welfare systems (Arrighi, 1994;Gilmore, 2007;Krippner, 2011;Silver, 2019).…”

Section: Bringing Labor "Back In" To Studies Of Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

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From mass mobilization to neoliberal war-making: Labor strikes and military-industrial transformation in the United States

Payne

2023

International Journal of Comparative Sociology

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How did workers affect—and how were they affected by—the dramatic transformations of U.S. war-making that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century? Where do such transformations leave workers and war in the twenty-first century? Using newly compiled data on workers’ strikes in the U.S. armaments industries from World War II through the present, this paper examines the relationship between labor and military-industrial restructuring. The paper introduces the concept of regimes of war-making and makes three main arguments. First, workers’ power was a significant force shaping the shift from a regime of mass mobilization war-making to a regime of neoliberal war-making, as armaments firms aimed to overcome the constraints imposed by workers in the mid-twentieth century. Wartime mobilizations—for Korea and Vietnam—temporarily stymied these efforts by enhancing the disruptive power of workers, who leveraged that power into pauses or reversals of firms’ initial attempts at restructuring. Second, U.S. defeat in Vietnam was a watershed moment. Mass mobilization was abandoned, and the changing nature of war meant that subsequent military buildups offered workers little leverage with which to resist restructuring. Third, in the twenty-first century, the combination of greatly expanded wars and decades of restructuring has resulted in a bifurcation among armaments workers, between those producing supplies needed for pressing counterinsurgency operations and those producing other innovative, but unused, systems. Thus, while the regime of neoliberal war-making has reduced the size and strength of armaments workers in general, some still have significant disruptive potential at the present juncture.

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“…Booth et al (2001), Bury (2021), King (2006), Lachmann (2020), Moskos et al (2000) and Shaw (2005). b See, e.g. Beasley (2019), Cowen (2014) and Moore (2019). …”

Section: Regimes Of War-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%