Can man live without war? Can a state live without war?

Question

Just imagine when a man sees our planet from a different planet (like Mars), the man sees no causes of war.

Why are all wars not finished? Please propose books/articles to understand it.

Answer 1

Historical materialism is the idea that history, including wars, civil wars and social conflicts, is driven by material causes rather than ideology.

Those material causes are namely the access to resources necessary for life and comfort, and the mode of production and distribution for goods.

For example, equipped with this conceptual tool and a really good telescope, a martian could see how, in the beginning of the XXth century, a few countries concentrated all the means of production and had moved to colonize vast array of lands that were less productive but full of resource. How once all accessible colonies had been seized, their repartition created tension between the productive countries who all wanted more resource and now had to grab it from each other. He could also notice how some productive countries in Europe had a restricted access to the sea, and therefore less capacity for colonization, which led to their frustration.

Observing all that, the martian would have no difficulty understanding why all those countries stockpiled more and more weapons, seeked alliances and how in 1914 a single spark could start the largest and most senseless of conflicts between earthlings.

Observing the aftermath of this conflict the martian could predict the next one (some humans managed to do it after all). They could predict how colonized countries would soon take opportunity of their invaders' weakness after the conflicts to try and seize independent control of their own resource. They could foresee how productive countries, now reluctant to engage in resource costly all out conflicts, would jump on the occasion to help former colonies gain independence while trying to keep their own.

And so, they would have understood the entirety of the XXth century history. The history of earlier conflicts can be similarly explained by the necessity to control resource. Roman soldiers did not invade the known world out of bloodthirst, but to grab land, etc...

War and conflict happen over the struggle for resources. Resources being limited and appetite limitless (mimetic desire made sure of that...), there will likely always be conflicts.

Answer 2

The earliest states seem to disappear suddenly in the historical record — suggesting sudden invasions and climactic changes; swift transformations of material conditions. These early city-states were tribal associations — not yet ramified networks of fortresses sustained by great houses — and maybe lacked stable security structures, possibly having little more than simple police forces to control the population itself and protect against direct injury or theft. Massive “war machines” existed before and largely independently of the state, and the earliest states had not yet solved the puzzle of how to build an “apparatus of capture” for these terrifying whirlwinds of spiralling mayhem and chaos. By extension perhaps large areas of the state amount to strategy and logistics for supporting and “incubating” elements of war machines in an “orderly” way... (see D+G’s A Thousand Plateaus for more on this sort of analysis).