Edward Sard and the Rise of the Permanent War Economy
The war industry has become a permanent fixture of US capitalism, channeling massive public subsidies to private corporations. The first writer to analyze this “Permanent War Economy” was Edward Sard, a brilliant Marxist economist working in the 1940s.
Three workers build an aircraft cockpit in May 1942, during World War II. (Wikimedia Commons)
The theory of the “Permanent War Economy” has played an important role in the debates of the radical left from the late 1940s onward. Several generations of radical intellectuals have developed the argument that the US ruling class has used arms production to compensate for the imbalances and crisis tendencies of capitalism, building up in the process a vast military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower called it, that has taken on a life of its own.
The founder of this theory was Edward L. Sard. Sard was a brilliant Marxist economist who worked for the US government during World War II and had a front-row seat for the development of the war industry.
Sard wanted to remain invisible to a wider public and operated under five different names as a writer. This no doubt explains why he has remained a relatively obscure figure, despite the influence of his ideas. His consecutive pseudonyms will serve as a means of mapping his development.
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