The Pnrr for Arms. towards the transition of war

The EU Commission’s decision to use part of the Pnrr funds to finance the war industry, to increase ammunition stocks, must be taken seriously. Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market, justifies this as follows: «The Recovery Fund was created specifically for three main actions: the green transition, the digital transition and resilience. Immediate intervention to support industrial projects that are moving towards resilience, including defense, is part of this third pillar.”

Interestingly, flexibility, a category used so far mainly in the environmental world, meaning the ability of individuals to deal with adversity by successfully strengthening it. In particular, Pnrr has so far had an approach that is going in the direction of mitigating “extreme events” with investments, from agriculture to urban planning, that have had to deal with ongoing climate change. It was said and written that it was necessary to rethink water use given that we have to deal with prolonged droughts, as well as redesign cities with more green spaces to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Thanks to Commissioner Breton we learn that there is a new meaning: military defense is part of the resilience where war has become a natural and permanent event from which we must defend ourselves.

The decision to direct investments in this direction is not taken as an exceptional fact but as a “flexible” response to a world that threatens us.

This choice of economic policy It shows everyone what development model we are heading towards. Mythical economic growth is increasingly based on the production of goods with “negative use value” for humans and the environment.

If we do qualitative accounting of GDP We will discover that an increasing part of what we call national wealth is related to the production of goods that have a negative impact on the ecosystem, on the health and well-being of people, in our daily lives. All of this is hidden inside a reality-falsifying bubble where terms like “sustainability” and “green” obsessively prevail. The shutdown of gas supplies from Russia was enough to reopen coal plants, to resume drilling in Europe and in the southern hemisphere, starting with African countries, to build new gas regasification plants, and finally to accelerate the arms race, one of the first causes of the environmental catastrophe. . In short, from the much vaunted “Green Transition” we are moving quickly to the “War Transition” without finding much opposition. Trade unions are increasingly exposed to hiring extortion, so they have little power over what to produce, to whom and how.

The ideology of infinite growthan end in itself, has prevented what is left of the European left from critically analyzing the quality of this monetary growth, and furthermore has been numbed by a new rush of debt.
The European Union has now fully adapted to the American way of war as a structural and permanent reference to capitalism with stars and stripes.

We have now fully entered into what James O. Connor called “the war state” in his famous essay “The Financial Crisis of the State,” published in New York exactly fifty years ago. Or in the war economy as defined by Seymour Melman in 1970, he invites us to recognize that a new dominant group was taking shape, a new bourgeoisie determined more by its relations with the means of destruction than by its relations with the means of production, criminal. bourgeoisie that prevails today.

The question of war and peace It is not one of the many contradictions of our society, but it marks the dividing line between socialism and barbarism, between global catastrophe and the possibility of giving a future to future generations: the next generation of the European Union, from which the money has now been taken. It is taken to finance the war industry.