1 But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour.
2 In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.
3 By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up.
4 The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.
5 A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships.
6 Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy.
7 Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
8 Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
9 The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.
10 In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.
11 The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.