Military-economic cycles in the context of civilizational development

The article substantiates that wars are an inevitable component of civilizational development, during which periods of peaceful development and periods of the intensification of military violence alternate, appearing in the form of large-scale military conflicts affecting the form of resolution of the contradictions of social evolution. All historical forms of the most developed civilizations are social organisms based on class antagonism. Class inequality and exploitation, characteristic of civilizations that reached the empire level of development in the pre-capitalist era, and under the conditions of the capitalist world-system as a contender for the role of global hegemon, encourage them to perform external military expansion in order to acquire colonies and establish in them a system of exploitation. Military technologies have acquired the greatest lethality under the conditions of capitalism, while the military economy is an important component of the capitalist economy. However, already in the agrarian society, there were military-economic cycles, in particular those associated with cycles of power, which were expressed in the synchronicity of the emergence, strengthening, and decline of ruling dynasties in China and steppe empires in Mongolia, as well as the cycles of xenocratic state characteristic of the medieval Maghreb. The cyclicity of wars is clearly visible in long-term cycles that determine the dynamics of the capitalist world-system, such as Kondratiev cycles, long cycles of world politics, and cycles of hegemony. The military-economic cycles in historical retrospect and in modern conditions are conditioned by the struggle for resources that allow social units or complex social organisms, who win in the struggle for military-political leadership to dominate, creating political-economic systems of domination-exploitation, which allows the hegemonic civilization for some time to develop successfully. Each historical form of domination based political-economic system contained the prerequisites for the next war for regional or global leadership in the form of deep socio-economic, political and civilizational contradictions.