Workers World, Vol. 23, No. 15
April 6, 1981: All across the country, people everywhere are asking themselves a week after the attempted assassination, “Who won out in the power struggle in the capitalist establishment?”
Was it Weinberger? Was it Haig? The capitalist press is trying to put a good face on the continuing struggle between the major contending factions in the Reagan administration.
Who actually gained political authority?
The unheralded answer is the unbridled military.
It doesn’t necessarily mean Haig. It is, however, absolutely beyond question that the military came out of the struggle with enormously increased political authority.
The capitalist press has deliberately shied away from attributing any political significance to the shift in authority or giving a hint as to how and why it happened. On the contrary, it has deliberately obscured the shift. That the shift took place, however, is beyond doubt.
This was revealed in an order issued by Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci at the direct order of Weinberger himself on Wednesday, April 1. (See New York Times, April 2.) This order, while purporting to be a reorganization plan of the Pentagon, actually delegates to the Joint Chiefs of Staff political authority as distinguished from military authority. It reverses an executive order issued during the Robert McNamara era under President Kennedy which sought to block the Joint Chiefs from intruding into the budgetary process of appropriating military expenditures.
As the Times puts it, “It would include planning budgets to carry out strategy, bringing the chiefs into a process from which they have long complained that they were excluded.”
This process is a wholly political one and is the prerogative in almost all bourgeois democracies, and especially in the U.S., of Congress and most particularly the House of Representatives, which has the power of the purse, so to speak.
This order for the first time brings the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the budgetary process. It means that the military can openly lobby for military appropriations over and above the usual normal procedures where the military may – the word “may” is key – be called in during Congressional hearings. It is almost always the case that they are at least publicly under the discipline of the secretary of defense, a civilian, and that they themselves merely justify or approve the position of the secretary of defense.
This order reverses this process and gives the military the so-called right to articulate and dissent. It opens the door to them not merely on matters involving the budget, but also implies that they can articulate or dissent from broader political issues, such as SALT and other issues.
Of course, the military has always found ways to circumvent this restriction by leaking their position to the press. But in general they have had, at least in public and in congressional hearings especially, to abide by the discipline supposedly imposed by the commander-in-chief so as not to transcend his authority or be guilty of intruding into the political process.
This order then is a major concession to the military and undercuts the political authority of the bourgeois civilian establishment.
The order does more than just that. The order also invalidates the so-called principle of zero-based budgeting.
This required the military to justify – that is explain, show the need for, and put in writing – every year any request for a new program or more money. Now, this restriction has been invalidated.
What it means is that the Pentagon can put in tabs, vouchers, and plans for more money without justifying it or explaining why they need it! This is incredible. All the more so when one compares this with how such an order would be greeted if it was put in effect in the Office of Economic Opportunity, OSHA, Health and Human Resources, etc.
Imagine what a storm of abuse the capitalist press would heap on the secretary of a department who issued such an order. According to the New York Times, Weinberger supports this order on the ground that the old process – the zero-based budgeting – “required too much paperwork and ‘served no tangible purpose’.”
And this comes from “Cap the Knife,” the man who has made his career by slashing to the bone vital life-sustaining services and social programs in health care, education, welfare, etc.
Only an utterly shameless and servile press and media in fear of the military could possibly avoid raising this order to public view and soundly condemning it.
How does it happen that this shift of power to the military has suddenly taken place? It has come as a result of the furious struggle for power in the capitalist establishment.
Weinberger issued this order in an attempt at what he undoubtedly conceives to be a clever maneuver to win over the military in a struggle with Haig who unquestionably has a military faction behind him.
In so doing Weinberger is not merely attempting to appease the military. He has given it another opportunity to independently increase its steady and consistent encroachment on civilian authority and arrogate to itself ever so unobtrusively more and more political authority.
The Weinberger grouping no doubt is just as belligerent, just as virulently anti-Soviet and reactionary as the Haig faction. But in the struggle the military gains independent political strength and is clearly gaining the potential to stand over and above the factional groupings now wracking the capitalist establishment.
How does it happen that the military continually intrudes and grows stronger in the capitalist establishment as a whole?
That is because the military is the most reliable prop of the capitalist system whenever it is in acute political crisis.
The military is the most removed from even a semblance of popular control and is, from the point of view of the ruling class, more capable of taking repressive and reactionary measures, especially with respect to war adventures, without taking into account mass sentiment, as most capitalist politicians occasionally have to do.
The military brass – as distinguished from the rank and file – is inherently most anti-democratic, almost always tends toward authoritarian methods, and in the contemporary imperialist period gravitates in the direction of totalitarian, if not fascist, ideology and practice.
The military is not a decisive or even significant factor in the political struggle of capitalist countries when the capitalist regime is relatively stable, when the class struggle appears somewhat quiescent or even dormant, when the capitalist economy is if not booming at least somewhat stable and growing, and when relatively peaceful relations are maintained between the imperialist powers.
Significant battles between factions of the ruling class have often broken out in most of the capitalist countries on this or that issue, such as a struggle between church and state or monumental scandals at the summits of the executive, such as the Teapot Dome scandal involving the Harding administration. None of this brings the military to the fore.
It is only when the class struggle, either at home or in the world at large, becomes acute, when military adventurism is on the order of the day, when the capitalist establishment is wracked by policy divisions for which there is no real solution except perilous and catastrophic wars, and when the capitalist economy is stagnating instead of developing on an upward curve, that the military, seeing the internecine struggle and often acting independently of this or that political faction, is driven to the fore by the very nature of the acute contradictions that are remorselessly and relentlessly driving the capitalist system in a catastrophic direction.
How did Haig get to where he is in the first place? Only because of the previous Vietnam war crisis, only because Watergate was in the long run a product of the general crisis of the capitalist system and the specific political crisis growing out of the Vietnam War.
In the given situation the ruling class was divided, and an arbiter was called in as the classical and traditional way when a capitalist ruling class was divided against itself.
For no other reason was Haig chosen to take chare of the capitalist establishment under Nixon. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, neither right-wingers nor left-wingers in the capitalist establishment objected to him, although they fully knew his sordid origins and credentials.
Part of the arrogance of Haig lies in the fact that he believes himself to have saved the republic of finance capital from catastrophe by virtue of his becoming the administrator of the capitalist state during the Watergate period.
Thus, as far as one can see, whether or not Haig himself necessarily enhanced his power individually, the obvious, absolutely indisputable fact is that the military emerged with more political authority. And that means that unbridled militarism fueled by Big Oil and supported by the military-industrial complex has gained further ground.
Again and again, the broad mobilization of the masses and their vigorous intervention in the political process was never more necessary.
Last updated: 11 May 2026