War
Until recently war never played a role in my work. This changed when I was asked to give a plenary lecture at a conference in Wuppertal in 2020, commemorating Friedrich Engels’ 200th birthday. In preparing for it I realized how central war was in Engels’ work, much more than a side interest of his as is often claimed. Indeed, it seemed to me that what I came to call the “means of destruction” were equally important to Engels’ worldview as the traditionally dominant “means of production” in Marx’ ambit. One year later the war in Afghanistan ended and the war in Ukraine began. I found this reason enough to pay more attention to war as a modern social and historical phenomenon and learn more about it, based on my observation of rapidly unfolding current events. A first summing-up is found in my “Notes on the Political Economy of War” (2024).