Treadmills of Production and Destruction

The treadmill of production has identified and examined an inherent dynamic that results in the inexorable expansion of capitalism. Although it is argued that a number of benefits accompany this economic expansion, the treadmill of production literature has focused on the environmental costs. The treadmill of production embraces the legacy of C. Wright Mills with a focus on the entangled relationships between two aspects of Mills’s “power elite”—politics and economics. Building on Mills’s inclusion of militarism as one of the three pillars of the power elite, it is argued that there exists a treadmill of destruction that maintains a distinct logic relating to geopolitics and arms races that cannot be reduced to capitalism. The 20th century has witnessed unprecedented growth in the research, testing, storage, and employment of both conventional weaponry and weapons of mass destruction. In focusing on this development, the distinctive role the state plays in creating a treadmill of destruction is stressed.