Complexo industrial-militar e tecnologia: a inflexão da pesquisa científico-militar estadunidense como gestante da inovação tecnológica após os chamados anos dourados

Abstract

The military-industrial complex (CIM) is a productive adjustment that arises of the need for own capitalist accumulation, and that has the potential to perform the major economic functions, such as: soften the fall in profit rates; warlike imposition to control and expand markets and boost technological advancement. Since law is a phenomenon that responds to the operators of reproduction of material life, it will have a very limited power to alter these determinations. Among them, the drive for technological advancement receives special attention in this study, which aims to determine how the inflection in scientific-military research in the USA occurs after the golden years. Using data analysis, he pointed to the functionality that CIM had in the 1950s and 1960s, when it served as a brake on the fall in the rate of profit and nursery for innovations such as the manipulation of nuclear fission and the advancement of computer science, and then indicate what changed the determinations after 1970. The large investments in scientificmilitary research, characteristic of the 1960s, declined sharply and stopped at 50% of the total federal investments in R&D until the early 1980s, when it increased again rapidly, entering a slow decline at the end of this decade and remaining stable until today. In 1964, federal spending on R&D reached a mark of 1.86% of the North American GDP, while public investments in this area represented 0.86%. Following a trend that was already evident throughout the 1970s, the 1980s defined a turning point, and private investments exceeded government spending on research and development. It turns out that the leading role of scientific-military research in the golden years skewed technological advances towards military demands, which demand high performance. This technical standard made North American products more expensive and less competitive compared to Japanese. In response, the golden triangle of the industrial-academic-military complex of the golden years was overcome and created a new institutional structure for North American R&D, in order to offer a great incentive to small entrepreneurs who develop new technologies. This ended up influencing the emergence of small companies and also redesigned the administrative configuration of large corporations, reducing the number of researchers employed in them. The main point of all these changes is that they arise from the need to respond to the fall in profit rates, which military spending no longer had the power to offer, reducing its influence on the economy and, synergistically, on scientific development. In any case, military funds continue to finance half of federal spending on R&D, and are very important for the early stages of research in the United States. The fact is that any radically new technical advance is either generated by militarism itself, or is immediately employed for military purposes under capitalism. As productive forces develop in one hand, destructive and barbaric advances in the other