were now military state capitalisms. It was driven forward by the same dynamic and subject to the same contradictions analysed by Marx. This was true during the period of total war, in which the rival states did not trade directly with each other and naval blockades greatly limited their competition in foreign markets. Every success in accumulating military hardware by a state forced efforts to accumulate similar levels of military hardware in its rivals. Just as the efforts of rival car producers to outsell each other bring the concrete forms of labour in different car plants into an unplanned inter-relationship with each other, transforming them into different amounts of a homogenous abstract labour, so too the efforts of rival tank-producing states to outshoot one another have the same result. Marx described how under the market capitalism of his time: the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society only by the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly through them, between the producers.90 In the world system as it developed after Marx's death, military competition came to play the same role in bringing individual acts of labour performed in diferent, apparently closed, state entities, into a relationship with each other. Acquisition of the means of destruction on the necessary scale to assure success in war depended upon the same drive to accumulate means of production as did the struggle for markets-and with that went the holding down of wages to the cost of reproduction of labour power, the forcing up of productivity to the level prevailing on a world scale, and the drive to use the surplus for accumulation. As Tony Clif pointed out more than 60 years ago, the only difference, in this respect, between military and economic competition was the form the accumulation took-whether it was terms of an accumulation of use values that could be used to produce new goods or of use values that could be used to wage war. In either case the importance of these use values to those controlling them was determined by comparison with use values elsewhere in the system, a comparison which transmuted them into exchange values. This also meant the rate of profit continued to play a central role. It no longer determined the distribution of investment between different sectors of the internal economy. The requirements
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